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https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/12/chris-hedges-israel-destroyed-my-university-where-is-the-outrage/

Israel Destroyed My University. Where is the Outrage?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina, Vice President of the now-destroyed al-Israa University, speaks out against Israel’s systematic targeting of Palestinian educational and cultural institutions.  

In Jan. 17, the Israeli military detonated 315 mines to destroy Gaza’s last standing university, al-Israa University, located south of Gaza City. For 70 days prior, the Israelis occupied the university as a military base, posting snipers in its buildings and using it as a detention and interrogation center. According to university authorities, prior to the detonation Israeli soldiers looted the university museum, which contained 3,000 artifacts dating back as far as the Roman era. With al-Israa University’s destruction, Israel has now destroyed or damaged all of Gaza’s 12 universities, and also targeted 280 government schools and 65 UN schools, many of which were sheltering civilians when they were attacked. Al-Israa University Vice President Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss Israel’s war on Gaza’s educational and cultural institutions.

TRANSCRIPT

Chris Hedges:  The Israeli attacks on Gaza have included systematic assaults on Gaza’s cultural and educational institutions. Israel has damaged or destroyed all 12 of Gaza’s universities. Some 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools or UN-run schools have also been destroyed or damaged, often resulting in dozens of fatalities.

About 133 remaining schools are used to shelter those displaced by the Israeli assault. More than 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes amid continued Israeli ground and air attacks that have killed more than 25,000 people, including 10,000 children. The Geneva-based independent Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel destroyed Gaza’s 12 universities in stages. The first stage included the bombing of the Islamic and Al-Azhar universities.

On January 17, the Israeli military detonated 315 mines to turn Gaza’s last standing university, Al-Isra University – South of Gaza City – Into rubble. The Israelis have occupied or had occupied the university for 70 days, using it as a military base, including positioning snipers within its buildings as well as turning it into a detention and interrogation center. The university housed a museum with 3000 archaeological artifacts dating back to the Roman era. University authorities have charged Israeli soldiers with looting the museum before blowing it up. Al-Isra University was home to the only university hospital in the Gaza Strip, one of only two in all of the Palestinian-occupied territories, as well as buildings that housed medical and engineering laboratories, nursing labs, media training studios, the law colleges, court trial, and graduation halls.

The Israeli attacks have killed 94 university professors. These include Professor Sofyan Taya, the president of the Islamic University of Gaza, an award-winning physicist, and UNESCO chair of astronomy, astrophysics, and space sciences in Palestine, who died alongside his family in an airstrike. Dr. Ahmed Hamdi Abo Absa, dean of the software engineering department at the University of Palestine reportedly shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he walked away having been released from three days of enforced detention. Professor Mohammed Eid Shabir, professor of immunology and virology, and former president of the Islamic University of Gaza, Professor Rafat Al-Araeer; a poet and professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza was killed along with members of his family.

Some 4,327 students have been killed and 7,819 others have been injured. 231 teachers and administrators have also been killed. Palestinians who have one of the highest poverty rates in the world nevertheless cherish education. They also have one of the highest literacy rates in the world and Palestinian graduates excel in medicine, mathematics, engineering, and other fields. Israel appears determined to obliterate Palestinian cultural, educational, and historical properties, part of its planned erasure of the Palestinian people.

Images of Israeli troops cheering as schools are blown up and appeared on social media including one video showing the demolition of a distinctive blue UN school in Northern Gaza. Joining me from Cairo to discuss Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza’s educational and cultural institutions is Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina, the vice president of Al-Israel University. Dr. Alhussaina’s home block in Gaza was bombed by Israel, resulting in the death of 102 of his family members. Doctor, thank you for joining us, and of course my heartfelt condolences not only for your loss but for everything that has been happening in Gaza.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Thank you, Chris, for having me.

Chris Hedges:  I want to begin with what it took to build this university and how important the university was. We should also note that this isn’t the first time that Israel has struck or bombed universities; they did so in previous assaults. Let’s begin with the university itself because Gaza is very poor and one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. And to build that structure and create what you created is almost Herculean. So talk about the inception of the university and what you built.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  The university was established in 2014. We started teaching in the fall of 2015. We started with a small building north of Gaza, which also was demolished partially or 70% demolished during this war. It’s in the North, close to the North of Gaza. At the same time, two years later, we started building this campus, which is 4,000 square meters of area multiplied by seven floors, it was one of the biggest buildings, if it’s not the biggest building, in Gaza. And we had the designs and we had a lot of hope. It was a bunch of pioneers that we had. Everybody pitched in. We spent years building that building and we followed every single detail of it. It was, by witnesses, everyone in Gaza, everybody visited the building. It is one of the best buildings, one of the nicest buildings in Gaza.

