Christiane Amanpour (interviewer): Well, first I need to ask you, what do you think the Defense Minister’s declaration of an expanded annexation of parts of Gaza will mean for the people there?

Arwa Damon (former journalist and currently humanitarian activist): Well, you have to think about the population there that’s already crushed and now it’s just going to be crushed into an even smaller, more condensed space. And this is happening, whilst no aid has gotten in for nearly a month now, nothing. So right now, there are no functioning bakeries. The World Central Kitchen says it only has about two weeks of supply left. And when we look at what they and other community kitchens are actually being producing right now, and we deliver hot meals as well, it’s rice and basically canned vegetables. What’s on the market, pretty much non-existent, there is some local produce that you can buy and distribute. We’ve done that, but a fresh vegetable parcel costs about $60. Nobody can afford that. That’s going to run out as well.

Christiane Amanpour: And there’s people price-gouging, right? Merchants and things as they do in wars.

Arwa Damon: Exactly, which has been happening all along, but there’s also, there’s nothing on the market, so the prices don’t even out. They even out when aid comes in, but not at a time like this. And then there’s the trauma of all of it, that is especially being felt by the children, and we see this in our work all the time. There’s children who have started bedwetting, there’s children who have gone non-verbal, there’s children who have had their hope crushed to such a degree that they no longer have hope in themselves anymore, or in life, in these institutions that are meant to protect them.

Christiane Amanpour: So you and we’ll ask further, you’re for the moment, your organization, or you are blocked from getting in. Tanya Haj-Hassan, you have just come out after a long period in Gaza, ministering, perhaps not to the mental health and emotional health of children, but their physical health and the destruction there. But tell me what you’re seeing most recently in the hospital.

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan: Thanks, Christiane. I mean, nothing I tell you right now can fully encapsulate the abhorrent catalogs of atrocities that Israel has committed, even in the last 10 days I was in Gaza. If you just look at those last 10 days, in addition to Israel’s vicious break of the cease fire agreement, killing and maiming around 100 children per day in this last period according to UNICEF, and I bore witness to a lot of that children taking their last breaths, children maimed in our intensive care unit, children who have been orphaned, children who will never move parts of their body again or and in addition to that, in these last 10 days, Israeli military shelled, a UN team, killing and maiming members of it, bombed the ICRC, the Red Cross offices, directly hit Nasser hospital, the hospital where I was based. I was in the emergency department. They they shelled the floor directly above me, killing two patients and injuring others. They completely leveled the only specialty cancer specialty hospital in the Gaza Strip. And as you mentioned, they they frankly executed 15 rescue workers, nine paramedics, six civil defense service members and a UN worker and then buried them in a mass grave. I mean, the UN and others spent over a week trying to rescue these people and they had gone to Rafah to rescue others who had been injured. And I can tell you, we passed through Rafah in the UN convoy as we were leaving Gaza. And I remember seeing some people running, carrying a wounded person and thinking, we’re an entire convoy of people who could help this person. And we couldn’t stop because the Israeli forces would shoot at us too if we had stopped. And in addition to just those crimes I just mentioned, they killed multiple Palestinian journalists in these last 10 days at a time when international journalists are not let in and Palestinian journalists, like Palestinian paramedics, like Palestinian rescue workers, like my Palestinian health care worker colleagues have been very courageously and incessantly providing humanitarian services to their people at a time when they’re starving, when their families are in tense. Israel is exterminating Palestinians at an alarming rate. And honestly, Christiane, I want to ask you, what red line has not been crossed?

Christiane Amanpour: Well, that’s the question, frankly.

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan: I’d like you guys, anybody, to answer that question.
Christiane Amanpour: That is the question that we put out all the time when we’re having these conversations because the Israeli government is constantly saying and we understand that this ceasefire, which was meant to go into its second phase, which is the start of all of this. The Israeli government said, no, because they said the Hamas hadn’t released the hostage. So it’s this constant cycle of repetitive orders and case counter case. And my question to you then , Arwa, is now there’s 16 or 17 months of this carnage starting with the carnage in Israel on October 7th and the carnage that’s been reaped over Gaza for more than a year, nearly a year and a half. What exactly has it achieved because they still say they’re going after Hamas militants?

