Lawfare Daily: A New Documentary on Surviving the War in Gaza

[Intro]

Kavitha Chekuru: That was, you know, one of the reasons that we wanted to focus on it because it really highlights the way that the U.S. is complicit in the way that they defer to the Israeli military.

Tyler McBrien: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, with Emily Tripp, director at Airwars, Samaneh Moafi, assistant director of research at Forensic Architecture, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, founder and director of investigations at Earshot and documentary filmmaker Kavitha Chekuru.

Lawrence Abu Hamda: I suppose one of the most heartbreaking things was the fact that Layan and Hind said it. They said the tank is next to them and they're firing at us. And it took all of our work just to be able to hear them as a witness, to be able to lift them from the status of just another victim, another number, into a witness that could be heard and listened to.

Tyler McBrien: Today we're talking about a new film directed by Kavitha for Al Jazeera's Fault Line series called “The Night Won't End,” which profiles three Palestinian families as they try to survive the war in Gaza.

[Main Podcast]

Kavitha, as the director, I wanted to start with you. This is a story that many, if not all of our listeners will be familiar with, at least some aspects of it, some angles of it, and they will likely come in with a lot of their own ideas and opinions. So I want to just set the scene first. What story were you trying to tell with “The Night Won't End?”

Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah, I mean, we started Fault Lines, we, when the war started, we knew that we wanted to cover the war somehow, but at that point, obviously, when it began, I don't think, we didn't imagine that we would get to this point. But by the time we kind of commissioned it, Fault Lines within Al Jazeera, obviously, Al Jazeera has been covering the war 24/7 but with Fault Lines itself is on Al Jazeera English.

And it's kind of the role is to examine U.S. roles in a story. And so obviously that's very clear when it comes to the war in Gaza. But we wanted to, instead of it just being focused on, you know, the politics of it, we wanted to anchor that in what has been happening to civilians in Gaza. And the, you know, it was, it's, it was kind of daunting to try and pick, you know, figure out how exactly we're going to tell that when this war has been so horrifically destructive.

But we started from the point that we knew we'd have to cover an airstrike just because of the, you know, extent of the bombing campaign. From there we wanted to move on to when we started kind of looking at this editorially was around, it was really in December. And at that point was when they had the quote unquote safe zones was kind of a big talking point from the White House in particular. And so we wanted to kind of look at safe zones.

And from there also in December is when we really started to get the allegations of arbitrary executions of civilians by particularly by ground troops in the North who had a really substantial presence at that point in the North. And then as we went along, you know, in late January is when the attack on Hind Rajab and her family happened and we felt like we had to look into that as well. And yeah, so that was kind of the beginning point.

And then we were really the other part of it was that you know when you have something this big I feel like as a journalist doing collaborations like we did is so crucial and important. Not only does it expand the reporting, but I think it's the way the industry should be approaching the reporting, right, instead of making everything so individualistic. So we were really, really honored that we got to do this work with Airwars and Forensic Architecture and Earshot.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I would love to bring in some of these collaborations. Emily, we can start with you. When did you and Airwars join in on the project and what did you see as your role in supporting the documentary as a whole?

Emily Tripp: Well, thank you so much. And it's really good to be here and speak to all of you and with you.

And just to kind of echo that spirit of collaboration, I think, you know, when October 7th happened, and then the ensuing air campaign, us as an organization decided to document every airstrike and document every civilian casualty. And it's still a process that we're working on. It's something that we've, you know, we've managed to document about 10 percent of the total caseload. I mean, we have so many cases that we're getting through.

And it was, I think a few months into that, whether that was in, in kind of late December that we kind of coordinated with, with Al Jazeera because we were producing these cases every single day. And we got the request of saying, Hey, look, we're, you know, we're doing an investigation and a story into civilian harm from airstrikes is this one that you've documented. And then we kind of went back and looked at all of the list of the thousands of cases that we've now identified. And of course, indeed, you know, it's, it's among the many.

And I think this is a process where we sort of bumped it up the queue. So we were able to look at that strike in particular. It was one of the first strikes we looked at from that December period. And yeah, we kind of had the back and forth and went through our own methodology.

I think the thing that we've, we really appreciated about working with this and I think was really done so well in, in the story that was told was that we were able to come exactly with our methodology. We didn't change anything about the way that we do our research, we didn't change anything about the way that we do our, our usual investigations as an organization, which is indeed this kind of casualty counting system, but we were able to explain that process and tell that story in a way that, you know, I hope made sense in the context of the documentary.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, Emily, you appeared early on in the documentary and I thought it was a really striking scene. Up to that point, I think we had gotten images of Gaza, of the destruction some of the aftermath of the actual strikes and then we're sort of transported to this room where you're conducting analysis and behind you is this spreadsheet of, you know, Over a hundred names or something like that. And it's Salem, Salem, Salem the, the one family who sustained such heavy losses.

