Day 62 roundtable: Genocide enters third month

“Last week, I lost my uncle. He was sleeping, he just was sleeping and then they bombed his flat. He’s a father of six children,” Ahmed Al-Sammak told us on Thursday’s livestream.

Ahmed is a journalist and contributor to The Electronic Intifada, and recently left Gaza to study in Dublin, Ireland.

He explained the abject horror of watching, from so far away, his family and neighborhood be subjected to Israel’s relentless bombardment and mass arrest campaigns.

Two weeks ago, he said, his other uncle’s house was bombed after he and his family fled to an area in the central Gaza Strip. And one of his cousins was kidnapped and arrested by Israeli soldiers.

“He didn’t do anything wrong in his life. He’s just a man who works as a vendor. He has no military or political interests. I don’t know why they arrested him. They brutally tortured him for nine days in Ashkelon prison,” he told us.

Sewar Elejla, a medical researcher and former doctor at Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital, also joined us to talk about a piece she wrote on the failure of an adequate response by international medical community to the genocide in Gaza.

Physicians, she said, need an immediate end to Israel’s bombings. “They can’t take any more, and everything is collapsing.”

Asa presented some of the latest revelations of admissions by Israeli soldiers that they killed Israeli citizens on 7 October.

“In a Hebrew language podcast, an Israeli Air Force colonel admitted that his forces blew up Israeli homes in the settlements using drones and helicopters,” Asa said, explaining that this is part of the Israeli military’s secretive “Hannibal directive” policy.

The directive allows Israeli forces to intentionally kill their own captives rather than let them be taken by Palestinian – or Lebanese – fighters.

“So the next question to ask is the following: How much of all this was deliberate policy? And how much was it the result of the chaotic nature of the Israeli response to the Palestinian military assault?,” Asa inquired.

And Jon and Ali focused on reports that Israel is planning or attempting to flood the tunnel network under Gaza, as well as the gains by the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli army.

They talked about several new videos published by the Qassam Brigades, who battled the Israeli military in Shujaiya. One video showed an armored troop carrier in flames after a direct hit, and another showed how the Palestinian resistance group closely monitored an Israeli military camp.