Joshua Scheer

Reading from his new book, Chris Hedges brings forward the voices of Palestinians who have endured displacement, hunger and the killing of their loved ones. Their testimonies form a devastating record of Gaza’s destruction—and an indictment of the world’s refusal to stop it.

A mother gives birth without adequate anesthesia. A family shelters beside a loved one’s body, unable to escape or bury him. Reading Palestinian survivors’ accounts, Chris Hedges lays bare the intimate horrors of Gaza’s destruction—and challenges an audience to turn moral outrage into action against the governments and weapons suppliers enabling it.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

Please share this story and help us grow our network!

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn
• Mail
• Mastodon
• WhatsApp
• Reddit

Chris Hedges: Book Readings and Audience Q&A

Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for punctuation and readability. Timestamps, verbal fillers and repeated false starts have been removed. The speaker’s arguments and accounts have been retained. This text was prepared from the supplied automated transcript and has not been checked against audio.

Reading One: Waffa’s Journey in Gaza

Chris Hedges: So this first passage, it is about a woman named Waffa. Waffa, pregnant with her third child, is concerned about inhaling the smoke and dust kicked up by the bombing strikes. She and her husband Ahmed leave their home four times for brief periods in the first week. They eventually moved to Batan al-Samin south of Khan Younis following Israeli evacuation orders. They find refuge in an apartment owned by Ahmed’s friend. Waffa’s parents and her four sisters along with her brother Raed and his family stay behind in northern Gaza.

They live under constant shelling. There are severe food shortages. Former Israeli general and head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland, along with several other retired generals, drew up a plan after October 7th known as the Generals’ Plan. It calls for the forced evacuation of Palestinians from northern Gaza and a blockade of all food and humanitarian aid. Those who refuse to leave the north will be considered legitimate military targets. “I said my farewells to my mother, father, brother and sisters,” Waffa says. “They were crying. I was crying. We lived through many wars, but this one was different. This was the first time we had to keep moving from place to place to place.”

Shortly after the first ceasefire, Waffa and Ahmed’s abandoned apartment is looted. “They took everything, the furniture, the doors, everything,” Waffa tells us. A a police officer observes a man carrying electronics, including laptops, out of their apartment. The man is questioned and admits he is looting.

He is the doorman of the building. The police officer forces him to call Ahmed and confess. Waffa and her family stay at a friend’s apartment for 40 days before being forced to flee again, this time to Deir al-Balah. They find refuge with around 50 of Ahmed’s relatives in a windowless carpentry shop. Waffa in her third trimester sleeps on a thin mattress. Her two daughters sleep on a blanket on the floor. The shop is infested with insects and mice.

The landlord lets everyone stay for free for two months. Then he charges $1,500, that’s in US dollars, per month, for rent. He demands to be paid in dollars. Waffa needs a cesarean, but her hemoglobin is low. She is anemic. Doctors tell her to eat meat. She and her husband spend up to $100 a day rapidly depleting their meager savings to buy meat. Waffa goes into labor on January 17th. Her hemoglobin level was at 8 g/dL, which has gone up to 9.5 g/dL.

Doctors hoped she could reach 10 g/dL, but they can no longer wait. Waffa has a C-section with a light dose of anesthesia. There are no blankets. Patients must bring their own. Waffa shares her blanket with her infant and mother-in-law who stays with her at the hospital. There is no cell phone service or internet. Waffa is unable to communicate with her family. There are no painkillers following the surgery. “I wished I was dead,” Waffa says. “I wasn’t able to move. I couldn’t do anything. I was crying all the time. My family did not know I had given birth for two days.”

Waffa bundles up her infant Diala and leaves the hospital without her daughter’s birth certificate. She finds a ride and returns to the carpentry shop in Deir al-Balah. Israeli soldiers raid the hospital shortly after she leaves. They detain some of the patients and staff and order everyone else to leave.

Parts of the hospital are set on fire. A week later, Diala is struggling to breathe. Waffa returns to the hospital. Diala spends a week in the ICU. Waffa’s parents, sisters, brother, and his wife and four children remain in Gaza City. They have little food, surviving on hot peppers, zatar, and honey. Waffa speaks to them periodically. The cell phone service is erratic. During Ramadan on March 18th, Israel drops leaflets around Waffa’s parents’ apartment, ordering everyone to evacuate.