So I want to, I want to turn to maybe to Lawrence. Could you just describe a bit about your work on the documentary and your organization's work and how you think it, it kind of can complement this picture to tell this more holistic story in the documentary?

Lawrence Abu Hamda: Right, yeah, thank you for having me here. And it's great as well to just echo that it's great to be back in touch with everybody on this call. So I run an organization called Earshot and we are the world's first organization dedicated to audio analysis for human rights and environmental advocacy. What we do a lot of is reconstruct events forensically through the soundtrack.

And we started officially last, one year ago, last July. And then like all organizations like us, October has meant that our focus has been on Gaza. And it has shown the necessity for audio analysis. We've, we've shown the, the, the sort of gaping hole in human rights research when it comes to sound. And being able to fill that void as effectively as we can with just a small team of three people across many cases.

This case in particular was one we'd been asked to look at by multiple organizations, including Washington Post and others, as soon as it happened because the only evidence was sound. Now, usually, you know, we're looking and working across multiple streams of evidence, and just to have one phone to, you know, one recording of a recording of a phone call is not really ideal. But we, we, in the end, you know, after months and months of listening to that, those recordings of Hind Rajab and her family, we could start to piece together what, what, the most likely scenario of what happened.

Tyler McBrien: So Samaneh, I want to turn to you to further first just help tell the story of Hind and what happened to her and her family in the documentary. And then also, same question, how did your organization contribute to this collaboration in terms of the documentary?

Samaneh Moafi: So we are a research team based in Goldsmiths University of London investigate cases of human rights violation, mostly from a spatial perspective. Palestine has always been a part of our practice. Many members of our team are from Palestine, have worked there. And also since October 7th, it was inevitable that we started working.

By the time Kavitha and Sharif from Fault Lines came to our office to discuss this case, we had studied the destruction of medical infrastructure in Gaza. We had looked at the Al-Ahli hospital, the bombing of Al-Ahli. We've looked at the Al Shifa hospital, the kind of like, what had taken place there. We had also looked at a kind, what we called a humanitarian violence, the way that Israel had abused and weaponized measures such as evacuation orders and safe zones. We had tried to look at it kind of like in a systematic way at the territorial scale, at the scale of Gaza, and what that means for in terms of mass displacement.

The kind of like the invitation to look into the case of Hind. With that invitation, we could look at the case, we could look at what is taking place in Gaza with a, in a different scale. At the scale of a child, her family trapped in a car in a street. And so in that scale, we could kind of pull all the kind of background research that we had developed, all the kind of territorial analysis that we had developed.

The Fault Lines team came with a lot of kind of like interviews with witnesses. detailed interviews of what had taken place on the day and their experiences. They had also gathered images and video documentations from October 10th, because of course, as you know, the audio recording of Hind on the, on the phone, the audio recording that the world heard it was from January 29th, and no one had access to where she was last seem because it was an evacuation zone.

And it was not until kind of like February 10th that reporters had gone on the scene, residents had gone on the scene and had documented it. And those images and videos were so precious for us at that early kind of like moment of arriving because there was a lot that could be read into them, that the scene could be reconstructed based on those images and that's that's what we did.

Tyler McBrien: So, Kavitha, going back to you, I would love to also, you know, stay with Hind for, for now. I know there are other stories told in the documentary but first, you know, why, why you chose this story? What, what do you think it particularly highlights about the conflict? But then also speaking to this wider collaboration, why go through, you know, this meticulous reconstruction to, to bolster the, you know, the reporting that, that had already occurred?

So, you know, Samaneh mentioned that, you know, Al Jazeera had images and videos of, of the strike and, and recordings. Why then take that extra step in a documentary or elsewhere to reconstruct it in this visual three dimensional way bringing in so many inputs and senses and sound analysis, video analysis, et cetera?

Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah, I mean, it actually, it stems from the reason we chose it because obviously the case of Hind and her family received a lot of media attention, probably more media attention than any, any other attack in the war, I would say has. And I think that's, you know, the testament to the fact that it is, people do have a heart and it's, it's gut wrenching to hear a six year old beg for someone to come save her.

So I think that was that, but the reason we chose it was because we're focusing on the U.S. role, something that really stood out from the moment that it became clear that she was killed when Civil Defence Forces went to the site on February 10th, you know, from immediately the State Department was asked about it from the very beginning.

