Episode 226: The Importance of ‘Seriousness,’ or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide (Part I)
Citations Needed | August 6, 2025 | Transcript
Nima Shirazi: Hi, everyone. This is Nima Shirazi. Before we get started this week, we’re sharing the very sad news that friend of the show, former guest of the show, and visionary advocate for justice, Brandi Collins-Dexter, passed away, June 2025. Brandi was a fearless and tireless activist for corporate accountability, a brilliant researcher and media analyst, a beautiful and witty writer. She was amazing at dissecting how all pop culture is inherently political, and analyzed the narratives of power and popular resistance, as much through polling and data as through music, media, film, TV, radio, sports, wrestling, dance, art, and celebrity. Her 2022 book, Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future, was prophetic in revealing the fragile state of Black voters’ relationship with the Democratic Party, noting the disaffection and distance that comes with being taken for granted.
A few years ago, Brandi joined Citations Needed for a live show fundraiser to discuss our mutual love for pro wrestling and the power of morality tales and gladiatorial storytelling. She is already so missed, and we send her family all the support and strength at this time. If you care to honor Brandi’s legacy in some way, her family has recommended donating to any of the following organizations that were near and dear to her:
- Media Justice, which you can find at MediaJustice.org, is where Brandi got her start in organizing and media and tech justice work.
- Baltimore Beat, a Black-led, Black-controlled, nonprofit newspaper and media outlet in Brandi’s adoptive hometown.
- Aspiration Tech, which builds technology capacity in nonprofit organizations that sorely need it.
- And Health Care for the Homeless, a clinic providing comprehensive medical care to over 100,000 people without homes every year in Baltimore.
Rest in power, Brandi. We really, really miss you.
And now, on to this week’s show.
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Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson,
Nima: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Adam: Indeed. If you listen to the show and you like it and you haven’t yet, please do subscribe on Patreon. It’s very, very, very important. It’s not just a box we check. It actually does keep the episodes themselves free and the show sustainable. So if you can do that, we’d be very grateful. Thank you.
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Nima: “12 UN Relief Works Agency staff members are accused of involvement in Hamas’ attack against Israel,” reports NPR. “Details Emerge on U.N. Workers Accused of Aiding Hamas Raid,” announces the New York Times. “Hamas Military Compound Found Beneath U.N. Agency Headquarters in Gaza,” claims the Wall Street Journal.
Adam: In January 2024, literally on the same day the International Court of Justice deemed Israel was committing a plausible genocide, a number of sensationalist headlines broke across US media, namely the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, telling us in 40-point font that the UN Relief and Works Agency, the single most important supplier of food and medical aid in Gaza, was, in fact, a front for Hamas. Western audiences were told, based on so-called “Israeli intelligence,” that 12 workers at the agency may have been involved in the attacks on October 7, 2023, and in another blockbuster claim that, quote, “Around 10% of Palestinian aid agency’s 12,000 staff in Gaza have links to militants, according to intelligence dossier,” unquote. Given this history, the logic went, who knows how else the agency might be operating at the behest of Hamas?
Nima: It would have been a major revelation if there were any evidence to support it. But there wasn’t, and the story was later dropped, walked back or ignored by US media. But the damage was already done. President Biden quickly defunded UNRWA, and Israel criminalized it, helping fast-track mass starvation in Gaza. So why did media outlets publish so many breathless and lurid headlines about Israel’s claims without an ounce of independent confirmation? To what extent, if any, have outlets acknowledged their journalistic and moral recklessness? And how has this contributed to the deliberate policy of mass starvation, immiseration, and wholesale murder of the population of Gaza?
Adam: On today’s episode, part I of a two-part series on “The Importance of Seriousness, or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide,” we’ll examine the role of legacy news media in inciting the starvation of millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the racist double standard of what sources and experts can be trusted, and the broader incitement campaign against the UN Relief and Works Agency which directly caused today’s mass starvation in Gaza.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined from Khan Younis in Gaza by Moureen Kaki, who has been coordinating medical and food aid on the ground there for more than a year. She is the head of mission at Glia, a medical solidarity organization bringing doctors and providing open-source medical equipment to Gaza. She’s also been volunteering and cooking with the community kitchen Shabab Gaza, which serves thousands of meals a day to the starving people in Gaza. Previously, she opened Saha, a Palestinian food pop-up in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas.
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Moureen Kaki: You mentioned that I am head of mission for Glia, and one of the things that Glia does is bring international emergency medical teams in to support hospital staff here. And I don’t even need to look at statistics that are reported by the WHO and the Gaza Ministry of Health. I’m looking at my own doctors’ daily medical forms that they submit data on, and the amounts of patients that are being recorded as severely malnourished has just skyrocketed. I mean, the numbers have quadrupled in the last couple months alone. People are dying of starvation by the dozens now, they’re reporting, and that’s the first time that I’ve seen that in the year.
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Adam: So this two-parter, “The Importance of Seriousness, or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide,” is putting a cap on this season. We thought it was important for the, I mean, obviously there’s the urgency around mass starvation in Gaza, but one thing we’re realizing in the sudden kind of turn on this, sudden handwringing and liberal establishment–
Nima: Right, because we’re seeing even mainstream outlets and more mainstream politicians even admitting that there is a famine, that there may be possibly even a deliberate Israeli strategy to not save everyone who lives in Gaza.
Adam: So what we thought was important was that there’s a lot obviously missing from this kind of limited hangout narrative, right, where we have a lot of, like, scapegoating just Netanyahu, or saying like, Well, there wasn’t a famine, but there is now.
Nima: Right. Everything up until this point was not genocide, but now, now maybe it’s getting closer.
Adam: Yeah, that the US media, specifically the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, had a direct hand in the current starvation campaign. Now I and others wrote about this at the time, I wrote a Substack article from March of 2024 entitled “NYT, WSJ Laundering Israel’s Obviously Bogus UN ‘Hamas Links’ Story Helped Starve Gaza,” where I talk about much of what we’re going to talk about in this episode, but this history, this history of media’s direct role in this particular instance, and as I wrote at the time, I think the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal as well here, crossed the line from bad coverage or racist coverage or even mendacious coverage, to what I would argue is outright incitement to genocide, which is to say, spreading lurid, tabloid, false claims on a besieged and vulnerable population, the consequence of which could only lead to starvation. There is not a sort of other option you would have, and that’s the argument we’re going to make in this episode, that, I don’t believe it’s an argument we’ve explicitly made before, but this is an instance where, in a strictly legal and moral sense, you could make the argument, and I think, quite conclusively, that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, when they laundered these stories in January of 2024 that were completely bogus, later, their standards editors, we’ll discuss, admitted they actually hadn’t seen the supposed evidence of 10% of UNRWA being Hamas. We’ll make the argument that this crossed a line into outright incitement, that this was deliberately putting a target on the back of civilian, besieged population.