It then carries out a nighttime raid on Al-Shifa hospital, which is in front of Waffa’s parents’ apartment building. As many as 25,000 displaced Palestinians are camped in and around the hospital. Israel fires tank shells at the hospital. It attacks crowds with quadcopters. The army claims it kills 200 “terrorists”. It is the second time the hospital is shelled in 5 months. Israeli troops detain about 900 men, including doctors and journalists.

Their faces are scanned. They are blindfolded, stripped to their underwear, and forced to lie on the ground. They are taken away for interrogation. Many are beaten and tortured. Some are tortured to death. By April 1st, the hospital, having been subjected to two weeks of siege, bombardment, and raids, is in ruins. Israeli troops dump the dead, including women and children, into mass graves. Over 400 bodies are discovered in and around the complex when the graves are exhumed in April and May.

Many have their hands zip tied behind their backs. Some are found beheaded. Bloated corpses are discovered on beds in the reception and emergency departments. “Israel destroyed the department over the heads of the sick and injured people, and they were buried alive,” Motasem Salah, director of the Gaza Emergency Operations Center, says in a video message. “Preliminary reports suggest that 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, injured, or are reported missing as a result of the massacre at Al-Shifa with women and children making up half the casualties.” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports on April 1st.

Waffa’s family takes shelter in a back room on the [floor unclear in supplied transcript] of the apartment during the attack on Al-Shifa hospital. Shells rip open holes in the walls. On March 21st at 2 in the morning, Waffa’s 34-year-old brother Raed goes to the bathroom. He is shot by a quadcopter. “They hear him scream,” Waffa says. “They try to reach him, but the quadcopter keeps firing.” Waffa’s father, Ismail, crawls towards his son. He pulls him back into the room.

Raed’s mouth and lower jaw are blown away. He has no tongue. Blood is pouring from his gaping wound. Ismail calls for an ambulance. He calls the hospital. He calls the red crescent. They all tell him the area around the hospital has been declared a red zone by Israel and all movement is prohibited. Raed cannot speak, although he tries. His father brings him paper and a pen. Raed weakly scrawls a few indecipherable lines.

Three hours later, Raed dies. His family wraps his body in a plastic tablecloth. They place him against a wall. Waffa’s family remain trapped in the room for five more days. “I managed to get through to them on the phone once,” Waffa says. “I tell them to put my brother’s body in a box and throw him out of the building.”

“Waffa,” her mother says, “we can’t move. It’s too dangerous to go to the window. They will shoot us if they see us.” “Can you lift up the tiles and put him under the floor?” Waffa asks. Waffa hears shooting and the line goes dead. Raed’s four children, all under the age of 10, frequently attempt to pull back the tablecloth to look at the mangled face of their dead father. The children’s grandmother, Maha, and the other adults intervene to stop them. The ground floor of the apartment is bombed.

The building catches fire. Smoke billows up to the first floor, blinding everyone. The family write their names on their arms and legs so they can be identified if they are killed. They also write their names on pieces of paper and slip them into their pockets. “Shall we stay or try to get out?” Ismail asks. The family decides it is better to be shot than burned alive. They flee. They make their way down the stairs through the thick billows of smoke.

When they open the front door, they come face to face with a quadcopter. They turn to retreat upstairs, but the flames and smoke are too thick. They reach the front door. They see tanks. Maha, Waffa’s mother, says she will leave first. She turns her back to the tanks. She holds up a white cloth. She calls the rest of her family to come out one by one. She uses her body to shield each person as they leave.

“If the Israelis call any of you, go talk to them. But everyone else, keep moving,” Maha says. “If they shoot someone, don’t stop. Don’t run to someone who is wounded. Keep going. They will shoot you as well. If you drop something, don’t pick it up.” Maha waits until her family has left the house. She joins them at the end of the line. She hears the grinding gears of the tanks moving towards her.

She does not look back. “If anyone had killed us,” Maha told Waffa later, “there would have been no blood. We were petrified with fear.” The first time Waffa becomes aware of the fate of her family is when she sees a short video on Al Jazeera. The video shows them walking down a bombed out street. They are carrying backpacks. Waffa’s sister Rama, who is weeping in the video, describes the horror they have endured.

“We’re tired,” Rama whispers. “We’re tired.”