Arwa Damon: And this is what ends up begging the question of what then did you flatten all of Gaza for? And by what count are you unable to accomplish what it is that you need to accomplish? And also, Christiane, remember the Arab League put forward a proposal, a roadmap for Gaza recently that actually addresses all of Israel’s concerns, including removing Hamas from both military power and political power. But that was rejected. Arab states have even offered to take on the whole reconstruction effort when it comes to Gaza. That’s part of this whole package. Exactly. And the thing is is what we are seeing right now and again, like you know Dr. Tanya is saying, you can’t describe Gaza. And what I’m hearing right now from our team on the ground there is that this is worse than anything that they have ever been through because operating in the space is impossible. What you need is impossible. And it’s not just the targeting of locations that were de-conflicted or just the sort of an inability to navigate a pattern to the bombing, right? I was talking to a doctor who’s like, I’m afraid to leave my house because before, yes, it wasn’t really a pattern, but you could kind of sort of predict what hours would be safe enough to make a run for it to the hospital. You can’t predict that anymore. Plus, you know, I should have been in Gaza. I was denied entry after having already been in Gaza for a time.

Christiane Amanpour: Why is that? Because this is important.

Arwa Damon: I don’t know. I have been messaging Cogat repeatedly.

Christiane Amanpour: That’s the Israeli organization.

Arwa Damon: … Coordination body. Yes, That coordinates everything. Repeatedly, trying to get an answer to say, what concerns do you have? What can I address? What can I do to alleviate your concerns? And I get zero response whatsoever. And it’s not just me. Dozens and dozens…

Christiane Amanpour: But we know. There’s no aid getting through. And Tania, Dr. Haj-Hassan, what does this mean in actual terms of what you need to, let’s just say, operate with? Because what we hear is that there’s tons of stuff waiting on the borders to get in, whether it’s to eat, whether it’s medical supplies, equipment. I mean, do you have oxygen? Do you have medicine?

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan: Christiane, I’ll just give you the example of my own specialty. So I’m a pediatric intensive care doctor. Every single hospital providing pediatric and neonatal, so newborn and children, intensive care in Gaza City, in the north of Gaza has been destroyed or put out of service by the Israeli military. So instead, the organization I work for set up a small pediatric ICU, neonatal ICU, in a small non-governmental hospital in Gaza City. There aren’t enough ventilators. There are 20 UNICEF ventilators waiting at the border to enter Gaza and are obstructed by Israel. There are several…

Christiane Amanpour: When you ask why, what is the answer?

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan: But, Christiane, this is before the full blockade earlier in March. This is even before, not a single oxygen generator has been allowed by Israel into the Gaza Strip for the last year and a half, despite them destroying the majority of the oxygen generators in Gaza. So same goes for the hospitals. I’m telling you they’ve destroyed most of the hospitals in Gaza, but they won’t let in the construction equipment required to rebuild them. So this is, I guess, from a sort of gross infrastructure and equipment standpoint. Then you have all the chemicals…
Christiane Amanpour: Tanya, Can I ask you, I want to ask you something? Were you there while the ceasefire, the first part of the ceasefire was in effect? [Tanya nods] So what did you see? I’m really fascinated to know there was a flood of aid, right? And people were trying to go back to even their bombed out… What was the atmosphere? What was the ability of people to try to, try to live during those few weeks of ceasefire?