And I think that’s overwhelmingly obvious, and this is an important case study into how genocides happen. They don’t happen overnight. They don’t happen through one instance or one sort of event. They are a constant trickle of dehumanization, racism, and delegitimizing of genuine aid groups and medical staff and food distributors and humanitarian workers. Putting a target on the backs of the people and institutions that maintain and sustain life is a way in which you snuff out life. And so we’re going to go over what happens in January of 2024, the political consequences of that, and how that led to the current reality of mass starvation, the knockdown effects of which will be felt for decades. Again, as several medical professionals have been pointing out, it’s not like you’re starving and then you eat and you’re magically better, like it’s a video game. You have permanent medical issues for the rest of your life when you suffer this level of mass starvation. And tens of thousands of Palestinians are likely subject to those conditions. And so the consequences for this have been mass death, mass maiming and mass chronic illness for the rest of their lives, for the ones that have been lucky enough to survive. And so we’re going to detail what happened and talk about why. Specifically, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal crossed a line into genuine genocide incitement.
Nima: Because it goes from complacency to complicity at this level of spreading propaganda. There’s a reason why Julius Streicher, who was the founder of Der Stürmer in Nazi Germany, was also convicted at the Nuremberg trials for crimes against humanity, because propaganda can go hand-in-hand with dropping bombs or official government policies of mass starvation. Oftentimes you can’t have one without the other.
And so let’s actually go back to January of 2024, as you said, Adam, and lay out some of the background for what we are going to talk about. On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice issued a ruling that Israel’s assault on Gaza, quote-unquote, “plausibly” constituted genocide. The ICJ demanded Israel, quote, “halt acts of genocide,” end quote, and await further adjudication. While the United States and Israel flouted and continue to flout international law, this was still a significant ruling, reflecting the legal consensus of the majority of countries in the world.
Now, mere hours before the ruling was issued, and almost concurrently with it, Israel alleged in a publicly released, quote-unquote, “intelligence report,” without any evidence or proof cited, that 12 of the 30,000 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, otherwise known as UNRWA, was linked to Hamas and had been involved either directly or indirectly in the October 7 attacks. This was a bombshell claim that had massive, massive consequences.
Now, UNRWA, for a little background, was founded in 1949 to provide Palestinian refugees with aid following the mass displacement and dispossession, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine resulting from the Nakba in 1948, part of the violent process of establishing the state of Israel. Now at the time that Israel published its allegations, again without evidence, without proof, in January 2024, about UNRWA, UNRWA was supplying the majority of schooling, healthcare, social services, emergency response services, and other forms of critical life-sustaining and lifesaving support to Palestinian refugees in Gaza as they were getting bombarded and slaughtered by Israel.
Adam: Now, to be clear, even if the claim were true, the idea that 12 out of 30,000 employees of an organization committed a crime is a standard that media has heretofore never ascribed to an employer. Right? This is a totally new standard, because it’s unclear what UNRWA was supposed to do. Again, this is a aid relief agency in a ongoing genocide and war zone attempting to feed and house and shelter and provide medical supplies. I guess the assumption is that, of the 30,000 employees, they’re supposed to follow them 24 hours a day with drones? It’s unclear how what their employees do in their off hours is supposed to at all be their responsibility, or what that even means. A standard that is absolutely never held to any other organization in human history.
But of course, that doesn’t make any sense, because the goal wasn’t to actually make sense. The goal was to simply use the words ‘UNRWA’ and ‘Hamas’ in a sentence as much as possible, ideally in as many headlines as humanly possible. So even the basic principle of, taken in its most generous terms, the basic principle doesn’t make any sense. What was UNRWA supposed to do? Were they supposed to monitor tens of thousands of employees in the most besieged, poor, how would that even be possible? I’m sure not even the CIA could do that. But again, this was not supposed to make sense.
So after Israel’s claim went public, the UN fired the 12 employees in question as a kind of immediate response, which I think they later regretted, because it kind of seemed to vindicate their claim. Then elite media pounced. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal in particular, amplified the story on their front pages. Had put huge, again, 40-point type headlines on their website and later in the print publication.
Now let’s actually examine the New York Times homepage in the morning of January 27, 2024. The court finding, the ICJ finding that Israel was committing plausible genocide, and urging Israel to stop its genocide, was described as such. Quote, “The International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must prevent genocidal acts in Gaza, but did not call for a cease-fire,” unquote. The Times placed a headline about the UN firings above this headline on its homepage all day, and in significantly larger font. The paper presented Israel’s tabloid claims about an UNRWA-Hamas conspiracy as credible solely because Israel said so, and the UN fired the employees in question. The headline, which again is in twice the size of the font of the story about ICJ finding Israel’s committing genocide, kind of big news, the New York Times said, quote, “U.N. Fires 12 Aid Workers and Looks Into Their Possible Involvement on October 7.” So we have this kind of, ‘possible links.’ We have this sort of tabloid, sensationalist language.
Nima: And they’ve already fired them, which kind of vindicates Israel without any burden of proof.
Adam: Yeah. There’s always this kind of air of conspiracy and hiding something. They’re hiding. They’re sort of not being forthcoming. They admit–
Nima: The UN is really just an arm of like, quote-unquote, “terrorist” infrastructure, rather than a relief agency, rather than an international body, so that anything that is at all supporting or sustaining Palestinian life can be discredited and dismantled and destroyed.
Adam: And this was covered non stop in the following week. Quote, This is New York Times from January 28, 2024 quote, “Details Emerge on U.N. Workers Accused of Aiding Hamas Raid.”
Wall Street Journal, the next day, January, 29 2024, “Intelligence Reveals Details of U.N. Agency Staff’s Links to Oct. 7 Attack.” Now, this took it one step further. This is, again, is an anonymous Israeli, quote-unquote, Israeli intelligence claim that the Wall Street Journal never saw a single ounce of proof of, quote, “10% of Palestinian aid agency’s 12,000 staff in Gaza have links to militants.” Links to militants, Nima. Unquote.
Wall Street Journal podcast would follow up three days later. Quote, “The UN Agency Accused of Links to Hamas.”
The Wall Street Journal on the same day. Quote, “A U.N. Agency Is Accused of Links to Hamas. The Clues Were There All Along.” So Wall Street Journal has already convicted them. They’re accused, and also there’s clues everywhere.
The New York Times, February 3, 2024, quote, “The 8 Days That Roiled the U.N. ’s Top Agency in Gaza,” unquote.
Wall Street Journal. February 10, 2024, “Hamas Military Compound Found Beneath U.N. Agency Headquarters in Gaza.” Oh, my God!
These announcements on January 26, 27, 28, 29, what immediately followed these articles was 18 countries announced they would pause UNRWA funding. This included US, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, Italy, Australia, and Finland. As of 2022, the US was the agency’s top funder, providing the agency with $343 million of its total $1.17 billion in pledges. UNRWA was thus deprived hundreds of millions of dollars. Now the thing with the story was that the UN said, Okay, great, show us the evidence. And what’s important to understand is that Israel never did that. They didn’t even bother trying to do that. They tried to launder some sketchy, patchy intelligence through US, Western media. But when the UN itself said, Please send us the evidence, Israel just ignored them.