“Every time I call them, even today, they still talk about what happened,” Waffa says. “They cry. We all cry.” When Waffa’s family returned to the charred remains of the apartment, Raed’s body is gone. “We don’t know what happened to my brother’s body,” Waffa says. “We don’t know if it survived the fire. We don’t know if someone buried him.”

Reading Two: The Story of Abdul Raheem

Chris Hedges: The second passage I’m going to read from the book is about a neighbor of ours. It’s about his brother who we saw in Cairo, Abdul Baset’s brother who had cancer when we saw him and died not long after we did the interview. So this is with Abdul Baset’s brother in Cairo. Abdul Raheem and his family leave their home in Al-Qarara on October 10th, 2023. After Israel drops leaflets demanding everyone evacuate, they move to a relative’s apartment in Khan Younis.

They stay until the first ceasefire is declared on November 24th and returned to their home for a week. “There wasn’t a lot of damage,” Abdul says. “The municipality had been bombed. Some homes were destroyed, but it wasn’t a lot. My house was okay. My younger brother, who had remained in Al-Qarara, watched over it.” On December 1st, when the ceasefire ends, they go back to Khan Younis. Israel attacks Khan Younis with fire rings.

Fire rings consist of sustained and intense bombardment of a small area, usually for an hour. They include rockets that explode several feet below ground. Once one area is obliterated, the Israelis move on to the next fire ring. “It was very bad,” Abdul says. “A lot of people were killed.” Israeli drones drop evacuation leaflets over Khan Younis. Abdul and his family moved to another part of the city close to the University College of Science and Technology where a relative of Abdul’s wife lives.

Israel orders all of Khan Younis to be evacuated. The family travels 5 miles further south to Rafah. They are joined by relatives and become a group of 20. “The last night of bombing in Khan Younis was catastrophic,” Abdul tells us. “We fled in three cars.” The cars made their way slowly down Gamal Abdel Nasser street to Rafah. The trip, normally 15 minutes, takes an hour. “People are walking on the road,” Abdul tells us. “They carry what they can. Some can’t move. They sit on the roadside. It is very sad. Some people are on bicycles. Some are on motorcycles. Some are on donkey and horse carts.”

“Were the children scared?” I asked. Abdul gestures towards his 15-year-old son, Khaled. “Ask him,” he says.

“Of course, we were afraid,” the boy says. “Everyone was.” When they get to Rafah, there is no shelter. There is little food or water.

The children sleep in the car. It is cold and rainy. They have no blankets. They attach a sheet of plastic to the back of the car to make a protected area. Adults sleep on the ground. There are no bathrooms. They relieve themselves on the side of the road. The stench is overpowering. Abdul, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, is ill. The family take him to the Gaza European hospital. The doctor tells Abdul he is not eating enough.

“We can’t handle your case,” the doctor says. “There are more critical cases.” The family moves to Al-Mawasi in March. It is Ramadan. Al-Mawasi is designated a “humanitarian area” by Israel. They will at least be on open land, some of which belongs to them. The coastal area filled with dunes has over 380,000 displaced Palestinians. The Israelis promised the delivery of humanitarian aid. Little arrives. Water is trucked in. There is no electricity.

Abdul’s family set up two makeshift tents with palm tree leaves and sheets of plastic. Israeli drones circle overhead. It is cold and rainy. They huddle together to keep warm. Hunger wraps itself like a coil around their stomachs. Abdul’s son, Omar, is 17. He is a gifted student. He hopes to go to college to be an engineer like his father. He was in his last year of high school when schools were forced to close in October.

Omar manages to get a phone connection to speak to his sister in Canada. “Please get us out of here,” he pleads. The family wakes in the darkness to say their morning prayers outside their tents. “It is you we worship and you we ask for help,” they pray. “Guide us to the straight path, the path of those upon whom you have bestowed favor, not of those who evoked your anger or of those who are astray.”

They return to their tents after prayers. Omar is in a tent with his aunt and three cousins when a shell explodes near them. Shrapnel injures his aunt and severs her 14-year-old daughter’s right leg. Omar rushes outside for help. A second shell explodes. Shrapnel rips through his stomach and exits from his back. Omar enters Abdul’s tent and collapses. His cousins carry him out. “What happened to Omar?” his father asks. “He fainted,” Omar’s cousins tell Abdul.

“We knew Omar was seriously wounded, but we didn’t tell my father,” Khaled tells us when we speak in Cairo. They drive Omar to Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. “Omar, are you okay?” his cousin Hassan asks.

