Israel And Hamas After Six Months

at passersby in the streets of southern Israel.

Bloodshed continues now, six months later.

I'm Ayesha Roscoe.

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rule.

If they gain more power, it could mean fewer rights for you.

I'm Heath Druzin, and on the new season of Extremely American, I'll take you inside

the movement.

Estrin was already reporting on a historic and shocking attack.

going, and it's just astonishing scenes.

Both Israelis and Palestinians I've been speaking with have been shocked by what has

been happening.

in southern Israel put the numbers at as many as 70 Israelis and 200 Palestinians.

Those awful statistics would rise.

history, and it goes on.

We're joined now by some of our correspondents who've been covering that war.

Of course, Daniel Estrin is in Israel.

Daniel, thank you for being with us.

Jane, thank you for being with us.

Thanks for being with us, Greg.

Hi, Scott.

Let me turn to Daniel Estrin first in Tel Aviv.

Daniel, how has the past half year changed Israel?

still talk about that day.

1,200 dead by the Israeli government's count.

And Israelis speak about it also as a second Holocaust because of the atrocities committed.

Israelis hiding at home in their closets, burned alive, shot and killed in a field at

a music festival, corpses decapitated, mutilated, hostages captured.

The United Nations has documented these details in a report.

And that brutality really has tapped into Israelis' trauma going back to the Holocaust.

And it, I think, explains how Israelis have responded since.

We've seen hundreds of armed civilian squads formed inside Israel.

And Israelis' hearts have been hardened as soldiers have invaded Gaza, have reported

on finding weapons in homes and schools in Gaza.

And you hear a common phrase in Israel, there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza.

Israelis are not seeing the horrors of the war that Palestinians are experiencing as

they watch the Israeli news.

More Palestinians have been killed in this conflict than in any other in their history,

33,000 and more.

According to Gaza health officials, mostly believed to be civilians.

There is no escaping this war for Gazans unless you have lots of money or connections.

The UN projects imminent famine.

Most homes, roads, water systems, health facilities, ancient historical landmarks have all been

decimated, damaged, destroyed.

And Palestinian public opinion poll recently found wide support still for the October 7th

attack, seeing it as a triumph of resistance to Israeli oppression.

But very few Palestinians have seen videos of what happened to Israelis that day.

And I think you can see this as two societies where each sees themselves as the victims

and the other as the aggressors.

hasn't it?

You know, on October 7th, we saw widespread public support here for Israel.

Within two weeks, President Biden was flying to Israel and he was greeting Prime Minister

Benjamin Netanyahu on the airport tarmac with a big embrace.

But as Israel has waged this aggressive air and ground campaign that Daniel just described,

we've really seen unprecedented criticism of Israel.

It's coming from some Democratic members of Congress, on college campuses, among the

broader U.S. public.

And in the early days of the war, Biden proposed $14 billion in additional military assistance

to Israel, and that's still on the table.

But over the past six months, Biden has gone from totally supportive of Israel to mildly

critical about its military operations.

And then on Thursday, we saw his sharpest criticism yet.

It came in a phone call with Netanyahu.

He told the Israeli leader he must urgently do more to protect Palestinian civilians and

allow in more humanitarian aid.

Biden warned that if Israel doesn't change the way it wages the war, the U.S. will change

its approach.

Now, we should stress the U.S. hasn't changed policy at this point.

It's still backing Israel overall.

But if you go back to October 7th, this is certainly not what we expected to be hearing

from President Biden.

What's the effect been throughout the wider Middle East?

first time in decades, the Palestinian issue being the lack of a Palestinian homeland and

six million Palestinian refugees, 76 years after Israel was created and they fled or

were forced from their homes.

In the past few years, that normalization spearheaded by the United Arab Emirates with

Israel has papered over what countries like Jordan say over and over is instability that

will last as long as the Palestinian issue isn't addressed.

And in Jordan, which we have to remember is one of only two Arab countries with a peace

treaty with Israel, the longer this goes on, the more civilians killed, the more tension

rises.

That was a protest last week near the Israeli embassy in Amman, now almost nightly.