Nima: Yeah. So in April of 2024, an independent review for the UN led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna found no credible evidence to support Israel’s allegations. The review noted that UNRWA routinely supplies Israel with staff lists, and added this, quote, “the Israeli Government has not informed UNRWA of any concerns relating to any UNRWA staff based on these staff lists since 2011,” end quote. So again, Israel made the claim in a, quote-unquote, “intelligence dossier” that was leaked to or written for media to publish, right? That was the purpose. There was no actual finding that they then reported to UNRWA, to the UN, to try and actually suss out whatever their bogus claims were. No. This was pure propaganda aimed at dulling the effects of the ICJ finding and assuring that hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, would be taken away from the primary aid organization in Gaza.
Adam: Now, there’s a third and fourth consequence of this as well, which Israel sought, which is, the third one is that the court that found them guilty of plausible genocide at a United Nations court, so if they could there, say, Well, the United Nations is compromised and infiltrated and full of Hamas, that delegitimizes their case of genocide, right? The fourth consequence is that UNRWA is a relief agency for refugees. Now, UNRWA stands for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The full name of UNRWA is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. So, by definition, it is an organization that maintains the refugee status, which has certain legal and moral and historical connotations. Which is to say, the vast majority of people in Gaza are refugees that were kicked out of their homes in the 1940s and this is the children, the people, the children, or the children’s children, of the people who were kicked out. So they are refugees that have, legally, a right of return. They’re supposed to be able to return to their homes.
Nima: By international law. By humanitarian law.
Adam: Now, Israel for years, almost decades, but even especially going back to 2016, 2017, has attempted to kick UNRWA out of Gaza, largely based on the assumption that if they do so, this will completely sever the refugee status of these Palestinians, and they therefore will have no legal claim to the homes they were kicked out of 75 years ago, 80 years ago. And so there’s really nothing but upside here for Israel to make these lurid, sensationalist claims that this organization is somehow a proxy for a terrorist group.
And this huge conflict of interest, this huge ideological ulterior motive, is never mentioned in any of these New York Times, Wall Street Journal reports. It’s sort of seen as this, Oh, Israel stumbled onto this cache of evidence mysteriously the day before the UN ruled they were committing plausible genocide. It just happened to announce that. I mean, the level of credulity it takes to believe this is what happened is quite immense. And it wasn’t just independent UN reports that found that there was no evidence. Close Biden ally Senator Chris Van Hollen, in March of 2024, went on the Sunday morning shows and said, quote, it was a “flat-out lie,” this UNRWA-Hamas connection story, and that he had not seen any evidence. And if the evidence did exist, he would be someone in the Senate who would have seen it.
Nima: Nevertheless, the US under Biden maintained its UNRWA funding freeze, despite the fact that, after this ruling, this finding that there was actually no evidence for the Israeli claim, many other countries reinstated their own funding, but the Biden administration did not.
Adam: Yeah, that’s important to understand, the US never returned funding back to UNRWA, although every other country quietly did, without acknowledging that they made a mistake in the first place, because they realized these allegations were self-serving bullshit. The Wall Street Journal had no interest in ever evaluating its narrative, specifically around its more sensationalist claim that 10% of UNRWA had, quote, “links.” I love ‘links.’ ‘Links’ is an all-time great weasel word. ‘Links to Hamas.’
Months after advancing the claim, an editor at The Wall Street Journal privately admitted in an email that the paper had no evidence for this claim. As Semafor reported, in August of 2024, Elena Cherney, the chief news editor, wrote this in an email. Quote,
The fact that the Israeli claims haven’t been backed up by solid evidence doesn’t mean our reporting was inaccurate or misleading, that we have walked it back or that there is a correctable error here.
Unquote. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times have had more chances and an ever-rising responsibility to retract the reporting, but still haven’t. In May of 2025, UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini published a statement making clear that Israel, quote, “failed to provide adequate evidence,” unquote, to support its accusations against UNRWA and its neutrality. Lazzarini wrote that, despite what had been a 20-month period of allegations, quote, “UNRWA has not received any response,” unquote, from Israel to the agency’s repeated requests for proof that the agency was in any way involved with October 7.
So what happened was Israel just made this completely, obviously self-serving, lurid claim. Again, this is an organization, a military, IDF, an intelligence agency, that fucking lies all the time about everything. We could list you the lies, if you’d like. Showed no evidence, no proof. Again, the premise itself that somehow an organization of 30,000 people is responsible for the moonlighting of 12 of its employees, which they didn’t really show evidence for pretty much any of them, is absurd. The claim of 10% was absurd, never backed up by evidence. Wall Street Journal admits it never saw any evidence, but it served its function. It took the ICJ ruling of plausible genocide off the front pages. It undermined the UN itself and undermined, most importantly, the organization tasked with making life sustainable. And making life unsustainable, making Gaza not able to sustain human life, was the one of the primary so-called “war aims” of Israel by their own admission. And so getting rid of the aid agency responsible for doing that is what led to this so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation death zones, which are weaponizing aid to herd Palestinians away from their homes and towards the Sinai and ultimately either being evacuated out of Gaza or killed or pushed into Egypt or other surrounding countries, which is obviously Israel’s goal. And this media propaganda campaign in January of 2024 and February of 2024 was essential for making that happen. It would not have been able to happen without that.
Another element of this is that the New York Times repeatedly lies or permits Israeli officials uncritically to lie about Hamas, quote-unquote, “stealing aid.” This has kind of been a main trope to justify shutting down UNRWA and bringing in this bogus Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, was that they need to keep aid out of the hands of the baddies. And this is a claim they’ve made over and over and over again for the better part of two years. And what’s important to understand is that there’s absolutely no evidence for this. And the New York Times finally, again, after not doing so for almost two years, decided to publish an article debunking this claim. On July 26, 2025, they finally published an article saying that there was, quote, “no proof,” unquote, that Hamas was stealing aid from the UN. Citing four anonymous Israeli officials, the story would go on to say that the UN aid system was, quote, “largely effective,” and that there was no evidence of Hamas stealing aid in any systemic way.
But as Minnah Arshad at The Intercept noted, this is in total contradiction to the New York Times mindlessly repeating this claim by Israeli officials, uncritically, several times. They did a media analysis since January of this year, when Trump came into office. Arshad of The Intercept would write, quote,
In 61 articles related to Gaza’s hunger crisis the Times published since January, 23 included Israel’s accusations that Hamas was stealing aid. Nine of those stories did not include opposing statements refuting Israel’s claim. Twelve articles of the 61 analyzed by The Intercept cited concerns about Hamas diverting aid without an explicit accusation. At the time of publication, the Times had not added a correction or update to these stories to indicate that the claims were false.
None of the articles provided any evidence in support of the claims except for the comments of Israeli officials, who work for a government that has repeatedly spread disinformation, including in its record-breaking fatal attacks on journalists, aid workers, and children.
Unquote. So this is a claim that the New York Times allowed to be repeated over and over and over and over again for six months now, during this most recent starvation campaign, and never once refuted it, and then later reported four Israeli officials saying that this claim had no basis, that they had no evidence Hamas was stealing aid in any meaningful way, but didn’t feel the need to go back and correct any of the articles, or at least provide context or clarification for the reader that the Israeli official, again, if I’m sitting there reading a claim by an Israeli official and a Hamas, quote-unquote, “terrorist,” obviously the reader is going to believe the Israeli official.
