Watch the full, unpaywalled interview with Muhammad Shehada here:

Palestinian writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada returns to Useful Idiots once again to give an update on Gaza, Israel’s newest Nazi-coded scheme, and how the US is benefitting from keeping the genocide going.

Useful Idiots: Let's talk about one of the major stories of this week. Among countless Israeli atrocities in Gaza, there was the emergence of this so-called aid mechanism, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, basically an Israeli front group setting up a site in Southern Gaza to give meager amounts of aid to Palestinians desperate for food. We saw these horrific scenes that were reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust, people caged, people being fired at, Palestinians reportedly being kidnapped while going to wait for this aid. What should people know about this whole fake aid mechanism?

Muhammad Shehada: To put it mildly, if you combine together the movies Mad Max, Fallout, Minority Report, and Black Mirror, you would get exactly this scenario. It's basically a fenced concentration camp that is run by American mercenaries surrounded by the IDF. They established a number of checkpoints leading up to these concentration camps.

Whenever I ask any friend in Gaza, ‘Would you go there?’ they said you would have to be completely out of your mind to step a foot into that trap. They saw it as bait rather than anything to do with humanitarian aid, because to get there, you have to cross a number of Israeli checkpoints where you can be kidnapped or detained at any moment without any explanation. And that's the last your family would ever hear of you.

Useful Idiots: Why did Israel create the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation?

Muhammad Shehada: The way this organization functions, it establishes four heavily militarized fenced hubs or concentration camps, all in the very south of Gaza. This is the most obvious exploitation of food as a way of luring people away from northern Gaza, as a way of forcible transfer, or mass expulsion. And it coincides with them saying that they have plans to conquer all of Gaza and concentrate the entire population beyond the Morag corridor, basically on the borders with Egypt.

Another concern is the clear risk of mass interment. And that is something that the United Nations and every single humanitarian organization has warned member states: Do not fund this ploy. Do not fund this Israeli shield organization.

They explicitly say there is a clear, credible risk of mass interment in which Israel would confine people in inhumane conditions, in fenced cages. What we saw in pictures, basically people being herded like cattle into feeding pens under the boiling sun of the desert, surrounded by sand dunes and IDF tanks and troops and mercenaries, waiting endlessly. Either you get a package of food, or you get shot dead, or you get kidnapped, or you get maimed.

 

Useful Idiots: What are you hearing from your friends and family who are still in Gaza?

Muhammad Shehada: Everyday I see another report where someone walking on the street got hit in the head with a loose shot fired by Israel or someone got hit by shrapnel. And with all of this, the worst part is to know that there's no end in sight. I get messages everyday from colleagues, from family, from friends, literally begging me for an answer. When is this coming to an end? Is there any hope soon?

And I try to make up things. I try to give them some false hope from time to time. But I ran out after twenty months of telling them, ‘Okay, Netanyahu's government is about to collapse.’ ‘The EU is about to speak up.’ ‘Trump might be convinced otherwise.’ And then they see it ten times not happening. I lost words. The worst sentence that I can say to someone in Gaza is stay safe. It feels insensitive, obtuse, and cruel. It's like mocking them because there's literally nothing to do to stay safe.

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Our full discussion with Muhammad is unpaywalled. Help spread his important message by sharing this interview, and follow Muhammad on Twitter @muhammadshehad2

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: CNN Claims ‘Free Palestine’ Protests CAUSED Israeli Embassy Staffers Shooting

“What I saw in his eyes,” claimed Jonathan Epstein, a witness of the aftermath of the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington last week, “I saw the same thing in his eyes that I saw in the eyes of all the [student] protesters at Columbia. Nothing different between him and them.”

The CNN anchor interviewing him apparently felt no need to push back on these outrageous claims. But that’s normal for CNN: in the wake of the shooting, Dana Bash, who has never commented on the “Death to Arabs” chants or any of the countless hate crimes pro-Israel supporters have committed against Arab-Americans, had a similarly racist take.

“You heard the alleged killer saying ‘Free Palestine,’” she said on CNN’s Inside Politics. “We hear that on college campuses, and there are a lot of people who have been worried that that has been turned into a call to arms and violence. Others claim that it’s not.”

During a week in which Israel has burned children alive in schools and hospitals and kept starving refugees fenced and trapped in the hot sun, drawing serious comparisons to Nazi concentration camps, it’s more clear than ever that the ‘others’ she sarcastically mentions are correct: it’s not a call to arms. It means Free Palestine.

 

Also in this week’s Thursday Throwdown: the former Biden official who sponsored Israel’s genocide in Gaza is CALLING OUT the Trump administration (for not warmongering hard enough against Iran), another conservative British politician accidentally spills the truth about the US, and even staunch Israel supporters are abandoning the newest lie about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a fake aid fund set up by Israel and the US, because it’s so fraudulent they don’t want to be associated with it.

It’s a tough week to be watching the news. Watch with Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here: