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How 6 months of Israel's war in Gaza have upended the Middle East

12:40pm April 06, 2024

A young Palestinian sits on the rubble of a destroyed home following an Israeli military strike on the Rafah refugee camp, in the southern of Gaza Strip, on Oct. 15. Sunday marks six months since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.

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Hamas unleashed its early morning rampage in southern Israel six months ago this Sunday, igniting the deadliest war ever between Israelis and Palestinians.

To look at how the war is reshaping the region, and where the war could be heading, a trio of NPR correspondents drew on their deep experience of reporting in the region, including the current conflict.

The three are Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv; Jane Arraf, who's based in Amman, Jordan; and Greg Myre, who's based in Washington and has been working in the region.

How have the past six months changed Israel?

Daniel Estrin: The Hamas-led assault on Israel was the deadliest single attack against Jews since the Holocaust, with around 1,200 dead, by the Israeli government's count. Israelis speak about the Oct. 7 attack as a "second Holocaust" because of the atrocities committed. Israelis were hiding at home when they were killed. Some were burned alive. Others were shot and killed in fields at a music festival. Corpses were decapitated and mutilated, among other acts of violence documented by the United Nations. More than 250 hostages were taken to Gaza.

The brutality of the surprise Hamas attack tapped into Israelis' generational trauma from the Holocaust and it helps explain how Israelis have responded. Hundreds of armed civilian squads were formed. People's hearts were hardened. A common Israeli phrase now, referring to the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, is, "There are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza."

Israelis are glued to the news, but they're not seeing the horrors of war that Palestinians are enduring in Gaza.

The war has devastated Gaza. Can you tell us how it has been transformed?

Estrin: Israel's relentless bombardment in response to the Oct. 7 attack has decimated Gaza to its core. More Palestinians have been killed in this conflict than in any other in their history. The figure has topped 33,000, according to Gaza health authorities, and roughly two-thirds are believed to be civilians.

Gaza residents have been blown to pieces or buried under rubble in Israeli airstrikes that have flattened buildings. There's no escaping the war, unless you're wealthy or have connections to a foreign government that have allowed a limited number of people to leave the territory.

There's not nearly enough food in Gaza, malnutrition is soaring, particularly among children, and the United Nations projects that a famine could be imminent in northern Gaza.

In a territory with more than 2 million Palestinians, most homes, roads, water systems, health facilities and historical landmarks have been mostly damaged or destroyed.

A Palestinian public opinion poll last month found 71 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza supported the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. Many see it as a triumph of resistance to Israeli oppression. But only 1 in 5 Palestinians surveyed in the poll said they saw videos showing what Israelis endured the day of the Hamas assault.

These are two societies that each sees itself as the victim and the other as the aggressor.

This war has also had a powerful effect on the United States too, hasn't it?

Greg Myre: We saw widespread support for Israel on the day of the Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, we saw President Biden fly to Israel, even as rockets were still raining down on Tel Aviv and other parts of the country. Biden embraced Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the airport tarmac to show solidarity.

But as Israel waged its aggressive air and ground campaign, and the civilian Palestinian death toll soared, we've seen unprecedented criticism of Israel, a country that has long received bipartisan backing in the U.S. This criticism is coming from many sources — some members of Biden's Democratic Party to college campuses to the broader public. Most Americans supported Israel's war effort at the start of the fighting. But a recent poll found a majority of Americans now disapprove of the way Israel is conducting the war.

Shortly after the war began, Biden proposed $14 billion in additional military assistance for Israel, which is already the leading recipient of such U.S. aid. That plan is still on the table, though it's being blocked in Congress.

Meanwhile, we've seen Biden go from totally supportive of Israel, to mildly critical about its military operations. On Thursday, we saw the president's sharpest criticism yet, which came in a phone call with Netanyahu.

Biden told the Israeli leader that 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 to Israel. Within hours, Israel announced plans to expand aid deliveries to Gaza.

We should stress that Biden hasn't changed his policy at this point — he is still backing the Israeli aim of defeating Hamas. But if you look at how the president's position is evolving, we're now hearing things we certainly didn't expect to hear at the beginning of the war.

