Israel Killing EVEN MORE Palestinians During War With Iran | Bethlehem U Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh

## Fractures of a Wider War: Gaza, Iran, and a Strategy of Diversion The conversation with Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh cuts through the immediate headlines to expose a strategic logic: military escalation beyond Gaza serves not only territorial aims but also political cover. As strikes between Israel and Iran intensify, the Gaza catastrophe is not a separate tragedy; it is being reframed, eclipsed, and instrumentalized. The result, as voiced repeatedly in the exchange, is a lethal choreography in which violence abroad and repression at home feed one another—allowing policies that amount to ethnic cleansing and famine to proceed with diminished global scrutiny. Understanding the conflict therefore requires seeing Gaza not as an isolated humanitarian emergency but as a focal point of a broader imperial posture that depends on distraction, impunity, and the complicity of powerful states. ## Gaza as Extermination: The Mechanics of Starvation and Destruction One of the starkest assertions in the discussion is the claim that Gaza is being treated as an "extermination camp" through a deliberate policy of starvation and attrition. Whether one adopts that specific term or frames the reality in other legal or moral language, the evidence of systematic deprivation is painfully clear: mass displacement, widespread destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure, and deliberate cuts to food and medical supplies. The conversation highlights how military language—declaring areas "military zones," forbidding rescue and recovery, and targeting civilians queuing for food—translates into deaths that are not incidental but central to the operation. Beyond the immediate human toll, the assault has ecological and institutional dimensions. The destruction of tree cover, schools, universities, hospitals, and journalists is not collateral damage in a punishment campaign; it is a comprehensive attempt to erase livelihoods, knowledge, and truth. The result is multi-layered famine: not only hunger for calories but hunger for education, health, and the documentary record needed to challenge impunity. ## Veriticide and the Targeting of Journalists A critical strand of the conversation focused on the calculated suppression of independent reporting. The killing of journalists—and the crippling of communication infrastructure—functions as a form of veriticide, the deliberate destruction of the capacity to know and be known. When reporters are silenced, when images of rubble and suffering cannot circulate freely, the dominant narrative gains oxygen. That is precisely why attacks on journalists cannot be treated as a footnote: they are a tactic for shaping the battlefield of global opinion. The implications are immediate and long-term. In the short term, the absence of independent witnesses allows for competing claims—by state actors and proxies—to go unchallenged. In the long term, the erasure of archival memory undermines accountability mechanisms. If entire cohorts of witnesses and recorders are made to disappear, then prosecutions, historical reckoning, and reparative processes are all weakened. The conversation makes clear that destroying journalists is therefore an attack on the future as much as on the present. ## Colonial Continuities: Western Complicity and the Language of Dehumanization The exchange places the current crisis within a longer narrative of colonialism and racialized violence. Professor Qumsiyeh’s commentary traces direct lines from European imperial practices—genocides, slave economies, and land theft—to contemporary policies of dispossession and dehumanization. These are not accidental parallels but structural continuities: a worldview that permits the classification of certain populations as expendable or subhuman is the same worldview that rationalizes mass violence. This perspective reframes interventions by Western states and leaders not as neutral peacekeeping or moral clarity but as performances that reproduce hierarchies of value. When influential governments or officials rhetorically endorse military actions against states they portray as “terrorist,” or when they tacitly greenlight operations that cause mass civilian harm, they are participating in a long-standing geopolitical economy that privileges imperial power over human life. The conversation insists that accountability cannot be limited to local actors; it must include those who enable, arm, fund, and provide political cover for such campaigns. ## The Siege of Information: Access, Networks, and the Battle Over Narrative The conversation underscores how information itself has become a contested resource. Communications blackouts, intermittent internet service, and the targeting of broadcasters create an information siege that mirrors the physical siege. Even where phones still ring, social media and journalistic platforms are intermittently suppressed, leaving families in limbo and human rights monitors hamstrung. This degradation of the information environment does two things at once: it heightens the immediate danger to civilians who cannot summon help or coordinate, and it hampers the global community’s ability to form an accurate, timely, and mobilizing picture of the crisis. The strategic objective is clear: control the narrative by controlling the networks that produce it. But the conversation also points to the resilience of local reporters and networks, and to the international solidarity networks that persist—even when obstructed. That resilience matters for humanitarian relief, legal evidence, and historical memory, but it is relentlessly undercut when the institutions that validate and disseminate their work are themselves targeted. ## Survival, Memory, and the Psychology of Endurance One of the most human and unsettling themes of the discussion is the day-to-day reality of living under eliminationist policy. The psychological costs—insomnia, grief, numbness, and a painful calculus about survival—are as consequential as the physical ones. The conversation draws on historical analogies—Congo, Indigenous dispossession, forced marches—to show that survival strategies vary widely: some organize, some flee, some fracture. None are facile. The emotional landscape is mixed with courage and exhaustion, with acts of small defiance threaded alongside the inescapable tasks of mourning and memory. This dimension demands that analysis not flatten victims into statistics. The survival of communities depends on social bonds, local institutions, and narratives of resilience that refuse total