They didn’t do anything to correct or to clarify that that was not true in old articles, because again, as long as they sort of say, Oh, we’re quoting someone else, as long as they launder the editorializing through a third party, even if it’s someone who’s conflicted, is obviously conflicted and is discredited as an Israeli military official who has every reason to lie about why they’re starving people, it’s just not something they feel like they have to really correct or contextualize, because, again, it’s about an official enemy, and official enemies, you can pretty much say whatever you want.
Nima: Now, it’s important to note here, of course, that aid workers, and certainly UN relief agencies, have long been subject to attacks by Israel, extending far before October 7, 2023. This is kind of how they operate under a constant threat, constant bombardment, constant propaganda. So the spate of accusatory articles in January 2024 and February of that year from the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, as we’ve been documenting, were really only the latest instance of attacks on UNRWA. According to a March 2024 report published by The Guardian, citing internal UN documents, quote,
“UN staff working with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been subjected to a systematic campaign of obstruction and harassment by the Israeli military and authorities,” end quote, since October 7, 2023.
Hamas has no presence in the West Bank, mind you, indicating that Israel’s claims of going after Hamas, again, as we’ve discussed before, Adam, are merely a pretext for the extermination of Palestinians. Now, UNRWA had been a target, as I said, for years, even before 2023. As just one example, in 2017. Benjamin Netanyahu stated, quote, “It is time UNRWA be dismantled,” end quote. But neither the Times nor the Wall Street Journal ever deemed it necessary to include this context when it reported without any sense of, you know, due diligence to check what the validity of Israeli claims the accusations against UNRWA, these were never put in the context of the fact that Israel had systematically, over many, many, many years, been attacking that agency and had overtly stated that it wanted to dismantle it.
Adam: Now, cut to summer of 2025 and the very acute mass starvation is undeniable. And so the New York Times has to sort of acknowledge that there’s mass starvation, but they can’t do a critical analysis of how it got to this point. And you’re not allowed to say Israel does it deliberately. That’s not something you’re permitted to say, right? Everything bad that happens has to be an accident, collateral damage, a whoopsie, a technical problem, AI maybe forced them to do it. They can never morally decide, as an entity, as an institution, to starve Palestinians, even though they explicitly said that’s what they were going to do. Yoav Gallant on October 9 explicitly said, 2023, explicitly said, We are going to have no food in Gaza. But they’re not allowed to say that. Not allowed to acknowledge it, certainly not allowed to acknowledge New York Times’s role in delegitimizing the actual aid organization that was feeding people. So then you have to get the Oh, well, failure to plan, right? So the New York Times has pushed this narrative that the reason why there’s starvation in Gaza is because Israel, quote, “failed to plan.”
But before we get to that narrative, let’s lay out the stakes a little bit. The defunding of UNRWA and the brutal Israeli-US blockade of Gaza gave way to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is a front for US military contractors, the US military and the Israeli military, to weaponize aid distribution to depopulate Gaza, which is to say, basically, use aid as a way of getting Gazans, as it were, to go further and further south. There’s no aid agency. There’s no aid distribution in North Gaza for a reason, because the plan has always been ever since the October 13, 2023, evacuation order of North Gaza. The plan is to always ethnically cleanse North Gaza, a task that is functionally complete, and they use the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation not only to herd people where they want them to go, but it’s basically live shooting exercises. So far, over 1,200 Palestinians have been killed at these so-called aid distribution sites from live fire, from stampedes. And they play what is the equivalent of, according to Haaretz magazine, they play the equivalent of red light, green light, which is where you basically just arbitrarily shoot people for sport. This has been well documented. A US military contractor whistleblower has attested to this, and that is where we’re at now. That is the end game that Israel wanted. That’s the end game that it got, which is using mass starvation to achieve what they couldn’t achieve through military means, which is a classic siege warfare tactic, right? This is a Bronze Age, Middle Ages tactic of starving a population to extract a concession from a military actor, which is to say they want everyone with a gun to hand it over and leave so they can depopulate Gaza without any pushback.
Nima: Yes. And mass starvation and collective punishment, mind you, as we’ve said kind of ad nauseam on this show, not that Israel or the United States or large parts of the international community actually care, because they clearly don’t, but these are explicitly against international law. These are gross violations, not that it matters, because the only way it would matter is if the people committing these crimes actually stopped when they were called out on it, because these are crimes, they’re not doing that. There’s no policing mechanism that is effective enough because of UN Security Council vetoes held by the United States and others and other ways that just, when you have a nuclear-armed superpower backing your own nuclear-armed military that is committing genocide against a starving and imprisoned population, yeah, there’s no accountability. But just to be clear, Adam, just to be clear, these are explicit violations of international humanitarian law, these are war crimes and crimes against humanity, mass starvation and collective punishment that is not even questionable, that is undeniable. So just as we continue to talk about these policies, these are explicitly noted as crimes against humanity, the worst crimes that could possibly be committed under international law.
Adam: And the World Health Organization released a report making clear that 71,000 children in Gaza are either currently suffering from starvation or will in the next few months. 17,000 pregnant women are vulnerable to acute malnutrition and starvation over the next few months, and, quote,
The long-term impact and damage from malnutrition can last a lifetime in the form of stunted growth, impaired cognitive development, and poor health. Without enough nutritious food, clean water, and access to health care, an entire generation will be permanently affected.
Unquote. Now cut to the New York Times. How does the New York Times spin this, right? Because they were part of the incitement campaign. Institutionally, they’re stenographers for the Israeli military. It’s a bumbling accident. In his July, 21 2025 article headlined, “Shootings, Devastation, Hunger: Israel Fails to Address Gaza’s Power Vacuum,” by reporter Patrick Kingsley, he wrote, quote,
For a year and a half, experts have warned that Israel’s failure to plan for a power transition in Gaza would lead to anarchy, making it harder to deliver aid and stymie efforts to defeat Hamas.
A sequence of shootings in Gaza over the weekend — one near Gaza southern border, another at its northern edge — have highlighted the accuracy of those predictions.
Unquote. By the way, unclear who’s shooting anyone in Gaza in that writing. But also, Israel has simply failed to plan, that the starvation wasn’t their plan. They simply failed to plan. And they could throw in some sort of wonk speak about a power vacuum. But what does that mean? There was never going to be an alternative, because to Israel, Hamas is anyone with a gun, and they’re going to kill anyone shooting back and depopulate Gaza, which is their explicit plan. So it’s not clear what a transitional government would look like, as that assumes and that it smuggles in the ideological premise that is completely false, that somehow Israel doesn’t plan on kicking Palestinians out of Gaza, even though they explicitly say that’s the case.
Nima: That this is not the plan, right? That this is the absence of a plan rather than the plan.
Adam: Right. And so this is really typical New York Times liberalese ass covering. And what’s interesting is that no other publication has taken this ‘failure to plan’ angle. Zero. I have not seen any other publication, and I’ve looked. This is a completely boutique spin by the New York Times, because it’s pure projection, it’s pure guesswork. It’s just an ideological assertion, whereas other outlets are saying, Oh, there’s mass starvation because Israel cut off aid, right? It’s kind of a simple statement. You cut off aid, you do siege warfare, you prevent any aid from getting in, you weaponize the very minimum aid you have and turn them into shooting galleries. Yeah, obviously people are going to starve to death. There isn’t this child waiting by the window looking for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve naivete of like, Oh, Israel, they were trying to feed Gazans, but they failed to plan properly.