And something else I've noticed is the death toll climbs, more anger against the U.S. because

of its arming of Israel.

Here in Beirut, the focus is on the Lebanese border where Israel has been fighting the

Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.

The fear is that after the presumed Israeli attack on an Iranian embassy compound in Damascus

this week, an escalation in fighting here could spark a wider war.

Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, a short while ago told his followers they can be sure

that Iran will avenge the deaths, but they shouldn't be in a hurry to see it.

of this war in the Middle East.

A top priority since day one is that this war does not spread to other parts of the

Middle East, and it's taken several steps to try to prevent that.

Initially, this meant putting an aircraft carrier in the Eastern Mediterranean as a

show of force and deterrence.

Now, despite this, U.S. military bases in Syria and Iraq came under fire from various

militia groups.

The U.S. struck back, and these attacks have largely subsided for now.

The U.S. Navy is also in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen.

It's trying to stop the Houthis from firing missiles at commercial ships.

These attacks are ongoing, though at a lower level.

And the U.S.'s Iran is stirring the pot, supporting these groups.

But so far, the wider region has not boiled over, though it remains very tense, as Jane

explained.

with the killing of a team of aid workers with the World Central Kitchen in Gaza, including

an American.

Jane Araf, what are some of the repercussions we can see?

on Israel.

Israel has now agreed to U.S. demands that it open up a third border crossing and allow

more trucks through the existing crossings.

The reason that World Central Kitchen was delivering food by sea, and the reason for

the airdrops of aid, which are just a fraction of what could be sent by road, and the reason

for U.S. plans to build a pier, are Israeli restrictions on aid going by land into Gaza.

Israel cites security concerns.

But children are dying of starvation, according to the U.N.

Half the aid is getting into Gaza than it was before the war, and people need it much

more now, with so much of the infrastructure destroyed.

Jane Araf, let me begin with you.

How is this war different from what we've seen in the past?

chair in the courtyard of his damaged home, surrounded by shattered glass as he looked

out across the border.

And for decades, people in countries around here have expected everything they build to

come crashing down because of the region's instability.

This is the first time that I've heard hope that there could be a Palestinian homeland

emerging from this somehow.

It's also unprecedented, Scott, in terms of media coverage, because Israeli restrictions

have made it almost impossible to cover the war on the ground.

You know, I and many other journalists covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the major battles

afterwards on the ground.

The only way to see what's happening, we're barred by Israel from seeing what's happening

in Gaza.

A couple months ago, there was an Israeli commando raid that rescued two Israeli hostages

in Gaza.

And the Israeli military unleashed bombings to provide cover for their commandos and killed

many Palestinians.

And I was driving in Tel Aviv as our producer in Gaza sent over some sound that he recorded

of a mother wailing over her child who was killed.

And while I was driving, I saw an Israeli driving on his motorcycle with a bumper sticker

on it that said, Go IDF, Go Israeli Army.

And I think that just encapsulates the two worlds that Israelis and Palestinians live

in now.

And it was very bloody, Palestinian suicide bombings, Israeli airstrikes.

But it simply wasn't on the scale of what we're seeing today.

I mean, there's this clear need to stop the killing and ease the human suffering.

But it's also important to think about what comes next.

I mean, if there's a ceasefire, but Hamas remains in power, it continues to hold Israelis

hostage and poses an ongoing threat to Israel, that's not going to be acceptable to Israel.

And from the Palestinian perspective, as Israeli troops remain in Gaza, if there's no plan

to rebuild the devastated territory and no political horizon for Palestinian statehood,

that's not going to be acceptable to the Palestinians.

You want to end this war as soon as possible, but you don't want to leave in place conditions

that could lead to another conflict a few years down the road.

and NPR's Jane Aref in Beirut, thank you all for your fine work and for being with us today.

I'm Aisha Roscoe.

Ed McNulty and James Heider edited.

We had engineering support from Patrick Murray.

Sarah Lucy Oliver is our Executive Producer.

Jim Cain is our Deputy Managing Editor.

slash MidEastUpdates.

You can hear voices from Gaza and Israel, the wider region, and from here at home.

Again, that's npr.org slash MidEastUpdates.

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