You mean as individuals or as newsrooms?

Both.

Both, because, you know, there's, there's a bit of a, a tendency to want to assign blame and responsibility.

And up to a certain degree, I mean, yes, of course, but I always look at things, and I always argue that there is always a burden of responsibility on me.

Like, me as Arwa, you know, me as, you know, when I was working for CNN, me as, you know, the CNN correspondent.

I don't believe that we should move through the world assigning blame to everyone else for everything else without asking ourselves, "What can I do?" And this goes back to the whole conversation of, you know, well, these problems are so big, and, you know, there's nothing that I can do about it, and, you know, what difference is it gonna make? To which I will actually argue, that is what warring belligerent parties want you to believe.

Mm

... very dangerous, because then everyone else is less than.

This is about a people, isn't it? I mean, this is about a future.

And to that effect, you know, look, Inada does a lot of work in the mental health space with children.

And on one of my trips to Gaza, a mother had realized that we do this.

And she came up to me and she grabbed my arm and she was like, I don't know what to do with my little boy.

He was five or six years old.

And every night she said he just grabs his hair and pulls at it and screams and rocks back and forth.

And he's been like this since he saw his sister's head pop off.

And respiration.

Right.

It sets a standard, a very low standard, and what does that then mean? What sort of impunity do we start seeing because the US is speaking in this manner, because the US is doing all of this? And we already live in a world of such egregious impunity that truly is for anyone who cares about, you know, the state of affairs around us, a grave moral injury to anyone who's watching it who has a semblance of a moral compass.

We have regularly, for the last three years, been seeing war crime after war crime being committed, both by non-state actors, but more importantly by state actors who are meant to uphold certain standards.

We've seen it with the Israelis in Gaza.

We've seen it with them in Lebanon.

We've seen it, you know, with the Russians in Ukraine.

We're seeing it now with the Americans in Iran.

Mm.

Uh, and also, who's coming in? Can you talk about the workers for Inara, your organization, Arwa?

Look, uh, first of all, no one inside Gaza is calling this a ceasefire, not even the children.

We support a number of makeshift educational tents, and the kids, and in this case, it was a group of, uh, girls, seventh graders, they were talking to our team about how difficult it was just to get to the tent, how, you know, it shuts down when the rains are too intense because the tent floods.

They don't have anything to really sit on, so they're on the cold ground, and it's really a struggle for them.

And so our program coordinator, Yusta, was asking them, "Why do you bother to come to school?" And they said, "Because when the war is over, that's when we will make our dreams come true." And this launched a conversation about what their perspective was right now, and they were talking about how for them, the war hasn't ended, and that they still go around every single day with that fear that they could be bombed, that they're still struggling to get sufficient, you know, nutrition.

And so when we talk about the Rafah border, you know, partially reopening, in theory, we were supposed to be seeing 50 patients off of a medical evacuation list that is close to 20,000 being permitted to leave every single day, along with two relatives.

What we saw in total, as you just mentioned there, for the entirety of the first week, was just 37 patients leaving.

If you could explain, uh, what the sanitation, uh, system is like and the problems that it's producing.

People can't go into Gaza, so what I want to know from you is, four months after the ceasefire, what is the condition for the children of Gaza? W- w- you know, have their lives improved?

It's extraordinarily difficult, Fareed, and I'm in constant contact with our INARA team members on the ground there, and I actually just spoke to our program coordinator, Yusta, a few hours ago.

And I was asking her how she was able to, you know, basically feed and support her own two little boys, and she was saying that it's still quite hellish.

Even someone like her, who has a stable income, struggles to be able to provide her own kids with sufficient nutrition.

You know, you go out onto the market, and you can find plenty of soda and chocolate and candy, but you'll struggle to find a proper source of protein, and for the vast majority of the population, they can't afford the frozen chicken or meat when it actually does show up on the market.

We're not really seeing the expected or even close to the expected flow of humanitarian assistance into the strip, whether it's food items or, more crucially at this stage, shelter items, given the rains and the horrific flooding that was happening, keeping in mind that when we talk about flooding in Gaza, we're not just talking about rainwater flooding, we're talking about sewage.

Sewage is mixed in with that rain water because the sewage system in Gaza is broken.

the floods are obviously making, you know, destroying them.

Describe, um, what is happening right now in Gaza.

You know, it- it's- it- it continues to be indescribable, to be frank.

We do have these airdrops that are taking place.

We do have what is being described as a trickle of trucks going in, but nothing, nothing is happening to actually genuinely stave off the starvation that we're seeing across the Gaza Strip.

These airdrops, what we saw of them, for example, in the first 48 hours since Israel allowed them to begin, barely amount to a couple of trucks.

What is managing to get into Gaza that is being collected by humanitarian organizations quite often does not make it to the warehouse, because organizations are either having to confront armed gangs, and I'll note here that these armed gangs operate in what's known in- as the red zone, which means that these are areas that are fully under Israeli control, and yet somehow these armed gangs continue to have the capacity to operate there, or the trucks are quite simply swarmed by masses of starving and desperate Gazans.

The situation is beyond atrocious.

Uh, Arwa Damon, can you respond?

Hey.

... who are lugging, you know, gallons of- of water that are heavier than they are.

There's this one horrible scene of a father who's trying to push, you know, his son in- in a wheelchair, and he just completely collapses from exhaustion.

You have the elderly that are trying to crawl along because they don't have any other means of- of transportation.

And it is so hard to comprehend how people are actually surviving, and there's one thing, Fareed, that I really wish everybody could see and understand, is the level of kindness and compassion and humanity that still exists among so many.

It blows my mind.

Because, you know, we work in the same shelters, um, over and over again, so the- the people there, they kind of...

Wh- what's your sense?