Nima: I mean, even when you say that this is guesswork, that The New York Times, clearly, is not just trying to, you know, read between the lines, parse what they’re seeing, and maybe, you know, find some way to continue to cover up for Israel. It’s actually even more sinister than that, because it is clear that starvation is the Israeli policy, as stated explicitly by Israeli officials. And so what the New York Times is doing is not just being naive, it is actively lying, creating another reason why this may be happening.
Adam: Well, it’s the definition of feigned credulity. It’s like, Israel? I just got here, what’s going on? Israel tells me this is the case. You know, maybe they failed to plan. I mean, again, anyone who thinks anyone failed to plan is obviously not acting in good faith. And Kingsley repeatedly acts in bad faith. And he knows that. He knows this is fucking liberal Zionist spin to try to buy Israel some time and to sort of take off some of the criticism. And again, what’s notable is that literally, no one else really auctioned off this line. It was pure, in-house, liberal Zionist spin by the New York Times. Now on July 24 2025 in an episode of The New York Times’s very influential The Daily podcast, host Rachel Abrams spoke with Times reporter Aaron Boxerman, at one point discussing global condemnations of Israel’s violence and the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites. Let’s listen to that clip.
[Begin clip]
Rachel Abrams: Have any of those condemnations moved the needle at all, just in terms of Israel acknowledging any kind of problem or conceding that this aid distribution system had issues that perhaps it didn’t earlier recognize?
Aaron Boxerman: So publicly, at least, Israeli officials have defended the initiative. But there’s also reason to believe that they’re not totally thrilled with how it’s turned out. After all, Israel promised that this was going to be an orderly system, not just for the sake of Gazans, but also because the whole reason behind this overhaul was to prevent the aid from going to Hamas or benefiting Hamas. But the rollout has been so messy, and so disorganized, that it doesn’t really seem like anyone is checking who’s coming to pick up these boxes of aid.
[End clip]
Adam: Yeah, you fucking moron, because it’s got nothing to do with aid going to Hamas. The New York Times cited two IDF sources two days later saying that they had no evidence of any wide-scale or systematic stealing of aid by Hamas, and that to the extent to which aid is stolen, it’s stolen by Israeli-backed, ISIS-linked gangs that have no credibility within Gaza, that are backed and armed and funded by Israel. That’s who’s stealing aid. So the New York Times constant fucking, Well, you know, Israel really wanted this to work out. No, they didn’t! That’s obviously a lie. Are you fucking five years old? Clearly, that’s not their goal. Their goal is to starve, this idea that, Oh, they need to control distribution because aid will get into the hands of Hamas. Clearly, that’s not the case. Clearly they don’t care. Clearly the only people stealing aid are the Israeli-backed, ISIS-linked gangs, because they want to starve the whole population. And we know that because they repeatedly say so.
Nima: This whole aw, shucks routine by the Times, and specifically in that clip by Aaron Boxerman, is just really embarrassing. It’s, like, shameful to listen to it, because it is so obvious what is going on. The idea that, Israeli officials were really shocked that things were so chaotic. They’ve been committing a genocide for nearly two straight years, and now they’re like, Oh, man, you know what we really wanted to do? We really wanted to get aid in the hands of the poor, starving people of Gaza. Why are they starving? Because of Israel! What the fuck is going on here?
Adam: It’s truly weaponized credulity. It’s like this fake credulity, this fake naivete. They know what they’re doing. The New York Times, again, was central to the mass starvation. They know that. They know that Israel always has to be a bumbling failure. They’re getting the, dog ate their homework, failure to plan, They were going to feed Palestinians, but they just forgot. They had some food they were going to give them, put it on top of their car, and drove off.
Nima: And this narrative is supposed to live parallel with the fact that Israel has the, kind of, highest level of intelligence and insight. So when they bomb hospitals, it’s because they know exactly that there are 17 senior Hamas commanders working, you know, in a boardroom on the 17th floor. That kind of thing. We’re supposed to hold these two absurd ideas in our minds at the same time. That Israel can’t possibly be in control, and yet knows everything that is going on, so when they murder people, they are doing it on purpose, and that it really is Palestinians’ own fault if they put their children or their grandparents or their husbands or their wives in the crossfire of very, very smart Israeli bombs and bullets. We’re supposed to hold that in our minds at the same time as this idea that Israel would love to facilitate a very orderly rollout of lifesaving food and aid to the very people that they’re trying to literally exterminate off the face of the Earth. We’re supposed to believe these two things at the same time.
Adam: And let’s be clear about why this is so stupid. Because it’s not stupid because the New York Times is stupid. It’s stupid because it’s all there is. It’s all liberal Zionist spin. So they operate backwards from, Wow, this looks really bad for Israel. Objectively looks very bad. How can we make it look as least bad as possible? And again, we’ve talked about this before with the Stumbling Empire episode, Episode 13, right? You have Israel standing over a dead body with the murder weapon in their hand, and the New York Times is their lawyer. And it’s trying to get them off. They can’t get them off on killing the person, that’s obvious. So they’re trying to get them off on manslaughter. They’re trying to bump it down from murder one to manslaughter. And so what do you do? Oh, you really have only one play, which is bumbling empire. They didn’t sort of mean to do it. It was an accident.
Nima: They ran into my knife. This was not premeditated.
Adam: Yeah, exactly. I was hot-headed. It was dark. I thought it was an intruder. I mean, that’s what they’re doing. They’re working backwards from the presumption that they need to make it look as not-bad as possible for Israel, and pretty much the only play, you know, if you had asked me in early July to whiteboard some spin about how to make this look not as bad, while still being, having a modicum of somehow journalistic or liberal credibility, this is basically what I would come up with. I would come up with this kind of ‘failure to plan’ pablum. It sort of sounds very official, right? It sounds very sort of Council on Foreign Relations. Post-war planning. We didn’t plan right. We need more bureaucrats. Where the crime is not the actual underlying motive, or the actual people you killed, or the babies that you’re starving to death, or the 18,500 fucking children under the age of 18 you’ve killed. That’s not the issue. The issue is, you didn’t have the right bureaucrats in charge. Or there’s always this mysterious Israeli far right that’s kind of pressuring people to do things, that is simultaneously not held accountable and not in charge of the government, but also responsible for all the bad things so they can be the sin-eaters for the whole of Israelis.