annihilation. The insistence in the conversation that people continue to speak, teach, and make culture—even from a besieged Bethlehem—signals that survival is not merely a biological fact but a political stance. To endure is to refuse the annihilating logic of the assailant; to narrate is to contest impunity. ## Regional Escalation and the Question of Strategic Outcomes Finally, the regional dimension—missiles, defenses, and the specter of a wider war—alters but does not erase the immediate moral calculus. The exchange argues that strikes on Iran and counterstrikes are not external to the Palestinian plight; they are integrated into a broader imperial strategy that relies on distraction and escalation to secure domestic acquiescence and international latitude. At the same time, regional resistance complicates the political map in ways that can produce both peril and potential leverage for Palestinians. Most Palestinians, as the conversation notes, are likely to support any actor that challenges the hegemony facilitating their dispossession. That is not an endorsement of violence per se; it is a rational response to a situation in which other avenues of rights and justice have been foreclosed. Yet the danger is stark: escalation can harden the conditions for further repression at home and can give powerful allies yet more rationale to intervene on the side of the status quo. The strategic impli

Israel Killing EVEN MORE Palestinians During Iran War Today (18.6.2025) I’m talking to Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, the Director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History at Bethlehem University. Dr. Yumsiyeh got a PhD from Connecticut University and then taught for many years in the US, including Tennessee Duke and Yale University. He returned to Palestine in 2008 where he is also right now. Links: Mazin Qumsiyeh's personal website: http://qumsiyeh.org/ Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) (mentioned in the video): https://www.palestinenature.org/ Timestamps: 00:00 Preview 00:42 Intro 01:12 What's the situation in Gaza right now? 05:08 How do you view Israel's attack on Iran? 11:06 How are you receiving the news from Gaza in West Bank? 17:13 Thoughts on Israel killing people in food distribution centers 18:57 How do you deal with the situation, mentally? 23:07 Is Iran and Israel's war a source of despair? Or hope? 29:35 “We shall overcome this someday.” 32:06 Outro #M3 They are the people of the land. They are its indigenous inhabitants, regardless of the hegemony and the power structures that have tried to obliterate us, obliterate them. They are still the people of the land. We are still the people of the land. I'm speaking to you from Bethlehem. And if I die here, I die here. If they bomb me here and I die, I die. If they don't bomb me, I will continue to speak like I'm doing now. This is the reality of what people need to be doing. #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, the director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History at Bethlehem University. Dr. Qumsiyeh got a PhD from the University of Connecticut and then taught for many years in the US, including at the University of Tennessee, Duke, and Yale. He returned to Palestine in 2008, where he is also right now in Bethlehem. Dr. Qumsiyeh, welcome. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to see you too. And you just told me horrible news—that another 100, over 120 people, Palestinians, were killed in Gaza. Can you tell us what is going on right now and how you are experiencing everything that's happening, sitting right in the West Bank in Bethlehem? #M3 Well, as you know, this is day six of an attack on Iran, which is being used by Israel also to basically divert international attention from the genocide they are committing in Gaza and the fact that cases are being brought against them in international criminal courts and the International Court of Justice, accusing them of genocide—and they are committing genocide. But to divert attention from -- 1 of 9 -- that and to expand their empire, they're attacking Iran. So what they did in the past six days is accelerate their genocide in the Gaza Strip and their continuing ethnic cleansing and killings in the West Bank, where I am. I'm speaking to you from Bethlehem, which is the birthplace of Jesus, and is basically a ghetto surrounded by walls and fences. And now the gates are all closed. Basically, we're trapped here. Supplies are also diminishing, so we may end up here being like Gaza. But also, like Gaza, not just in terms of the food shortage or starvation, but we may end up like Gaza in terms of being an extermination camp. Actually, even this morning, they killed a young man that I know here in the Al-Walaja area, and there are killings in other parts of the West Bank. The West Bank is divided into cantons, ghettos, and that's present in only 15% of the land of Bethlehem and the land of the West Bank. The rest of the West Bank is basically for the colonial settlers and soldiers to do whatever they want in those areas, including building settlements, expanding colonial activities, military training sites, etc. So the situation on the ground here in Palestine is something we have not seen really since the Second World War. There has never been such a situation. In fact, even in the Second World War, for example, the Germans and the Allies never surrounded a town or a community and starved it to death, even during the worst of the horrors of the Second World War. So this is happening as we speak. Some two million Palestinians in Gaza are in an extermination campaign—an extermination camp, basically. They are being starved to death and killed regularly, daily. This is a horror that we are facing locally. And literally, Israel is getting away with murder and impunity because it is not acting on its own. It's acting with the support of great powers like the United States, like England, like France. #M2 The German chancellor, just less than 24 hours ago, said that the West needs to thank Israel for having had the courage to attack Iran and do the dirty work because Iran is a terrorist state that terrorizes everybody, and that this is something to be welcomed. For you, sitting in Palestine, how does it sound when someone calls Iran a terror state? And how are you making sense of the counteraction that Iran is now taking against Israel? #M3 Well, let's be very clear. I mean, there have been a lot of genocides in human history in the past. For hundreds of years, there have been genocides, mostly committed by European colonizers— Germany, for example, in Namibia committed a genocide, and certainly committed genocides during