“Yes,” Omar moans.

“Omar, are you awake?” Hassan asks a few minutes later.

“Yes,” he whispers. The next time Hassan asks Omar if he is okay, Omar does not respond. Hassan carries Omar into the overcrowded emergency room.

The doctors tell Hassan that Omar is dead. Hassan carries Omar’s body back to the car. They return to the family’s encampment. I watch a video of Omar’s mother keening over the boy’s corpse. “My son, my son, my beloved son,” she laments, her left hand tenderly stroking his face. “I don’t know what I will do without you.” They bury Omar at dusk in a makeshift grave in the sand dunes. Later that night, the Israelis shell again.

Several people are wounded and killed. The empty tents occupied the day before by Omar’s family are obliterated. The recounting of Omar’s death casts a chill over the room. No one speaks. “Fourteen years of my life with him. Then this happens,” Khaled says softly.

“I lived in Gaza for six years,” Ahmed, Abdul’s son from his first marriage, tells us quietly in English. “Omar and Khaled were like my children.”

Khaled has not been the same since his brother’s death.

He used to be joyful, outgoing, and gregarious. Now he hardly speaks. He is always by himself. Abdul’s house in Al-Qarara is bombed and destroyed on March 20th, 2024. Thank you. [Applause.]

Questions and Answers

Moderator: So we can do questions if there are any. Please just wait to be recognized. Do you want to take the mic over?

Audience Member: Thank you. Did you discuss religious belief in any of these contexts? Because this would certainly put belief in the will of God to the test. And I’m wondering if you saw examples of that.

Chris Hedges: I would say nearly everyone that we interviewed found their ultimate solace in their religious belief. And I can speak as somebody who spent two decades in war zones. Every war tends to strip everything away, all the veneer of a society, and strips the world down to good and evil. Good and evil become palpable.

So I would say what kept people grounded, to the extent that one can be grounded in that kind of horror, was there. And also, in Islam—it’s—I’m a Presbyterian. You don’t have to do much except go to Nassau Presbyterian once a week, give money. But in Islam, you pray five times a day. There’s a physical [ritual], and I think that that is extremely important.

I certainly found that important in refugee camps in Gaza, because remember, Gaza is a prison. You can’t leave. I would be in refugee camps where 10, 15 men are living to a room, sleeping on the floor. There’s no work there. And I think the one thing that kept them together was not just their religious belief, but the rituals that come with that belief. Before you go to a mosque, you wash your feet, your hands, etc.

This, by the way, was why I was so opposed to the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo. I’m not defending what happened, obviously, to the people in the magazine. But I remember there were very few of us, but I was very outspoken against them, because I said that is the ability of a privileged Western person to essentially make fun of or insult the one thing that is holding people who have nothing, nothing, together.

Audience Member: Thank you for bringing this situation to the attention, at least, of the U.S. I’m thinking back maybe 30 years to the time of apartheid in South Africa, which is also a moral outrage. The one thing that brought that to an end was a trade boycott, an international trade boycott.

Now, you mentioned your book had a good reception in France, but as far as I know, France and Israel still happily trade with each other. In fact, the whole EU and the U.S. trade happily with Israel. What would it take to have a trade boycott with Israel? I think that’s really the only language they understand.

Chris Hedges: I would agree. That’s why, since its inception, I’ve been a very outspoken and strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. I just came from Ireland, and it turns out that Ireland is the second-largest trading partner with Israel after the United States. The Irish, rhetorically, are pretty good.

But you’re right. Of course, we have to halt all military aid to Israel, but we have to sanction Israel. You’re right, that is the one language they speak. And as with South Africa, it works.

Audience Member: Hi, thank you very much for bringing this book to us. You talked about the hospitals that were attacked by the military. There have been many high-profile health workers who have been arrested and are still in Israel’s prisons and tortured, among them Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.

I guess the question I’m trying to get at here is: Where are these professional organizations? Why have they been [unclear in supplied transcript]? The targeting of journalists, the targeting of universities, the targeting of hospitals, health workers.

Chris Hedges: Well, that’s a really good question. Where is this university? Where are all the universities? They’ve shut down free speech and persecuted those students on their campus who I think functioned as our nation’s conscience.

