{"id":247211,"date":"2023-10-30T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2023-10-30T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=247211"},"modified":"2023-10-30T09:31:41","modified_gmt":"2023-10-30T09:31:41","slug":"the-lights-are-off-heres-what-we-know-about-life-and-death-inside-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/10\/the-lights-are-off-heres-what-we-know-about-life-and-death-inside-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lights Are Off – Here\u2019s What We Know about Life and Death Inside Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>

A victim is carried through rubble in the city of Khan Yunis, Gaza where buildings collapsed from Israeli airstrikes on October 26, 2023.
Photo: Mustafa Hassona\/Anadolu via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

In a chilling interview on this week\u2019s \u201cDeconstructed,\u201d Ryan Grim speaks with Maram Al-Dada, who has been in regular touch with his family in Gaza as they\u2019ve been killed one after the other.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

28 Oct 2023<\/em> – Israel turned off<\/span> the lights, cut the phone lines, and shut off the internet to Gaza on Friday night, plunging the region into darkness and isolation before launching a ground invasion. Only those inside know what\u2019s happening there.<\/p>\n

At the end of last week, I reached out to a source of mine from previous reporting, knowing that he was born and raised in Gaza, and I asked him how his family was managing in the face of the bombing campaign. He told me that so far, seven relatives on his father\u2019s side, and 30 on his mother\u2019s, had been killed. Those are numbers that we have no ability to comprehend. I told him that if he was able to, he was welcome to join our podcast, \u201cDeconstructed\u201d and tell their stories. After thinking about it for a few days, he decided to do it, and we spoke on Thursday evening, the night before he lost all contact with his family.<\/p>\n

I first interviewed Maram for research I was doing for my new book on the Squad, the left, and their years-long fight with AIPAC over Israel\u2013Palestine<\/a>. That reporting turned into this feature published in the fall of 2022 on the distorting role of AIPAC<\/a> and a related super PAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, in shaping and constraining the bounds of allowable discourse in Democratic primaries.<\/p>\n

This week, that fight ratcheted up to unprecedented levels of animosity when nine Democrats voted against a resolution that condemned Hamas and defended Israel\u2019s response, but which said nothing about Palestinian civilian lives lost. Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the Squad\u2019s chief antagonist in the House, called them \u201cdespicable\u201d in response. And President Joe Biden shockingly cast doubt on civilian casualty statistics put out by hospitals in Gaza because they run through the Ministry of Health, which is itself run by Hamas. In response, Hamas posted a public list of the names, ages, and ID numbers of 6,746 people who\u2019ve died amid the bombing campaign. The list includes 2,664 children.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen some people cast doubt on the reliability of the list, but Maram provided us a list of his relatives who\u2019d been killed that was created before Hamas put its own data out, and those names all appear on the Ministry of Health list. (We did find one duplicate on the list, not a relative of Maram\u2019s, a 14-year-old boy who appears twice on it. That\u2019s why I say it\u2019s a list of 6,746 people and not the number you\u2019ve seen in public reporting, 6,747.) I asked Maram what he made of Biden\u2019s dismissal of the accuracy of the numbers, and he said he agreed with Biden, but in the other direction: It\u2019s not possible that the hospitals are capturing the extent of the slaughter, he said, because many of the people he knows who have died in bombings have not been able to get to a hospital or a morgue.<\/p>\n

Deliberately leaving Palestinian lives out of a congressional resolution, or suggesting that the numbers from Gaza can\u2019t be trusted because Hamas runs the Ministry of Health, riggs those numbers. In fact, it likely makes the situation on the ground considerably worse, giving the IDF a sense of impunity that comes from dismissing the deaths as a Hamas conspiracy or fake news.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/a><\/div>\n

You can find my interview with Maram at this link<\/a> or anywhere you listen to podcasts \u2014 just search for \u201cDeconstructed.\u201d And please share with anybody you think does not yet grasp the scale of what\u2019s happening. It can\u2019t stay hidden forever. Below is a brief excerpt of our conversation.<\/p>\n

Maram Al-Dada:<\/strong> It\u2019s a total of 46. Yesterday, when you texted me about this interview, my uncle\u2019s house was bombed. My aunt\u2019s house was bombed. My cousin\u2019s house was bombed. I mean, yesterday, it was a very tough time. We really thought, like, that\u2019s it. The whole family will go.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ryan Grim:<\/strong> I saw news of Khan Yunis being bombed over the last couple of days and I thought of you and your family each time.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Maram Al-Dada:<\/strong> I mean, I was talking to my uncle when I was trying to get him to join this interview. He was telling me like, \u201cWe will die in this war, like all of us will die, but we don\u2019t know when.\u201d \u2026 I mean, I\u2019ll tell you a little story. Yesterday, I was calling him, I was talking to him. He goes like, today, a bomb fell in our street. A guy\u2019s leg was cut off in front of everyone and we were trying to just help him, waiting for an ambulance and there was just no ambulance. There\u2019s no, no 911, ambulance. The healthcare system\u2019s collapsed and he just kept bleeding and people just, at the end, just put him in a car and they just drove him away trying to take him to the hospital. I don\u2019t know what happened after that.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

And then another story: He goes, \u201cThere\u2019s no food.\u201d My cousin, my cousin called, my aunt called my uncle, she goes \u2013 that was before their house was bombed \u2013 she goes, \u201cDo you have food? Do you have any bread?\u201d And he said, \u201cLet me try to see who has bread. We don\u2019t have any.\u201d So they tried calling around and they found there\u2019s one little bakery in our town that still has bread, and they called and were like, \u201cCan you please keep a bag of bread for us?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

So he called my aunt back and he goes like, \u201cOh, ask Ahmed, my cousin, to go and pick it up.\u201d Ahmed calls my uncle back, and I was with him on the phone, and he tells him, \u201cI can\u2019t go, I can\u2019t leave, it\u2019s the street.\u201d Our street, called Gamal Abdel Nasser, you can go check it out, that street is just blocked because the buildings are collapsed. \u201cI can\u2019t just cross to the other side.\u201d So I was like, wow, so it\u2019s just a slow death, just waiting to die. There\u2019s no food, they get water now four hours a day, no electricity. It\u2019s horrifying. What\u2019s happening is literally slow death.<\/em><\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

Ryan Grim – <\/a><\/em>ryan.grim@\u200btheintercept.com<\/em> <\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original – theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

28 Oct 2023 – In a chilling interview on this week\u2019s \u201cDeconstructed,\u201d Ryan Grim speaks with Maram Al-Dada, who has been in regular touch with his family in Gaza as they\u2019ve been killed one after the other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":247212,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[1854,87,865,1029,88,2416,715,475,427,2897,880,99,124,70,92,965,886],"class_list":["post-247211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hamas","tag-israel","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-massacre","tag-netanyahu","tag-palestine","tag-sociocide","tag-state-terrorism","tag-structural-violence","tag-united-nations","tag-usa","tag-violent-conflict","tag-war-crimes","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247211"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247215,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247211\/revisions\/247215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}