It looked like a hotel when you walked in. One of the best. Everything was so elegant, was luxurious actually. We tried to make it one-of-a-kind and we had so many hopes for this. We had laboratories, we had everything. We had 4,300 students. We haven’t even been here for 10 years. Of 4,300 students, 65%, more than two-thirds were female. We had given opportunities to a lot of females even when they were mothers and single mothers or divorced, they weren’t home because we offered so many scholarships. We had our vision, our motto was poverty will not stand as an obstacle in front of any Palestinian who wants to pursue a college degree. So that’s what we started with and that was our slogan or motto for that. That’s one of the main reasons we started this university and that was the focus of everyone.

So we were helping, we were giving so many scholarships to a lot of people. We were getting help, we had donations from Kuwait, from UNDP. We were working with all our NGOs and international organizations and we were helping a lot of people. Even if they didn’t have the money, we were giving a scholarship to excel the students. It was 90% or more a 3.6 average get a full scholarship. Women who are divorced or minorities get full scholarships. Orphans, if their parents died we gave them a full scholarship. We were giving so much help and we were about to do a grand opening of the museum. The museum we had, we built a building next to this campus, which also was destroyed this time. We had a nice building in there. We had everything in there and it was looted out and destroyed. Everything went away in the blink of an eye. We also built the first university hospital in Gaza. We just started teaching and opened the program a week before we started the season. We started the semester for the Bachelor of Medicine and we just started this new program, not even a week teaching, and then everything was gone. Everything.

Chris Hedges:  When did you leave the university or when did you leave Gaza?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  I had spent 45 days. I left November 14 and I was in the North. I was in the middle of the city of Gaza except I was on the south side. We went through a horror leaving from the North to the South. When we left, the Israeli IDF was on Salah al-Din, which is the main road that connects between the North and South of Gaza. That’s the main road. And the Israeli tanks and soldiers were there, so you had to go through them. Everywhere else you can’t go because that’s what they announced: You have to go through that. You go there and then you have to walk because there are no cars, they don’t allow any cars to come in.

You’d have to pull the bag into the sand. There’s no pavement because everything was uprooted by the Israeli bulldozers or whatever. So you have to pull the bag and right before you got to the Israeli’s army, there was something they have you walk through, there were cameras in there and stuff, you walk in there and then they would put batches of 150 to 100 people. You stand in front of soldiers, you’re facing them, and you have to hold your ID in your hand standing up. We were in this position for two and a half hours, standing on our feet, in the sun, with our IDs in our hands. If you drop something, you can’t kneel up and down to pick it up because you subject yourself to a death sentence. You can get sniped out by… You can get killed.

While you stand there… Within that two and a half hours they were calling people. They were like a hundred yards from us and they had ditches on the ground between them. They call you, they say, you, the donkey with the red shirt – That’s how they call you. Humiliation – They call you, you come out there, you go into a small ditch and they make you stand. They pick people at random. I don’t know if it’s random but they make you take all your clothes off, totally naked. Even your underwear. You hold it in your hand and then they either come out, blindfold you, handcuff you, or they take you in. Some people, they made them sit there for the next day and used them as a human shield so people wouldn’t get shot.

All this humiliation. A 70-year-old man had to stand and take all his clothes off and they made him turn around in front of people. There were women, kids were standing there, women were crying, kids were crying. My granddaughter was with me. She’s three years old. She was horrified. And once you pass through, two and a half hours later they make whoever is left to walk. You had to walk. Then you walk another mile and then you find a cart that is pulled by a donkey. That’s the only thing they allowed there. It’s going to take you another mile to get to where cars are supposed to be. Then we found an old car we took to the Rafah border.