I’ve read a million of these articles. I know them by fucking heart. And the New York Times is doing what the New York Times explicitly set out to do, which is to hand-wave away, deflect, spin. So liberals who see these grotesque, horrific images, and they’ve been doing this for two years, and they’re outraged, and they want to do something about it, to numb that instinct, to dull that instinct, to say, No, no, it’s more complicated. Actually, Hamas was in the proximity. Actually, you know what? It was an accident. Okay, we’ll do better next time. Actually, it’s the far-Right who are simultaneously responsible, but never in charge. And they go, Okay, and then they move on, and then they, you know, flip to the next news item. And that’s that. That’s their role. Their role is to dull outrage. It’s to make things, that everything that the baddies do is the most tabloid thing imaginable, and everything Israel does is sort of drowning in nuance, and passive voice, and ‘some officials say,’ and there are, there’s other considerations. It’s to dull our moral intuition and moral instincts to be outraged by what’s going on, and they’re very, very good at it.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’ll now speak with Moureen Kaki, who will join us from Khan Younis in Gaza. She’s been coordinating medical and food aid on the ground in Gaza for more than a year now. She is the head of mission at Glia, a medical solidarity organization bringing doctors and providing open-source medical equipment to Gaza, and has also been volunteering with the community kitchen Shabab Gaza, which serves thousands of meals a day to people there. Previously, she opened Saha, a Palestinian food pop-up in San Antonio, Texas. Moureen will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
We are joined now by Moureen Kaki. Moureen, welcome to Citations Needed. It’s amazing to have you here with us today.
Moureen Kaki: Hey. Thank you so much. It’s really wonderful to be on. I appreciate y’all.
Adam: So I want to talk about the current state of things. Now, obviously, over the last few days, when we’re recording this, on July 28, there’s been a rhetorical shift where people who typically were silent or openly supported arming and funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza are now sort of handwringing about starvation due to these images that are emerging with increased frequency. Obviously, we’ve had images of starvation for several months, but now there’s dozens of them. Presumably, they have some sense that it’s going to get even worse. Can you talk about, as someone who’s obviously there and has a sense of what’s going on, it’s hard to sort of talk about degrees of bad, and forgive me for this question, but for those listening, what is the situation on your end? What are y’all seeing more and more, and what are maybe American audiences listening to this, or Western audiences listening to this, may not be aware of in terms of the severity and urgency of what is occurring?
Moureen Kaki: Yeah, I mean, I will tell you, Adam, here, that in my entire 13 months here in Gaza, this is the worst that I’ve seen the situation. And I feel like I’ve been saying that periodically, every month, for the past four months, since the Israelis imposed their most recent blockade back in March. You mentioned that I am head of mission for Glia, and one of the things that Glia does is bring international emergency medical teams in to support hospital staff here. And I don’t even need to look at statistics that are reported by the WHO and the Gaza Ministry of Health. I’m looking at my own doctors’ daily medical forms that they submit data on, and the amounts of patients that are being recorded as severely malnourished has just skyrocketed. I mean, the numbers have quadrupled in the last couple of months alone. People are dying of starvation by the dozens now, they’re reporting, and that’s the first time that I’ve seen that in the year.
Even the community kitchen that I volunteer at when I’m not working for Glia, they have the capacity to output 20,000 meals a day. They can’t make a fraction of that. At best, they’re doing 2,000 meals a day because there’s not even stuff available in the market. So it’s not just even a matter of, Oh, the things are really priced out of people’s ability to purchase them. It’s just not available anymore. Because, again, this blockade has been, it’s been a de facto blockade for five months. I mean, the Israelis talk about, to sort of quell media here and there, talk about, Oh, we let stuff in. But for example, they announced some sort of temporary ceasefire from 10am or 9am to 8pm or something like that, to let in the entry of trucks. They ended up letting in 20 trucks, and it was after the sort of temporary ceasefire. So it’s really just, they’re clearly trying to play the PR game to quiet people down about this and say, Look, we’re being humanitarians. We’re letting stuff in. But 20 trucks of food for a population of 2 million that’s starving is a joke. I mean, it would be a joke if it weren’t deadly.
Adam: Yeah, I want to ask about the idea that, so I’m going to read you something that Atlantic columnist David Frum said. He’s part of the sort of brigade that suddenly, along with Bari Weiss at the Free Press, that sort of suddenly realizes there’s hunger. He says, quote,
The fable of the boy who cried wolf has an important moral which is not that wolves don’t exist and will never attack anyone. Rather, it is precisely because wolves do exist and will eventually attack that makes it so important to not cry wolf. And ideally, even when the UN cries wolf and a wolf actually happens to finally be there, we should still be ready for that.
Unquote. The implication is that, in the last, basically the last week, starting around July 15, July 20, now there is starvation. Before all the lefties and Palestinian activists and supposedly antisemitic international organizations, Human Rights Watch, etc., they were all lying. But now it’s real. Obviously this is absurd, since that’s not how starvation works. What are your thoughts on this narrative, as someone who’s sort of there, this idea that, because it’s gotten so bad and well, really the thing that’s changed is the frequency of really obscene and upsetting visuals? It’s become a PR problem, like you said. It’s fundamentally a PR problem to be managed, which, of course, is squarely in the wheelhouse of our podcast. Talk about this narrative, how you would respond to that, if you could have. Matt Yglesias said the same thing. He said, It’s now a problem. That doesn’t mean before it was a problem. They were still wrong before. How do you respond to that claim?
Moureen Kaki: I don’t even have words to tell you how absurd it is. It’s clearly just somebody who’s buying Israeli propaganda and not even bothering to listen to anybody that’s been on the ground, whether they’re emergency medical teams that come in, whether they’re aid workers of another kind, whether it’s the UN, who’s been talking about this for months, months, aid groups have said that this was false and that there’s been the threat of starvation ongoing. I mean, there was an analysis done by aid groups, both international and local, back in May, and we’re now reaching the sort of point where they suggested, in that analysis, that this is going to be stage-five starvation, which is something that you can’t come back from, even if food is let in. So the fact that this data has existed from international aid organizations is one thing, but there’s also just the actual footage that Palestinians themselves have been putting out since day one of this genocide.
When people get displaced, I don’t think people actually can fathom the circumstances that also lead to starvation. It’s not just Israel’s blockade and their intentional cutoff of everything that could possibly lead to any kind of relief. And by that, I mean, for example, what was it? Gosh, I want to say, like, a week ago, maybe more now, the Israelis sort of reiterated their warning that any fishermen or swimmers in the sea are basically subject to be murdered or arrested by virtue of the fact that they’re swimming and fishing in the sea. And the ocean is one of the few remaining sources of independent means the Palestinians can get food through after the Israelis have razed all the agricultural lands that are available in the strip, and now people have nothing.
And so this idea that this hasn’t been a problem that people have been warning about for months, starvation hasn’t hit Gaza a long time ago, is just completely false, right? And it’s just, what we’re seeing now, is just the frequency increasing because people were in different situations. Some people were displaced from their home 10 times, for example, and some people have been displaced from their home once and got to return to it. And so the people who have been displaced from their home 10 times have way less means, for example, and they’ve been starving for probably over a year.
And now it’s reached the point where everybody’s being affected, even internationals like myself, right, who have been here and don’t have outside resources to bring in means of food. And I don’t mean to center myself at all, but I’m telling you this to sort of illustrate the extent to which this has impacted the entirety of Gaza. And I can’t fathom that anybody who kind of repeats this bullshit. You have aid organizations, you have the UN, and you have literal journalists who are giving you the visuals of hungry people and what they’re doing. And then all of a sudden, guys from the outside, sitting from their pedestal of privilege, are then telling you, Oh, starvation doesn’t exist in Gaza. It’s like, yeah. You know, even before this genocide began, back in October 2023, Israelis still had a blockade on Gaza and didn’t permit certain types of jam to come in either. And poverty was a thing. So you can imagine that when you drop bombs on the place at an insane frequency and then raze the agricultural lands and then also implement a total blockade for five months that, yeah, of course, any idiot can fathom that this is going to lead to starvation. It doesn’t take data or science or analysis at that point.