I am appalled at the collapse of the institutions, because what we’re really talking about is the evisceration of the rule of law, the UN Charter, the Genocide Convention. That’s a very frightening moment.

I think Pankaj Mishra wrote a good book, The World After Gaza, where he talks about what this means—the great Indian intellectual—what this means for the Global South. It’s a message to the Global South in a time of climate crisis and climate refugees, and that is that the rule of law does not concern us. We are quite willing to carry out mass slaughter, including genocide, to protect our climate fortresses. That is the message. And that’s why it’s so important that those of us who do care about the rule of law stand up and confront the machine.

A year ago I went to Genoa with Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for Palestine, who, along with—what is it?—16 ICC judges, and now the ICC court itself, has been sanctioned in an attempt to destroy it. So it was Francesca, Yanis Varoufakis, Greta Thunberg, myself. A picture of myself with Greta Thunberg, I think, impressed—my daughter is sitting there—maybe the first time she’s ever been impressed. [Laughter.]

And Thiago Ávila, who organizes the flotillas, because the dockworkers in Genoa went on strike and refused to load weapons onto Israeli ships. That is precisely what we have to do.

Just on the other issue of the doctors and the journalists, what was clear to us—we interviewed 29 families, so we interviewed a lot of people in Cairo—but it was very clear that they were targeted. We interviewed a lot of doctors. We interviewed journalists. In some cases, we were talking by phone to doctors in Gaza. Almost from the inception of the genocide, the entire professional class of Palestine was slated for obliteration. And that’s what, of course, genocide is about.

We found repeated cases of doctors who were being assassinated the moment their shift ended or the moment their shift started. They would get to their apartment, and the quadcopters would come in and blow away their entire apartment and kill them and their family. But it wasn’t the whole building. It was their apartment. Vans that were carrying medical workers to hospitals were targeted, and all the medical workers were killed. This was, of course, true with journalists.

In fact, at one point we’re doing an interview—I can’t remember who it was, maybe Ruba remembers—and somebody said people didn’t even want to be next to a journalist or a doctor. Was that Afnan, maybe? No, right? Yeah. But they didn’t even want to be near us because they knew we were the walking dead.

I think one of the things when you carry out interviews that are this extensive, and the book has it, is that all of these patterns are exposed. So it’s just absolutely appalling. And then, of course, all the intellectuals, the writers, the poets, Refaat [surname unclear], but not just Refaat. That’s what a genocidal project is about.

Audience Member: Mr. Hedges, you stated multiple times in your talk that the so-called Zionist project’s goals have always been clear from its inception. What is this monolithic Zionist project? What have been its objectives? Why has it taken a full century for them to execute it until this so-called incursion? I think you mentioned stating that their goal is to de-Arabize the Middle East.

Chris Hedges: I said de-Arabize Palestine, not [the Middle East].

Audience Member: Palestine, which, as you rightly point out, has essentially old Arab history and the millennial Jewish history. So you somehow forgot about—

Chris Hedges: I didn’t forget about it. I know the history of the Middle East pretty well. Spent seven years there.

Audience Member: I believe that.

Chris Hedges: All right. What’s the question?

Audience Member: My question is: What is the Zionist project that you referenced? Who are its proponents, and what took them so long?

Chris Hedges: Well, the Zionist project is about the seizure of Palestinian land and the de-Arabization of Palestine to create a theocratic Jewish state where anybody who is not Jewish is a second-class citizen or has no rights. That is the Zionist project. It began physically in the 1920s. And, by the way, in the 1920s, the Jewish population was 6% of Palestine. So this was a classic European settler-colonial project.

Netanyahu’s family comes from Poland. They came and gradually seized more and more of the land with the backing of Western imperial powers, particularly Britain at the inception, but then finally the United States.

Every war: 1948, 750,000 Palestinians are driven from their homes. A series of massacres, dozens of villages are razed. 1967, when Israel goes to war again and seizes the West Bank and Gaza—no, not Gaza, the West Bank and the Sinai—you have another 350,000 Palestinians pushed [out]. From every war, but in between, it’s been slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

That was certainly true in the West Bank, and now we’re seeing it turbocharged in the West Bank. But let me be clear: The Zionist project is a racist project.

[Applause.]

Audience Member: Thank you. Just a brief point. I believe if South Africa had anything like Israel and the Zionist lobby behind it, we would still be looking at apartheid in South Africa. So that’s what we’re up against.