the Second World War against Roma, Jews, and others. These countries, these so-called Western countries like the United States, are built on genocide. They're built on pillaging other countries, the indigenous people of other countries, and they're built on the dehumanization of people in the Global South, or in the case of North and South America. -- 2 of 9 -- Dehumanizing these people, regardless of who they are, is part and parcel of the colonial mentality. In many ways, the psychology of this explains why Germany, the US, and Britain, for example—as governments—support ethnic cleansing, support genocide, support colonization, and support the dehumanization of people like Iranians, Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, Yemenis, and, of course, South Africans at the time of apartheid. Because they are, quote-unquote, not white. They are not like us in the "civilized" Western world that is supposedly bringing civilization to these "savages," these "terrorists." This is the language of colonization that they are used to, and they have not changed much since the last few wars they engaged in. We have to remember how many people were killed by Europeans during their colonization just in the past 200 years alone. You know, be it Germany or France or Britain—I mean, Germany did a lot of damage, but it's not the same as the United States. Actually, the United States killed more innocent civilians in the past 200 years since they were founded, or something like 200 years, than any other country, and even a combination of countries. They killed millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia, in Africa, in Latin America, in many, many places. This is who they are. This is who the system they created is—the system that doesn't yet acknowledge its own killing of the Indigenous people on whose bones they are walking every day. They have built cities called Washington, New York, San Francisco, or whatever. They have built these cities literally on the bones of Indigenous people and on the bones of slaves that they brought from Africa—tens of millions of slaves who perished along the way from Africa. Germany, basically—if I take this German chancellor, what is he going to say other than that? It's totally expected that he would say such a thing, because that's how he was raised, with a colonialist mentality. Hasn't changed since the Second World War, when they spoke in denigrating ways about other people, when they had racial laws, for example. They haven't changed. They have not changed. They have not learned their lessons. They have not improved. One time, somebody asked Mahatma Gandhi, "What do you think of Western civilization?" And he answered, "I think it would be a good idea." So I think this is the reality that we have to face as people in the Global South, I would say— whether Iranians or Palestinians, or even common people in America and Europe and England who care about human rights. We have to realize that that's what we are facing. #M2 It's absolutely devastating because of the horrendous impact, of course, on innocent people on a daily basis, and also the fact that this is happening—that the genocide is going on—and that you are only kilometers away from this extermination camp, facing the prospect of being the next part of what's being exterminated. In the West Bank, in Bethlehem, how are you receiving news from Gaza? And is there any kind of interaction possible with family members over there, Palestinians over there? Or is it hermetically—also information space-wise—sealed? -- 3 of 9 -- #M3 Well, the phone lines are still there. The mobile network is still working. The internet was cut off for a while, then it was back, and now it's being cut off again. So it's hard to use things like WhatsApp or Signal or things like that. But phones are still working, and I have some friends of mine in Gaza. I check on them every day or every other day to see how they are doing. The situation is horrific. I mean, one of my friends—actually, they bombed his house. Both his parents and his siblings were killed and are still under the rubble. Israel declared that area a military zone, a dangerous zone, so they cannot even go to check if they can remove them from the rubble of their house. This is the reality that is faced. There is some reporting being done by local reporters, but Israel has killed 227—I believe the number now is 227—reporters in Gaza. That's more reporters, more journalists, than were killed in all the wars prior to this over the past 100 years collectively, including the Second World War, Vietnam War, Korea, Cambodia, all these conflicts. If you add up the number of journalists killed in all these previous wars, Israel has killed more journalists, and that's of course intended to destroy the truth. Look, Israel is engaged in not only a genocide of the local people, they're engaged in basically a system of ecocide, the destruction of the environment. We did research papers on this: 94% of tree cover in Gaza was intentionally destroyed. Ecocide, scholastic destruction of the educational systems—all the universities in Gaza were basically blown up. Scholasticide, or you can call it edu-cide more broadly, because they also destroyed the schools: high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, even kindergartens. One could say they are engaged in medicide, the destruction of medical services. Most of the hospitals were rendered out of service. They're also engaged in what we can call veriticide, the destruction of the truth. That's why they killed so many journalists—because then they can lie as much as they want and say, "Hey, we are killing, whatever, Hamas resistance fighters," or, as they call them, terrorists. And who's going to check on them? Because they don't allow journalists. And if there are local journalists reporting or trying to videotape, they literally shoot them in the head. That's what they are doing to hide their crimes. They don't allow any kind of independent reporting or anything like that. That's what they're engaged in. And this is unprecedented, as I said—even unprecedented in the worst of the worst of previous wars, be it the Second World War or the First World War. In the First World War, for example, they used chemical and biological weapons. That was horrific. Second World War, the US used, as you know, nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are, of course, acts of terrorism when you kill hundreds of thousands of civilians to subjugate a country. But all of these things were done in previous wars. There are even worse things being done now. As I said, for example, the use of extermination by starvation—this hasn't happened, to