Nima: Yeah. I mean, this really kind of connects to the idea that Palestinians and those who are in solidarity with Palestine or are literally working on the ground in Gaza or elsewhere, cannot be the narrators of their own story. It’s only when, say, Western journalists or Western pundits or Israeli officials finally say something that it can be, quote-unquote, “believed” as true. And I think that so much of this has also been exacerbated in the past year-and-a-half, since the deliberate attacks on organizations like UNRWA, militarizing humanitarian aid organizations and workers in order to continue a genocide, saying that UN workers are all part of Hamas, or that this agency is working hand-in-hand, or such and such, you know, knew about October 7 before it happened. All of these things kind of work in concert to make it possible to continue a genocide, to have doctors and aid workers, food aid workers, murdered by Israel. But hey, that’s all just part of this, quote-unquote, “war,” and you also can’t trust that these humanitarian aid workers were actually humanitarian aid workers.
So we’ve seen this narrative now play out for years and years and years, but much more deliberately in the past year-and-a-half with the attacks on UNRWA. What have you seen in your time there? Because you’ve been there basically over this time, in terms of how unsafe it is just to try and help people, how precarious it is to just try and survive, because of the kind of targets that have been painted on everyone’s back, from children to patients to the elderly to literally any kind of worker even trying to provide assistance.
Moureen Kaki: Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s crazy. Even the kitchen that I volunteer in in my off time, Shabab Gaza, their kitchen was hit by a drone strike a couple of weeks ago. And I can tell you, if you don’t believe Palestinians, for whatever my word might be worth, I can tell you that there’s nothing in that kitchen but pots and stoves and the workers that have been displaced, that have nowhere to stay, so they sleep in the kitchen, and there’s a little bit of pantry items. And the Israelis know that, right? Gaza is probably one of the most surveilled places on Earth, and Israelis are using some of the most advanced technology on Earth. So it’s not like that’s an accident, that they would drone-strike a community kitchen. And yeah, I mean, that risk is there.
But I want to go back to what you said, too, about Palestinians not being able to be believable narrators of their own lived experiences, right? You didn’t say it like that, but what you started with a second ago, it’s just kind of crazy, because everything that Palestinians say, that gets denied, eventually becomes proven true, and the West starts to believe it when there’s a source, right? So Palestinians were saying, for example, there are armed gangs being backed by the Israeli military that are stealing aid and selling it at exorbitant prices in the market. And then everybody’s like, No, that’s just fake news. That’s fake news. And then Israel comes out to admit it, and they’re like, Yeah, we’ve been giving military supplies and support to Yasser Abu Shabab and his gang, who are, in fact, thieves and have been profiting a lot of money on stolen aid.
The other thing about this bullshit claim that Hamas is stealing aid, right? And then an Israeli military official reported, you know, there’s actually no evidence of this. And then the USAID report also came out and said, yeah, There’s no credible evidence out of 100 and some incidents reported, there’s been not one report of Hamas stealing aid. And it’s like, yeah, well, the Palestinians told you that, but nobody believed them, until your Western sources came in. And even then, it’s not like the narrative that should be talked about the way it is. It’s just kind of like, Oops, we got this wrong. We’re not going to talk about it anymore.
Nima: Right. But it’s already been forgotten about, so there’s actually no accountability to be done, because also, all of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have been slaughtered in the meantime can’t come back to life, right? I mean, all of the kind of handwringing, and hey, Oh, yeah, I guess there’s no evidence of that, has no material effect on the ground, because the genocide has been able to continue due to not only all the literal bombs dropping, but also because of the cover that all the propaganda has provided.
Moureen Kaki: Yeah, exactly.
Adam: In media criticism, the ways in which our media acts poorly or with malicious intent, and racism, all that stuff, it can be kind of abstract. And this feels like an example of a direct line between when the New York Times runs these lurid front-page stories in January of 2024 talking about how Israel accuses Hamas of being, they don’t even say ‘accuses,’ they just said, you know, ’12 members of UNRWA were involved in October 7,’ and the Wall Street Journal reports 10% of UNRWA is Hamas. And then later on, people follow up and say, Well, did you ever see any proof of that? And there are standards editors saying, Oh no, as we discussed at the top of the show, but it’s like and now we’re seeing the outcome of that incitement campaign. We’ve been seeing it for, again, over a year now, but in terms of delegitimizing and making illegal UNRWA, which Israel did, defunding it, as the US did. And then, of course, when the UN does try to bring in aid, they’re bombed repeatedly, like they were back in June when they tried to bring in aid. And then Israel says, Oh, well, why is the UN not coming in? It’s like, well, because you haven’t given them clearance to do so, because you’ll fucking kill them.
And this is such a direct line between genocide incitement and the actual consequences of that, in terms of both funding and militarizing aid. And we saw this, of course, with hospitals, which we also talked about in terms of, you know, Hamas command and control center. Then they get in the hospital and there’s no, of course, there’s nothing there. So the stakes seem so significant and so urgent. So let’s be prescriptive here. If you’re, you have Americans listening to this, obviously people sort of feel like they can’t really do anything, aside from, you know, pushing one’s legislator to push for an actual ceasefire, which is to say, to compel Israel to agree to one, rather than this kind of vague handwaving. What can people do? What are organizations they can donate to, in your opinion? Obviously, there’s a bunch that are doing work, and it’s hard to sort of maybe say this one or that one. But what do you think, in terms of the most high-impact thing people can do to help right now in this current situation?
Moureen Kaki: Yeah, I mean, definitely give your money, do your research. I’m not going to be able to name all the organizations you can give money to. I would just suggest thoroughly doing your research on an organization. I’m going to boost Glia, because that’s who I work with, and I think it’s a phenomenal organization. And I’m not honestly just saying that because I work with them. We don’t work in food directly, but we have our polyclinic, which provides services in the middle area of Deir al-Balah, which is in an area that caters to about 10 to 15,000 people. And a polyclinic means that there are a variety of specialties available to people. We’ve got our polyclinic, we’ve got our EMT teams, but our polyclinic is also really important, I want to say, just because the blockade has, yes, meant no food, but it’s also meant no fuel for five months. So people trying to transport injured folks, and not even injured, like chronically ill loved ones, to the hospital or clinics to get treatment is pretty impossible now. The prices of fuel per liter are just insane, right? You’re talking about like $50 a liter, right? And you need at least 10 liters to make your trip to a place. So our polyclinic offers services to people in a very population-dense area where they otherwise wouldn’t have access to these particular services. So that’s particularly important.
Glia also just launched a new campaign to fundraise for more plasma exchange filters. This was a service that was absent from Gaza until a joint effort between previously alum and an ICU doctor at a specific hospital brought together some funding and logistics, and since then, almost a dozen patients have been treated, and one has already been weaned off in ventilator after severe paralysis from Guillain-Barré syndrome, which is becoming more frequent here in Gaza for a variety of reasons, including the lack of sanitation services available.