Chris Hedges:  And you were in Northern Gaza. Did you leave because you were ordered to leave or because where your home was destroyed?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Yeah, my home was destroyed. It was unlivable and we had no choice and then there’s nowhere to go and you either go to the South or leave. We had a chance to live with my family through the State Department. They had our names as dual citizens. We went through the State to Rafah Crossing. I forgot to mention, that once you cross past the IDF, while you’re walking, there are bodies on both sides of the road. They started decomposing. You could see them –

Chris Hedges:  So let’s talk about the assault on educational and cultural institutions. It’s clearly by design. This is not accidental. Why is it that Israel is determined to obliterate educational and cultural institutions? There are many that I haven’t mentioned including Gaza’s public library and Gaza’s cultural center. Why are these important targets for the Israelis?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  – They want to wipe out everything that points to the Palestinian identity or Palestinian culture. It’s like the propaganda says: People with no land came to a land with no people. They consider there were no Palestinians and they’re still saying it now. Oh, there were no people there. There’s no such thing as Palestine, there were no Palestinian people in there. So who was there? Who was living there? Where were my grandparents and my great-grandparents? They still have the keys to their homes in there. They have currencies. The State of Palestine, the old currency, was in 1927 and 1918. Where did that come from? It was a manhole cover in Jaffa. Still, I saw somebody posted a picture that it says the State of Palestine. They probably forgot to take that out too. I don’t know.

But they don’t want people to educate themselves. They don’t want education. They want to destroy universities because that’s the only way the Palestinian has. We have no weapon, we have no future. Every Palestinian in Gaza, as I know, will derive themselves from food and they will send their kids to college. It becomes like a necessity; it’s a must. Everybody sends their kids to college. They don’t let them – After high school they sit down, they force them or ask them to go to college. Even the young kids are convinced that you build a future and you can get your country back by educating yourself. You can’t be illiterate and you can’t represent yourself in front of anybody. It’s not just that. They uprooted olive trees; Olive trees are a symbol of Palestinian land and you see what happens in the West Bank: The settlers, every other day go to the olive trees and they uproot a lot of them. They burn them. It’s a war against everything that is Palestinian.

Another thing, they wanted to make Gaza unlivable. If you have no hospitals, no schools, no universities, no mosques to pray, and no place to go, what else would you have there? They won’t be alive in there. And it’s shocking what they did to the university. Why would you stay in it for 70 days and then go boobytrap it and blow it up in front of people while cheering? I don’t understand, he was there for how long? I saw the American spokesman for the States say, oh, they said it was headquarters for Hamas. It has never been for Hamas there. I don’t understand where that came from. There was no weapon. If they had something, they would’ve had videos and pictures or they would state something like they did in Al-Shifa hospital or whatever. I don’t know what to say anymore.

Chris Hedges:  If I remember, Palestinians have a 97% literacy rate. It’s high.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Yes. Everybody makes sure they go to school.

Chris Hedges:  In terms of Palestine, for viewers who may not know, from the Muslim conquest in the 7th century until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, historic Palestine – Which before World War I was under the Ottoman Empire – Was a Muslim entity. It was Muslim.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Yes.

Chris Hedges:  And much of what Israel seeks to accomplish is not just an erasure of Palestinian cultural and historic identity, but a form of historical amnesia.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to say.

Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about some of the figures: Rafah and others. They have killed over a hundred journalists. To a certain extent, for those of us who are watching it from a distance, it seems clear that some or many of these people were targeted; They weren’t killed accidentally. And Rafah, he was receiving threats from Israel before they bombed him and I think he was killed with his sister and his family. But they have been wiped out, along with a journalistic class – And foreign journalists are not allowed into Gaza, so we can’t cover. I was part of a group from the Egyptian Press Syndicate that tried to go to Rafah to protest a few weeks ago – But I want you to address this issue of the killing of leading academics, poets, and writers. What your reflections on it are, and whether you believe they were deliberately targeted by the Israelis?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Yes, I do. Most of these people are prominent figures. They know – And what I heard is that they’re typing them through their Facebook accounts and their social media accounts right now and anybody that is publishing something or posting anything, you get threats. Sometimes it’s directed threats, sometimes it’s indirect threats. You post something simple on Facebook, you get something. You get notified, sometimes you get phone calls, you get this recording phone call from the Israeli army that you have to leave your house or whatever, and sometimes it’s… You don’t know what’s going on. I’ve seen journalists get… One of the journalists that was in the North, in Jabalia, had come. His name is Anas Al-Sharif, he got text messages that were threatening him to stop because when Al Jazeera left, only this guy was videoing in the North. He’s the one who was staying. Then they bombed his house and killed his father and he’s still there. I don’t know if he’s still alive or not. There are so many cases of journalists getting threatened and killed.

