July 3, 2026, marks 1,000 days since October 7, 2023. Palestinian Ambassador to India Abdullah M. Abu Shawesh believes that four key questions about what happened that day and in its aftermath – why, what, who and where – remain unanswered to this day. He spoke to The Wire about the role of propaganda in suppressing and confusing certain facts, the growing international solidarity for Palestine, and the way forward.

The transcript of the interview follows. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

Hello and welcome to this special interview for The Wire. I’m Jahnavi Sen, and I’m very pleased to have with me today the Palestinian Ambassador to India, Ambassador Abdullah M. Abu Shawesh. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much indeed for having me today. And it’s always good to be interviewed by The Wire.

Today, that’s the 3rd of July, 2026, marks 1,000 days since the 7th of October, 2023. And this morning, you have released an article where you talk about how over the last 1,000 days, there have been many questions that have been left unanswered, and some perhaps have not even been asked. So I’d like to explore some of those questions with you here today.

I thank you so much indeed. Yes, after 1,000 days of October 7th, after 1,000 sunrises of that exact morning, yet there are four main questions that have yet not been asked.

The very first question, of course, why? The second question is what? Third question is who? Fourth question, where?

So if we can start with the why…

Yes. I want just to give a large idea about that question.

So that first question, why? It means what was behind October 7? What is the history? What is the root cause of the issue? The second question, what happened at that exact day? Because we already have more than one version, or a lot of propaganda, about that day. Then, who conducted that attack? Is it only Hamas? Or there is someone who was behind this? And by someone, I mean, the Israelis themselves, and the Israeli fugitive from justice, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself. And the last question is where, tackling the future.

So if we start with the ‘why’, we’ve seen devastating violence against the Palestinian people over the last 1,000 days, and often it is framed as a direct response to the Hamas attacks on October 7. But what you have argued, and what many people around the world have been saying, is that there is a much larger context to this ‘why’. So if you could walk us through that history.

This is the point, which I tried in my very lengthy article to tackle under the very specific word, ‘why’. Because we have had since that exact day main two schools of thought. The rational school of thought, and the Zionist school of thought.

The Zionist school of thought, which is led by, of course, the Israelis and all of their supporters, and the Israeli occupation and their supporters, which is trying to say that history itself, or the whole entire globe itself, was created at that exact day, and was started at that exact day. Which means that they neglect, they are trying to turn their back on, every single issue that led to that day, to all the causes, to all the misery that the Palestinians endured before that day, and they just want us to concentrate in that day.

And history not only started that day, but also ended that day. Which means that they want us to turn blind eyes to everything, or towards the war crimes and the crimes against humanity, that have been conducted throughout the last 1,000 days. This is the Zionist school of thought.

The second school of thought, which is the rational school of thought, the symptom analysis school of thought – the very first one who tackled it was the United Nations Secretary General, His Excellency Antonio Guterres, in his speech before the United Nations Security Council on October 24, 2023, when he said that, “but this did not happen in a vacuum”. And he referred to October 7, to the plight of the Palestinian people, and to the misery of the Palestinian people. And my argument as one who belongs to and strongly believes in the rational school of thought, is that October 7 did not happen in a vacuum, and there is a lengthy history behind October 7.

This history was started on November 2, 1917, when the British, your colonisers here in India, the British themselves, with zero footprint in our homeland, when they have no right – no legal right, no moral right – over our homeland, gifted our homeland to the European Jews. At that exact time, by issuing the despicable, notorious Balfour Declaration, the British sowed the seeds for all the evils and the misery that we are enduring. The British sowed the seeds for October 7.

That exact day, since that time, and up to October 7, 106 years before October 7, the Palestinian misery was not stopped. We had been ethnically cleansed from our homeland. We had been subject to tens of terror attacks, at the hands of the British themselves, during the British mandate, and the Jewish gangs at that time.

When I say terror attack, even the British themselves used to acknowledge that the attack that we had endured before 1947 and 1948 was a terror attack. And we had been expelled from our homeland. Many things happened to the Palestinian people.

Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been slaughtered and killed since that very first day of the November 2, 1917, with the issuing of the despicable Balfour Declaration, up to October 7. But unfortunately, no one even knows about it, especially the new generation. No one even gave us the chance to speak the truth or to tell the people that there is an lengthy history before October 7.

So regarding the very first question, why, again, there is a lengthy history behind October 7. Unfortunately, we did not have the chance to speak about it. On Friday, October 6, for example, six Palestinians – half a dozen Palestinians – have been slaughtered and killed. Does this make it to........

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