Nima: Now, before we let you go, though, and it’s been so amazing talking to you and really can’t say how much we appreciate you taking the time, we’d love to hear just about your journey from being a chef in your and Adam’s hometown of San Antonio, Texas, to now working on the ground in Gaza now for over a year.
Moureen Kaki: Yeah. Gosh, it’s a bit of a weird story. I used to work for a Palestinian American NGO back when I lived in Texas, and I opened Saha as a side thing. I used to be in the food business, and then the food business is not easy at all, so I started working for this NGO, and for fun, as a project that kind of is a reclamation of Palestinian food, but also, just because I love to do it, I started this pop-up called Saha. And Saha is kind of like salud in Spanish. You can say it when somebody sneezes, like a little kid sneezes, but it also means health. So they use it as a cheers kind of thing. So if somebody likes complimenting your food, you can say saha in return, which is like just a blessing and cheers to your health.
And then me and my boss in that NGO, we came on a trip to Gaza in March 2024 with Glia, there was going to potentially be some work between the two organizations. And so as the then-program and operations coordinator of this NGO that I used to work for, I came to Gaza, and honestly, I’d been everywhere else in Palestine, right? My family’s from the West Bank. I’ve traveled pretty extensively around the West Bank, and even what we call ’48 occupied Palestine, and Gaza was one place I couldn’t go to. And so it was weird to come to Gaza in the midst of this genocide. And it was, you know, not to romanticize it, but it was truly an honor to get to be here, because Gaza means so much to Palestine and has been the heart of the Palestinian resistance in so many ways, it was just the last place left in Palestine that I’d come to. So when I came in March 2024, I immediately fell in love with the people, how generous they were despite the circumstances they were in, how committed to Palestine they were, how committed they were to their lands and the way that they loved their community and their people, despite being put in an unfathomably difficult situation.
And I even thought to myself, you know, if I was in the US, how would Americans respond to this? I don’t think they would respond the same way as Gazans do, right? And that’s not a slight on individual Americans, by any means, but our culture is super individualistic in the US, and that’s not true in Gaza, right? A little kid can get lost in the chaos of a bombing, and somebody will take them in in their community, and they’ll find them really quickly, because that’s how close-knit this place was, even before the genocide, and remains. And I didn’t really want to leave, but I had to leave for work, and when I went back to the States, I was like, I just don’t want to be here. And I had the opportunity to come back with Glia after the Rafah border was closed, because I talked to our medical and development directors about potentially staying a long period of time, and they gave me that opportunity, and so I up and quit my job and told my mom, which was the scariest part, honestly, that I was coming to Gaza for a long period of time [laughs], and that was it. I came to Egypt, and about three-and-a-half weeks later I came in through Amman.
Nima: Well, Moureen, it has been so amazing speaking with you. And cannot thank you enough for joining us. We’ve been speaking with Moureen Kaki, who’s been coordinating medical and food aid on the ground in Gaza for more than a year. She is currently the head of mission at Glia, a medical solidarity organization, bringing doctors and providing open-source medical equipment to people in Gaza. She’s also been volunteering and cooking with the community kitchen Shabab Gaza, which serves thousands of meals a day to Palestinians. Previously, she opened Saha, a Palestinian food pop-up in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. Moureen has been joining us from Khan Younis in Gaza. Thank you so much again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Moureen Kaki: Thanks so much for all you guys are doing. Thanks for having me. It was really great.
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Adam: There’s a dynamic at work here that I think a lot of people intuitively find very troubling, which is these decisions that are made in these far-off, air-conditioned rooms, whether it’s supporting a, quote-unquote, “aid package” to Israel, sending bombs, making the bombs, designing the bombs, the Canary Mission doxing and ruining the lives of activists, again, all done in some air-conditioned room in New York or Los Angeles or Tel Aviv or Chicago, ADL, inciting libeling Gaza protesters. This New York Times editorial, some editor meeting where they decide to run the story without bothering to check if it’s true. There’s these decisions that are made by these college-educated, very sort of comfortable Westerners, Americans. And I say that knowing full well that I’m squarely in that demographic. It’s not like, you know, when you have a podcast, it’s not like I’m out toiling the mines, but that then therefore translate into mass starvation in some far-off country. And we saw this, we see this with sanctions to some degree, how you sort of casually just keep sanctioning countries. There’s been really good reporting on that lately in terms of the actual human consequences, malnutrition, stunted growth. And this is obviously a way more extreme version of that.
But the kind of casual nature of how these decisions are made, born out of chauvinism, unchecked chauvinism, entitlement, feelings of racial superiority, these kind of cheesy War on Terror epistemologies, you know. Oh, they were just ontologically evil, so fuck them. Whatever. And then you see, you talk to people who are physically on the business end of those decisions, these people who’ve done nothing, who have only known terror, have only known war, have only known suffering, have only known bombs, have only known starvation, and there’s no sense that there’s any accountability. There’s no, everything’s kind of muddied into this agency-free, responsibility-free world of a system. The system kind of churns out violence, and then everyone can kind of wash their hands. The New York Times can say, Well, technically, you know, we Israel said they had a dossier. We were just reporting what they’re saying. It’s like, Well, okay. Based on the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, perhaps you checked some box.
There’s never any context. There’s no connecting dots. There’s no moral logic to anything. And like you said earlier, everybody knows what they’re doing. The New York Times knows what they’re doing when they run these lurid headlines. They know the consequences that’s going to have. They know it’s going to directly kill people. And I think sometimes with bad media coverage, that line is not always clear, but in this instance, it was abundantly clear at the time what was going on. That’s why people wrote about it. That’s why I wrote about it. You didn’t have to be a fucking genius to figure out, connect the dots. That A was going to lead to B and B was going to lead to C, and C was going to be starving children.
Nima: Right. But if you’re capital-S Serious in the world of media, you can’t make those obvious connections.
Adam: If you’re capital-S Serious and you’re at an air-conditioned conference, and you go to Aspen festivals, yeah, and you know rich people, and, you know, you’re at the Council on Foreign Relations, and you go to the CSIS think-tank conference, and you’re sort of a Serious person.
Nima: Then you have to ask, you know, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli National Security Minister, what he says about this. And then, when he says, Yes, this is a deliberate strategy to starve Palestinians, you say, Well, that’s what he says, but, but it really just seems like this wasn’t planned for.
Adam: They’re Serious white people in Serious suits and Serious meetings. They go to conferences. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and AIPAC and Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And it’s all very kind of Serious and official and Western. And it doesn’t matter that at the end of what you’re doing, you create untold immiseration and dispossession and depopulation because you’re Serious, and what’s the most important thing in the world is to be Serious.
Nima: So that will do it for this episode, part I of our two-part series on “The Importance of Seriousness, or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide,” and we will get more into the second part of that title on next week’s episode, which will also be our season eight finale for Citations Needed. So stay tuned for that. We will be joined by guest Kaleem Hawa of the Palestinian Youth Movement. But until then, thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Our production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thank you all for listening. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, August 6, 2025.