There are so many academics that were killed. We had a few from Al-Aqsa University. We had Dr. Fadel Abu Hein, he was a professor of clinical psychology. He was a prominent psychologist for 30 years he was working for the Gaza Clinical Mental Health Center, and he retired. Then he came to work for us and he was teaching in the clinical psychology department. He was the head of the clinical psychology department. He was killed two weeks ago, maybe three weeks, with his family by a bomb on his house.

Rafat Al-Araeer was bothering them with his poetry and what he was fighting for; He was always posting things about Palestine. Dr. Sufyan Tayeh, the president of Islamic University and a prominent physicist, was number one in Palestine – One of the 10% of the people in the world for physics. I don’t know why would you kill somebody like that. He had nothing to do with anyone and you bomb their house with their family. They know who’s there before they bomb – There’s new technology right now, they know who’s in there through their cell phones and other technology, even with voice recognition and other stuff. So they know who’s in the house before they bomb the house. And it looks like this was deliberately targeting all these people on purpose to rid Gaza or Palestine of intellectuals and a good educational future.

These people are very well-known scientists and most of them were killed in cold blood with their families and children, some of them with their grandchildren, with the whole family wiped out. Some of them left a little kid or a father or whatever, but most of the families are wiped off this civics register. I don’t know what else we can say. It’s there, everybody sees that it’s deliberately targeted, but the US doesn’t want to see it. The State Department spokesman doesn’t want to see it. When I see somebody’s press conference for him with journalists and ask him – He tries to avoid questions and say, I don’t know. I don’t have enough information to comment on that. We still wait and we ask Israel for comment, for an explanation. I’ve never heard him say, I have an explanation. I don’t know.

Chris Hedges:  The US understands very well what Israel is doing. It is carrying out not only genocide but also attempting to create a situation or a humanitarian catastrophe that is so extreme that Palestinians will have to choose between dying of exposure, disease, bombs, starvation, infectious disease, or leaving. That’s the goal, whether Israel can achieve that goal – Because where are the Palestinians going to go? I don’t know. And having covered Israel for seven years, this has long been the intent of Israeli political figures like Netanyahu, it’s not a secret. They have long advocated for this wholesale ethnic cleansing. Are you in touch with anyone within Gaza at the moment?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Yes. It’s very hard, but I still have brothers and sisters back there. I have a brother and a couple of sisters in the North, still in Gaza City, and I have one brother with his family in Khan Younis with all this bombing right now. He evacuated to where they told him to go. They said, go to Khan Younis. It was fine, it was safe, but right now it is the worst area for him. Every day there is a bombing close to where he’s staying and he is so scared for his life. He sends me messages sometimes saying we might not make it through the morning. I felt the same thing when we were staying at the beginning of the war for over 40 days. That’s what we were feeling.

The bombing; The house shakes and you don’t know when the next hit will be. We’d say our prayers, we’d gather together in one room so we could die together and we didn’t know if we were going to make it until the morning. Nobody knows. You say your prayers and go to sleep and you say goodbye to everybody if you can sleep.

Chris Hedges:  What do you think the end goal of Israel is and how achievable do you think their goal is? They say that this is a war against Hamas. The evidence argues against that. It’s a war against the Palestinian people. A few days ago, the US intelligence reports in the New York Times and said that only 20% or 30% of Hamas fighters had been killed. And I was surprised Hamas had the capabilities to continue the resistance for two or three months. From your perspective, what is Israel’s goal? How achievable is that goal?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  The goal is to evacuate people from Gaza. They want Gaza an empty land; That’s what they’ve been planning for years. One of their leaders said before that Gaza has to be emptied. It’s imposed – I don’t know if this is part of the deal of the century – That’s what they do when they want to make it unlivable. They want to make it so people have no choice but to leave. Either you die there of bombing, famine, starvation, hunger, thirst, or disease that’s spreading right now because of all the bodies that are out there. They want to make it unlivable – Make or migrate. 

Their goal is to push people into the Sinai desert, into Egypt, and it’s going on step by step. It’s almost there. What I heard is 1.5 or 1.7 million out already in Rafah, close to the border. I see pictures of tents less than 20 feet from the Egyptian border. So the people are there, they’re ready to go. If they start bombing from the North, that’s what is going to happen. My own belief is they’re going to stop bombing and pushing people toward the border. Then they bomb the walls of the border, make it open, and people will run for their lives. They’re going to go in there and then once they go in there, they’ll seal it and stop them from coming in or back to their places.