What is the fallout of the war in the wider Middle East?

Jane Arraf: This conflict has brought the Palestinian issue back to the forefront for really the first time in decades. The issue is that 76 years after the state of Israel was created amid the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Palestinians still lack a homeland. There are 6 million Palestinian refugees today, successive generations of families who fled or were forced from their homes and not allowed to return.

The normalization efforts with Israel spearheaded by the United Arab Emirates have papered over what countries like Jordan say is inevitable instability as long as that issue is unaddressed. In Jordan, one of only two countries that has a peace treaty with Israel, tension has risen along with the death toll in Gaza.

Protests near the Israeli Embassy in Amman are an almost nightly occurrence. And as the civilian death toll climbs in Gaza, more anger - in Jordan and many other Arab and Muslim countries - is being directed at the U.S. because it is the main military supplier to Israel.

In Lebanon, the focus is on the southern border, where Israel is trading regular attacks with the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah. There's growing fear that the presumed Israeli attack on the Iranian Embassy compound in Damascus, Syria, this week, could spark a wider war.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah just told his followers they can be sure that Iran will avenge the deaths, but they shouldn't be in a hurry.

What is the U.S. trying to do to keep the war from spreading in the region?

Myre: The U.S. stepped up its naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean as a show of force. Despite this, relatively small U.S. military bases in Syria and Iraq came under fire from various militia groups, which led the U.S. to hit back. For the past month or so, those militia attacks have stopped.

The U.S. Navy is also in the Red Sea, off the coast of Yemen, trying to stop the Houthis from firing missiles at commercial ships. However, the Houthi attacks are still taking place on a regular basis.

The U.S. says Iran is stirring the pot, supporting proxy groups across the Middle East. But so far, the wider region has not yet boiled over, though it remains very tense.

Part of that tension is the killing of a team of aid workers with World Central Kitchen in Gaza, including an American. What have the repercussions been?

Arraf: This looks like it could be a turning point in President Biden's willingness to exert more pressure 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 ones.

The reason World Central Kitchen was delivering food by sea, and the U.S. and other countries are dropping aid by plane, are Israeli restrictions on aid going by road into Gaza. Israel cites security concerns.

Some children have already died of starvation, according to U.N. and aid groups. Today, only about half the aid is getting into Gaza as compared to before the war, and Palestinians need assistance much more now because so much of its infrastructure - including food production and water treatment - has been destroyed.

You've all covered wars in the region. How is this one different?

Arraf: I was at the southern Lebanese border one day watching a Lebanese man sitting in a plastic chair in the courtyard of his damaged home, surrounded by shattered glass, looking out across the Israeli border.

For decades, people in neighboring countries have expected anything they build to come crashing down because of the region's instability. But the international attention focused on this war has, for first time in decades, prompted some hope that there could be a Palestinian homeland.

Also, this war is unprecedented in terms of media coverage. In past wars, journalists could usually go into Gaza. This time, Israel is not allowing journalists in, except for brief visits when they are escorted by the Israeli military. At the same time an unprecedented number of local journalists and media workers have been killed.

I and many other journalists covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the major battles afterward on the ground — which is the only real way to see what's happening first-hand. We are barred by Israel from being on the ground to see what's happening in Gaza.

Estrin: One moment I experienced that sums up what it feels like to be here was the morning we learned an Israeli commando raid in Gaza had rescued two Israeli hostages. Israeli airstrikes provided cover for the commandos and killed scores of Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.

Our producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, recorded the sound of a mother wailing over her child who was killed. I was driving in Tel Aviv and listening to the cries of the Palestinian mother, as an Israeli drove past on his motorcycle with a bumper sticker that read, "Go IDF!" a reference to the Israeli military, the Israel Defense Forces. One people's tragedy is another people's triumph. Israelis and Palestinians live in two irreconcilable worlds.

Myre: I first covered Israel-Palestinian fighting in Gaza in the early 2000s, when the Palestinians waged an uprising. Back then, Hamas was sending individual suicide bombers into Israel. Israel was carrying out individual airstrikes against Hamas leaders.

