More than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last few months, according to the United Nations. Israel’s blockade on aid, ongoing bombardment, and the dismantling of independent relief efforts have pushed Gaza to the brink of mass famine. At least 600,000 people are suffering from severe malnutrition, and aid groups warn of a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe.

“It’s not about the distribution of food, it’s not about humanitarian aid. It’s about creating — luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south, putting them into a closed military zone,” says Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Hedges about how we got here and what’s at stake. Hedges spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestine, much of that time in Gaza. He’s the author of 14 books, the most recent being “The Greatest Evil Is War” and “A Genocide Foretold.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

TRANSCRIPT

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jordan Uhl.

More than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last few months, according to the U.N.

CBS: And as Israel’s military operations ramp up, hunger is at an all time high.

WTHR: At least 10 people have died from starvation in the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours.

Al Jazeera: This is what death by forced starvation looks like.

JU: Famine has persisted throughout the war. But in March, the crisis deepened as Israel imposed a blockade to aid, broke its ceasefire with Hamas, and resumed airstrikes on Gaza.

By May, a newly formed U.S. contractor, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, had taken over most aid distribution after Israel effectively banned independent and established relief groups, including the U.N. agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA.

Gaza’s 400 aid sites were reduced to just four.

Recent Intercept reporting from inside Gaza observed “a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death.”

António Guterres: We need look no further than the horror show in Gaza. With a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times.

JU: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaking at the Security Council.

AG: Malnourishment is soaring, starvation is knocking on every door, and now we are seeing the last gasp of a humanitarian system built on humanitarian principles.

Sky News: [Gunfire] This is what the head of the U.N. is talking about. [Gunfire] The abject chaos and danger Gazans face trying to get food.

JU: In one of the strongest rebukes of Israel’s actions to date, more than 100 aid and human rights groups issued a joint statement calling on world governments to intervene.

DN!: The NGOs, including Amnesty, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders warned, “Illnesses like acute watery diarrhea are spreading. Markets are empty. Waste is piling up. Adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration.” unquote

JU: Gaza is on the brink of mass famine. At least 600,000 people are suffering from severe malnutrition, according to staff at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza.

This is not a tragedy of circumstance. It’s a deliberate campaign of mass starvation, enforced through Israel’s unrelenting bombing and continuous blockade on the flow of aid into Gaza, which is prohibited under international law.

The death toll in Gaza has reached nearly 60,000, officially, but experts and relief workers on the ground expect the actual number of casualties to be significantly higher.

To be clear: This is a genocide.

And Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing wages on, as lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in the Knesset on Wednesday on a non-binding resolution demanding annexation of the West Bank.

To understand how we got here and what this moment most demands, we turn to someone who has spent years reporting on the conflicts: Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times.

He spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, much of that time in Gaza. The author of 14 books, his most recent are “The Greatest Evil Is War” and “A Genocide Foretold.” He has taught at Columbia, NYU, Princeton, and the University of Toronto.

Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, Chris.

Chris Hedges: Thanks, Jordan.

JU: We’re speaking on Tuesday, July 22nd. I’m eager to talk about this book, I finished it recently. But I also want to just first say thank you.

You are somebody who has had an outsized influence on my understanding and views on foreign policy. And I heard you speak at my undergraduate alma mater in Youngstown, Ohio, in the early 2010s, and you were talking about the death of a liberal class and what you said there stuck with me to this day.

And I remember looking around the room and seeing other people being encouraged and stimulated by what you were saying. And I’ve always seen you as somebody who has been able to speak truth to power and distill societal and complex problems in a way that we can all comprehend. And just wanted to say thank you. I’m really excited about this.

CH: Well thanks, that day Staughton Lynd came to that event with his wife Alice. He’s a great hero of mine.

JU: Yes, Staughton Lynd. He’s the labor attorney who fought to stop steel-mill closures in Youngstown, Ohio, and ultimately the community’s post-industrial decline.

CH: I remember that event because I speak at places like Skidmore where the children of the one percent are forced to go. They actually have to carry slips that you sign, and most of them probably spent the whole talk on their phones.

But that wasn’t true at Youngstown because I remember they were seated down the aisles because the student body was older, their parents had been laid off. They had felt the effects of de-industrialization in Youngstown, where the closure of the steel mills, and of course they had the capacity because of that experience, to ask the kinds of questions the children of the privileged don’t have to ask or don’t want to ask. So I remember that event very well.

JU: Let’s get into this book. I wanna start though with your 2002 book, “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.” In it, you talk about the use of myth to justify or perpetuate war. In one context, you talk about the creation myth of Israel and how Israelis are unwilling to question what they’re conditioned to believe about the state of Israel.

Then you also write about the myth of war and how through the filter of the press, the reality of war is misconstrued or even hidden. People are propagandized into believing the official narrative. In this case, in Gaza right now, it is a war for Israel’s survival. It is one of self-defense and solely against Hamas.

How else do you see the role of myth in Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

CH: Well every country, including our own, has a foundational myth, which is a narrative to essentially hold up national virtue, national courage. And we do it to this day. We’ve never really examined the two foundational institutions that created the United States, slavery and genocide against the Native Americans.

Israel is the same. It has its own creation myth that somehow the Palestinians — who, let’s be clear, had lived in historic Palestine for centuries — did not have an identity as a people, that the land was largely uninhabited. I mean, these were just completely false narratives still........

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