I recently heard an interview of someone who has been very deeply involved in what’s going on in Gaza up until the present, and he made the comment that in the West we have come to romanticize sumud and the steadfastness of the Palestinians. Can you speak to that point?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, I think you’re right. That is something that is also raised in the book. There are critiques. I think Al Jazeera’s reporting has been important, but many of the Palestinians, or certainly some of the Palestinian journalists, were critiquing Al Jazeera for exactly that: for romanticizing the resistance, romanticizing the steadfastness.

I just came from France and from Ireland. In Paris, I met with the wonderful Palestinian poet—his name is [unclear in supplied transcript]. His poem’s really short; I’ll read it. [He] was [in] Gaza. And then I was with another really well-known [name unclear], another great Palestinian journalist, and they both agree with you.

Of course, all of the Palestinians that we interviewed are in constant contact with family. Israel has seized 70% of Gaza. They said the fact is, given the chance, most of them would leave. It’s a horrible thing to have to confront, but this was something that we heard repeatedly among the Palestinians.

I’m just going to read his poem. He’s a really talented poet and a wonderful guy. It goes:

“Language is dying in me. The story I carry, the one I’ve written over and over again in the dark in my mind, has no witnesses left. No places, no names, no future. No language strong enough to hold it.

“Genocide crushes expression. It shatters the very words we use to survive. I try to write, but fear silences my hand. I try to remember, but everything has been erased. I try to speak, but there is no language left that can hold the weight of this devastation. And yet, I must speak. I must continue because silence is another form of disappearance, and I refuse to vanish.”

[Applause.]

Audience Member: You mentioned how Gaza was like a prison in itself and no one could escape. But the majority of the people that you talked about, that you interviewed, were in Egypt, or the person who we got handed slips to donate to was in Spain currently, or someone’s receiving medical attention in Qatar. Can you just explain how they managed to get out?

Chris Hedges: Two ways. One, medical evacuations. Egypt would allow a certain number of people who were seriously wounded or ill to leave.

But the way you get out if you’re not on a medical list is you pay an organization called Hala. Hala is an Egyptian-run organization. Before the genocide—these are for exit visas—you would pay about $350. Once people became desperate to leave, that price jumped to $5,000 for adults, $2,500 for children.

It is a deeply corrupt, mercenary organization. Sisi’s two—he is the president of Egypt—his two sons are purported to have made a fortune off of it. And you must pay in dollars in advance. That’s how you get out.

Audience Member: Thanks for speaking tonight. I wanted to ask a question about your reporting process. I really love the narrative storytelling. Just interested in the types of standards you hold yourself to there, and then thinking about your journalistic process that you put into the work, thinking about the journalistic standards you followed, which ones you continue to use and then which ones you purposely no longer see the need for in this type of work to tell this type of story.

Chris Hedges: I would say that for this book, it’s the same standards for reporting that I used for The New York Times. We can critique The New York Times. That’s another evening. But the one thing about the Times is that the lie of omission is still a lie. That’s the primary lie that they tell.

Although also they will do things or write this atrocious article, “Screams Without Words,” which was based on one source which [unclear in supplied transcript], which peddled this fiction of mass rape by Hamas.

But I would say that—and Joe also is a very rigorous reporter. So what does it mean? We taped everything. Everything was put into transcripts. And when it was translated into English, we had Ruba and—was it one or two other native Arabic speakers? I can’t remember—who checked everything to make sure the English translation, double-checked it to make sure it was correct.

One of the things that was interesting and even disconcerting about the reporting in Gaza is that the Palestinians have everything on their phones. Everything is on their phones, including, in some cases, pictures of their dead grandchildren in the rubble. So there was photographic evidence for everything. If they said their house was destroyed, we had a picture of the house.

This was very important for Joe, who is rigorous about the images. We weren’t in Gaza. I mostly wrote the book in Firestone, in the Princeton library, but Ruba was often there, just constantly on WhatsApp checking both for me and Joe, because people were displaced so much. They would describe an event, but where was it in their trajectory?

For Joe, that photographic evidence was so [important]. He takes one particular narrative story of a clinical psychologist who’s—I’m not going to, you can get the book—but the images, he gets the photographic images, but then he sent it all back to Osama to make sure that it was correct.