What stopped them? The people’s steadfastness in the North, there’s a lot of people still there. They don’t want to leave their houses, nobody wants to leave. Some people left but a lot of people are still there. There are big numbers still in the North in Jabalia and other places and that delayed their plans. For now, the fourth month started already, 120 days. But there are a lot of people. If they can do that, they will push who’s left in Rafah, and stay with more than half the population. They have this policy, it’s called mowing the grass. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  They were doing that every few years. Every couple of years there was a war in Gaza.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah. Let me explain: Mowing the grass was Israeli slang for periodically carrying out armed assaults including aerial attacks against Palestinians in Gaza as a form, in their eyes, of deterrence to keep them under control. In which thousands of Palestinians were killed.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Yeah, of course. That’s what is a target: They want to kill numbers. They don’t want the numbers to go up. Even when the blockade was there, they were counting the calories. How many calories are you supposed to consume in Gaza? They’d go from one person to another and they were controlling the food. They measured the food, how much food you need to go. So for all the past 17 years with the blockade in it, they were controlling everything that go in and out of Gaza. The food was portioned, they were not giving enough food, they were not giving you healthy food: some stuff was even forbidden.

Laboratory equipment… In our case, we had purchased a PC, PCR, and CPR unit during the COVID-19 spread. It was coming in and since then, it’s been there at Delta. They blocked it from coming. They didn’t allow it to come into Gaza. I don’t know why. There is no permission for this. Another instrument we had to wait for a year and a half and we had the ICRC, the Red Crescent, help us get that from the Israeli side. So all obstacles hinder everything. When you want to build something, the building material, the cement, you have to register and you have to tell them exactly where the cement is going and you have to show that you used the cement. There were cameras at the warehouse, UNDP was there with the staff, and they had to calculate every ton of cement, where is it going, who it was going to, and what it was being used for.

That was the policy for the past 10 years, at least. Since the war in 2014. You can’t bring in anything unless they monitor or agree to let it in. And that’s part of making Gaza unlivable for people. You have economic hardship, you have siege, a blockade, and you can’t travel – Through them, 1% get the permit to travel – You didn’t deny your entry, they deny you to leave. You go through the Egyptian site. Also, in the first few years, the border was closed for like 200 days out of the year. Now it’s started opening but with a lot of restrictions. You have to pay people. There’s a bribe. If you came here now, you’d have to bribe somebody to get out of Gaza.

Chris Hedges:  Yes and those bribes are in the thousands of dollars.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  $5,000 right now.

Chris Hedges:  $5,000. Now we’re talking about Egyptians who will allow people to get out.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  They have an advertisement that shows it, I didn’t believe it. They advertise that. They’re not even ashamed of what it says, $5,000 per person, $1,200 if you carry an Egyptian passport or Egyptian citizenship.

Chris Hedges:  We should also mention that the Israelis have announced that they’re going to make an assault on Rafah.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  Yeah, we are about to go there.

Chris Hedges: This is right on the border with Egypt. That’s where the border crossing is.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  This part of the planet is still going in there. I don’t know if Egypt would allow this or not, so hopefully, not. God knows.

Chris Hedges:  I’m wondering what this means for the Palestinian people. In many ways, what’s happening in Gaza is even worse than the so-called Nakba, the catastrophe, Palestinians call it in 1948. When 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine, thousands were murdered by Zionist terrorist groups and villages like Deir Yassin. How do you place this moment in Palestinian history? What does this mean for the Palestinian people?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  In my opinion, this is the second Nakba, or worse, the third Nakba. 1948, 1967, and now: 2023 or ’24 right now. My uncle was 95 years old probably, he was killed in the last bombing of our blocks with our family. He saw the Nakba, he left through the Nakba. He was a teen at that time or maybe 20 years old. He said that this is another Nakba but it’s much larger and more horrifying in scale. He’d never seen this kind of killing and a deliberate targeting of mosques, hospitals, and schools. This is the worst ever. I’ve never seen it in any other part of the world where you deliberately attack a hospital or university. And what patient in the hospital and unplug… I would stop a few from going in there for children or babies in the NICU building. People are dying of all kinds of stuff.