This was very bloody, but today the fighting is exponentially worse. Clearly there's a need to stop the killing and ease the human suffering, though it's also important to think about what comes next.

If there's a cease-fire, but if Hamas remains in power, continues to hold Israeli hostages, and poses an ongoing threat to Israel, that's not going to be acceptable to Israel.

From the Palestinian perspective, if Israeli troops remain in Gaza, if there's no plan to rebuild the devastated territory and no political horizon for a Palestinian state, that's not going to be acceptable to Palestinians. You want to end this war as soon as possible. But you don't want to leave in place the conditions that could spark another conflict a couple years down the road.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

By the time this program came on the air Saturday morning, October 7, NPR's Daniel Estrin was already reporting on a historic and shocking attack.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Well, you know, this is something that's been unfolding for about 10 hours now and going. And it's just astonishing scenes. And both Israelis and Palestinians I've been speaking with have been shocked by what has been happening.

SIMON: The estimates at that moment of the number of deaths and the attack by Hamas on small communities in southern Israel, put the numbers at as many as 70 Israelis and 200 Palestinians. Those awful statistics, of course, would quickly rise. And the conflict that began six months ago has now become the deadliest war in Israeli-Palestinian 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.

ESTRIN: Thank you, Scott.

SIMON: NPR's Jane Arraf is in Beirut. Jane, thank you for being with us.

JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Thank you, Scott.

SIMON: And Greg Myre, NPR national security correspondent, is here in our studio. Thanks for being with us, Greg.

GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.

SIMON: Let me turn to Daniel Estrin, first, in Tel Aviv. Daniel, how's the past half year changed Israel?

ESTRIN: Well, it was the deadliest single attack against Jews since the Holocaust, which is how Israelis 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.

SIMON: How do we understand the devastation that we have seen in Gaza and how it's been transformed?

ESTRIN: Gaza has been decimated to its core by Israel's bombardment. 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 U.N. 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 7 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 is the aggressors.

SIMON: Greg Myre, let me turn to you now, because war's had a powerful effect in the U.S. too, hasn't it?

MYRE: Oh, absolutely, Scott. You know, on October 7, 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 7, this is certainly not what we expected to be hearing from President Biden.

SIMON: And Jane Arraf, you're in Beirut now. What's the effect been throughout the wider Middle East?

ARRAF: Well, Scott, it's brought the Palestinian issue back to the forefront for really the first time in decades, the Palestinian issue being the lack of a Palestinian homeland and 6 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.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in non-English language).

ARRAF: That was a protest last week near the Israeli embassy in Amman, now almost nightly. And something else I've noticed as 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.

SIMON: And, Greg, tell us about the concerns that certainly the U.S. has about the wider potential impact of this war in the Middle East.

MYRE: Yeah. A top priority since Day 1 is that this war does not spread to other parts of the Middle East and has 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. says 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.

SIMON: There seemed to be a real event that stirred things up even more over the past few days with the killing of a team of aid workers with the World Central Kitchen in Gaza, including an American. Jane Arraf, what are some of the repercussions we can see?

ARRAF: Well, as Greg mentioned, possibly a turning point in the U.S. willingness to exert pressure 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.

SIMON: We want to go round to each of you for some final thoughts. Jane Arraf, let me begin with you. How is this war different from what we've seen in the past?

ARRAF: You know, at the Lebanese border one day, I was watching a man sitting in a plastic 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.

SIMON: Daniel Estrin in Israel, what are your thoughts?

ESTRIN: I'm left with one image, Scott. A couple of 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.

SIMON: And Greg Myre.

MYRE: You know, I first covered the Israeli-Palestinian fighting in Gaza in the early 2000s, 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 cease-fire 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, if 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.

(SOUNDBITE OF BLUE DOT SESSIONS' "WAHRE")

SIMON: NPR's national security correspondent Greg Myre, NPR's Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv and NPR's Jane Arraf in Beirut, thank you all for your fine work and for being with us today.

MYRE: Thank you, Scott.

ESTRIN: Thank you, Scott.

ARRAF: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF BLUE DOT SESSIONS' "WAHRE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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