I think with a book like this—and that was also true when I did this book I mentioned about collateral damage—the way they take you down is they find the one mistake that you made, which is often very minor. But then every time the book comes up, they go, “Well, you know, they wrote…”

I think what the Zionists are going to do is pretend the book doesn’t exist. I think that’s what they’re going to do here in the States. Look, we all make mistakes, but we work really, really hard not to, and we check, double-check, triple-check everything. That was the process.

Audience Member: Chris, I just wanted to say that I actually was there in August. I was in Gaza. I was at the hospital, actually. I don’t know if you heard, but in August there was a bomb that was dropped from the supply depot there, and right there we came out also on the crater there. [Wording unclear in supplied transcript.]

I can confirm everything that has happened, and it’s still happening. It’s ongoing. But the destruction is pretty much total. You mentioned the area. It’s pretty much leveled. There’s nothing left of it at all. So people are living mostly in Al-Mawasi, in tents.

There’s a lack of housing. Everything is very expensive because of the lack of supplies that come in. Now, there has been some respite for the last maybe six months to one year because they’ve allowed some supplies to come in, but still it’s very difficult. The restrictions for us to bring things include medical supplies. So we’re restricted on those items as well.

There are no stents there at all. So if you need a stent in Gaza, you’re not going to get a stent for any type of surgery, any type of intervention. It’s a total restriction on any type of reasonable life to have there. It’s very basic, and the people there still go through the day. They’re very resilient people.

I think what we can do here is to keep the pressure up that this is not over. It’s still ongoing. The pace has slowed down, but it’s still there. Also, they’re pushing in further. There’s a yellow line that they had, I think that they determined during the ceasefire that they would be within that line, but that line’s being pushed.

Chris Hedges: They just pushed it a little further in the last few days. They have 70% of Gaza. Israel controls [it].

Audience Member: Yeah. Trump had said, “Finish the job.” This is apparently what they’re trying to do. Slowly, they’re doing the same thing.

So what we can do here, I think, is to keep our voices loud and also engage people that are in positions of responsibility and in authority that can make a difference.

Chris Hedges: Well, I mean, don’t vote for anyone who supports genocide. I didn’t in the last election.

[Applause.]

I don’t care if Trump wins or not. Genocide is a moral issue. It’s not a political issue. And if you can’t stand up against genocide, then what are you worth?

Moderator: Chris, we’re going to take one more question, and then if you have any final remarks, it’d be great.

Audience Member: Actually, it’s kind of a follow-up to what this gentleman was just saying, what you say. I’m just curious. You say put pressure, but what can we, living right here in Princeton or thereabouts, actively do to try to have some kind of a force, something on this?

Chris Hedges: Well, there is stuff we can do.

Audience Member: What can we do?

Chris Hedges: Well, we can do what Palestine Action did in terms of protesting Elbit Systems. We can build movements to refuse to ship weapons to Israel.

Audience Member: But that’s—you mean, okay, we have to force the government to do that.

Chris Hedges: No, the dockworkers just refused to load the weapons on the ships. They didn’t ask Meloni whether they could load the weapons on or not. They refused to load them on.

There’s a little film, if you go on YouTube and you put my name up and write “Resistance 101,” there’s a little film about that action. We did it, and we have Greta and Francesca and all these people speaking to that issue.

Look, it’s pretty clear that our governments are going to do nothing to halt genocide, and we do not want to live in a Hobbesian universe where there are no rules. Either we, like these courageous students who are across the street, some of whom have been put on probation or at Columbia expelled—it’s up to us to defend, promote and ensure the rule of law, because even the United Nations completely caved, the Security Council, by adopting Trump’s obscene, quote-unquote, peace plan.

So this is our moment. Don’t be a good German. It’s our moment to stand up.

Just on an aside, on the midterms, whatever Trump is polling, you can be sure that he is going to try to invalidate this election. At that point, we better do what everyone is doing in India, to their credit.

It’s not just the evisceration of international law. It’s the evisceration of domestic law. I covered Bosnia, which is a land with no law, and it’s a pretty ugly, horrible, frightening way to live.

So there is a lot we can do, but it means risks. I’m not going to tell you which country, because I’m not allowed to, but when I was in Europe I spent quite a bit of time with the founders of Palestine Action who are in exile. It is going to take that kind of cost. We’re going to have to begin to pay that kind of cost if we’re going to save ourselves.

[Applause.]