There was a killing, there was an assassination. They were gathering people and shot them in the back of the head. Now they find bodies buried with their hands tied behind their back, it’s a lot of executions. This is the third Nakba and I think they want to do it because one of their leaders, they’re saying that they regret keeping Palestinians inside Israel. They want to get rid of the Israeli Arabs, they say. 1948 people. They said we should have never left anybody in there and they want to do what they couldn’t do in 1948: They want to get rid of everybody in there.

If this works, their next turn is they’re going to go to the West Bank and kick them to Jordan. I think that’s part of a bigger plan and that’s what makes me believe that. People should believe that Netanyahu in the United Nations, held the map and it didn’t show West Bank on Gaza. If you can remember that was –

Chris Hedges:  Yeah, you’re talking about, it was in September. He addressed the general assembly and he held up a map of the future of the Middle East and it showed Israel having incorporated the occupied West Bank and Gaza into one country. That’s right.

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  – Yes. That’s what I’m talking about.

Chris Hedges:  What do you think the consequences are for Palestinians? You have tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people who have been so deeply traumatized, that you have lost extensive family members, children are going to grow up with this: Not only this trauma, but having lost close relatives, maybe their parents, their homes, their community. How is this going to play out among the Palestinian people? You have roughly 5.5 million living under Israeli occupation and about 9 million Palestinians living in the diaspora. What are going to be the consequences for the Palestinians?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  I think after this, the Palestinian people will have reached a point of despair. I don’t think anybody thinks there is a future for peace with Israelis. Before that, it was divided. There were a lot of people who believed that we could live, we could have our own state, and they could have their state and two-state solutions. Their right is extremist, they destroyed that hope for everybody, and I don’t think that’s going to work anymore. Like you said, all these kids that lost their parents, lost their relatives, lost their homes, what are they going to think? They think they’re going to want to live in one state or two states next to somebody who killed their parents. I think they are destroying the two-state solution and that’s what they wanted to do for tens of years, decades because Netanyahu said that he doesn’t believe that there should be a Palestinian state. They don’t want it. They want a one-state solution for themselves, by themselves.

They want a Jewish state like they passed a couple of years ago. They don’t want Palestinians and the extremists are holding power in Israel and that’s what they want. And I think they’re getting a lot of support from the US and it doesn’t seem that support is diminishing. No, I think it’s growing more, especially between the Republicans and Democrats, it’s not diminishing at all. I don’t know what to expect. The kids are despaired, we feel in despair. I’m not so optimistic about the future. I don’t know when are we going to be able to go to Gaza and start building. Gaza is destroyed. More than 70% of the houses and buildings are turned into rubble. Everything is destroyed. Schools are gone; universities, hospitals, mosques, medical centers. What can we expect? What life are we ever going to go back to, to start this kind of stuff?

Chris Hedges:  What about the consequences within the region? Because with much justification within the Arab and the Muslim world, this is seen not only as an assault on Palestinians, but an assault on Muslims, and an assault on Arabs. And there’s been tremendous unrest which has put pressure on Arab regimes that have, beyond rhetorically, denouncing, the genocide hasn’t done much with the exception of Yemen. How is this going to play out within the region?

Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina:  To be honest with you, I don’t think there’s [going to be] a lot of change. There’s not much condemnation. They were condemned at the beginning, they’re not condemned now. Edy Cohen, one of the journalists, says if a lot of Arab countries are supporting our operation in Gaza, then some of them are funding it. They want to get rid of whatever is left of resistance in Gaza and Palestine. They want to finish this struggle and get rid of it because it’s giving them unrest, giving them a headache because the people in Arab countries and the Muslims are still alive and they want a solution. They want to stop the killing in all the countries, even the neighboring countries to Gaza Jordan, Egypt, and all other countries.

But they’re not moving it. The leaders of those countries are not doing much or they’re not doing enough to ease that suffering or to stop the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, or stop the killing. They’re not trying, they’re not even saying it. Some of them didn’t even cut their political ties or economic ties with Israel. I heard that they have trucks coming from Dubai through Saudi Arabia to Jordan bringing merchandise and stuff to Israel to make up for the laws through the Red Sea, which the Yemenis are stopping. I don’t know if that’s ever going to change and I think the leaders are worried about their position and authority to lose their power, but I think that’s too early. Maybe in the future, this will start. It’s got a domino effect, but it’s going to take time to start. I don’t think it’s going to be a time soon. That’s my thinking.