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan: Christiane, it was selective aid. All the things I just mentioned were still prohibited during that period. Chocolates were getting in, soap, which had been prohibited from entering for a while, was getting in. People got shampoo and soap and chocolates and things that allowed them to breathe. Yes, it is relative respite when you think about what they were going through earlier. And the evidence of which was our malnutrition unit in the hospital where we had children with severe acute malnutrition, both protein deficiency malnutrition and general caloric malnutrition as a consequence of the full blockade up until that point. So it was great that we were getting in food. People were able to eat varied sources of protein and a varied source of sources of vitamins, which is very important for their health after being starved for a year and a half. But at the same time, things that are necessary to rebuild their lives were being obstructed from entering the Gaza Strip. But people were breathing, Christiane. And you could see it, there was this sense of hope that they could go back to their homes, that they could rebuild. You saw health care workers setting up clinics and reopening hospitals or even tents on the rubble of where the hospital was to provide services. And that night, on March 18th, when Israel viciously broke the ceasefire and just to be clear, that they had been breaking the ceasefire all along. We were receiving casualties even during that period. It was just relatively fewer. We received patients with gunshot wounds. We received patients from Missile Strikes. We were receiving fewer war related casualties, but we were still receiving them. But on March 18th, that early morning, when I say terror shook Gaza, I don’t know how else to describe it. Christiane, I want to share this with your audience, even though it’s embarrassing to myself. But I think it helps people understand the level of terror that is being inflicted on Palestinian people by the state of Israel. The entire strip shook [of] that roaring sound. And I’ve been in war zones before, I was in Gaza last year when there wasn’t a ceasefire. I awoke from sleep and I started shivering and my teeth rattled, the way your teeth rattle when you’re cold. It’s never happened to me before. It was a visceral reaction to being awoken from sleep with pure terror. And it took me about 20 minutes, even after I rationalized what was happening, put my scrubs on, was getting ready to run down to the ER, expecting the wave of casualties that was going to come in with this. It took me about 20 minutes to calm down. And now I understand why all of these children come into the emergency department shivering. Last year, part of me thought it was, that they were cold. Now it’s, it’s terror, Christiane. It’s terror being inflicted on a people who have been on the receiving end of some of the worst atrocities of our lifetimes. And honestly, it’s going to be a shame that we’re going to have to reckon with, as history has written day after day and both, countries like the United States, and media agencies that are manufacturing consent for this, using, you know, misleading language, hiding certain narratives, discrediting the few journalists that are actually covering these atrocities. We’re going to have to reckon with this.

Christiane Amanpour: It’s going to be a huge reckoning throughout this whole, this whole tragedy that’s been going on, not just for these last 16 months, but for decades and decades, both sides suffering so unbelievably much. I just want to ask you really, a very devil’s advocate question, Arwa, from what we’ve just heard from Tanya, from the obvious visuals of the almost uninhabitable Gaza. I mean, I remember seeing these amazing pictures during the ceasefire where families were breaking Ramadan, you know, iftar in the rubble and they were looking like they were happy to be together, but you could tell it was almost uninhabitable. What do you, and clearly this press and the pressure to squeeze the number of… the amount of territory? Do you think inevitably they’re moving towards trying to move the Palestinians, like President Trump says? Move them out?

Arwa Damon: I think and a lot of Gazans believe that that is the end objective, because one – Israel has already declared that that is its objective on numerous different occasions, you know, senior officials have come out and said, you know, we are going to take Gaza. And for Palestinians who are there living through it, I mean, they can’t describe this as anything other than their own annihilation. And the sense of abandonment, they are fully cognizant of the fact that nothing is going to stop this and nothing will stop it.

Christiane Amanpour: And Tanya, just lastly to you, you’re obviously treating the Palestinians, but there are still Israeli hostages, individuals whose families are still protesting in Israel against this stepped-up war and who want their family members back. I mean, what do you think is happening to them right now? I know I’m asking you to guess, but this is just such a kind of a, I mean, they’re in this small enclave.

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan: Correct, Christiane. And I mean, if you just look at the last year and a half, when are hostages released alive? They’re released when there are negotiations, when the negotiations are respected, not when there’s bombardment. The hostages… given the intensity, the indiscriminate nature, and the sort of… across the strip, of violence and vicious bombing that happens when Israel strikes, the enclave. I mean, their biggest risk to death is the Israeli military. And I think a lot of people recognize that. And we know that… we know that the only way essentially to get anybody out of this alive is for Israel to respect the ceasefire.

Christiane Amanpour: We need to, yeah, we need to get a government official on to talk about this, it’s really hard. But anyway, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, thank you so much for your testimony. Arwa, as always, thank you very much. And good luck with this humanitarian effort trying to get back in.