And they, it's this common refrain and it's not, unfortunately not unique to Hind's case, but anytime there is an attack, there's been an attack, whether it's the case of Hind Rajab and her family, or the World Central Kitchen aid workers, you know, the, U.S. administration will say, well, we're going to wait for the Israeli military to do their investigation. And this precedes October 7th, right? This is, this has been going on for years.

So, and the reality is that the Israeli military does not do incredible investigations, right? And that's not just me saying that, you know, B'Tselem, which is one of the leading human rights organizations in Israel, stopped collaborating with the Israeli military in 2016 because it became very clear to them that they weren't doing real investigations. And so we wanted to kind of use that as, you know, as we moved on from the kind of the air campaign and the safe zones to how the U.S. responds to these, the allegations like this.

And so part of that, you know, I think what really, you know, helped when you see the work that Forensic Architecture and Earshot did, this, you know, open source work. If these civil organizations can do that, this amazing investigation with the, with, with just open source material, I can't even fathom what the U.S. government would be able to do, and they haven't done that, right? And with this case, from the very beginning, they've said, we're going to wait until, you know, they've said, well, the Israeli military said that they weren't in the area.

And they have repeated that up until recently, just the past couple of weeks. And, which is completely preposterous, because not only do you have the satellite imagery that shows the tanks in the, just up the road from the family car, which that footage has that satellite imagery has been out since the very beginning. I think CNN was the first, they were the first ones to put, to publish that.

So you have that, but in addition you have these two children screaming for their lives saying the tank is next to me. I see the tank in front of me. So, I just, I, you know, I think that was, you know, one of the reasons that we wanted to focus on it because it really highlights the way that the U.S. is complicit in the way that they defer to the Israeli military.

Tyler McBrien: And Kavitha, you mentioned, you know, don't just take my word for it, there's many voices, even from the U.S. government or U.S. representatives in the film so Senator Van Hollen, for one, and then Josh Paul, who himself oversaw a lot of arms transfers in the State Department and then had a, a high profile resignation. And I think his interviews really get to the U.S. role in the war in Gaza.

But in addition to this being the beat or the focus of Fault Lines in general, why highlight the U.S. role in the war in Gaza rather than focus on IDF fault or, or, you know, individual responsibility of, of IDF soldiers? Why, why focus on arms or you know, lack of investigation, noncompliance, that kind of thing with regard to the war? Because you know, as your subtitle says, the, the full title is the night won't end colon Biden's war on Gaza, so I'm curious about that choice.

Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah. I mean, Akbar Shahid Ahmed from HuffPost, he has a great quote at the kind of beginning of the film where he says what one former Israeli official said to him, which is that with one phone call, the U.S. could stop this. And we know that to be true. Reagan did it with the Israeli-Lebanon war in the 80s.

Like there is precedent for this and it's not just the phone call, it's the fact that yes, Israel could conduct this war to a degree without U.S. support, but not at this scale, and likely not for this length of time, there's just no way. So in the U.S. for all, you know, the Biden administration's very late kind of, you know, calls to protect civilian life, their actions haven't reflected that. You know, they just sent another shipment of 500 pound bombs.

I don't know, I don't know that they were the ones that were used in the attack on Al-Mawasi camp, but it was 500 pound bombs that were used in that attack. So the Biden administration's role is just so clear and they have the power to influence this war and haven't at all.

Tyler McBrien: Another theme that kept coming up, I think in the film was the exceptionalism of this current war vis-a-vis other wars in the region and, and other, other regions in, in general. So Samaneh I'd love to go to you first maybe you mentioned that Palestine has always been a, a prominent focus of forensic architecture, and I know that forensic architecture covers a great many other conflicts around the world. So what about this current war in Gaza strikes you as exceptional or unprecedented if, if that is an accurate depiction?

Samaneh Moafi: We've been, like, I feel like since October, we've always, it's, it's, it's happened again and again that we were like, okay, this is, it cannot get any worse. This is this, we cannot get any worse. The conditions cannot change, cannot be kind of like worsening from where we are now. And it's kept changing. And we have looked at it from several perspectives.

I mean, I was mentioning some before, but also from an environmental perspective, right? The kind of like the destruction of food infrastructure, farms, greenhouses, orchards, we've studied these and the way, the kind of the systematic way in which they've been destroyed. First with the bombing campaign, then through the ground invasion, is, we have not seen any, anything of that scale in our experience.

Of course, Israel has been involved in, in the destruction of environments in Gaza. We've studied it with herbicidal spraying on the border of Gaza, so on and so forth, but not to this scale.

Tyler McBrien: And Emily, you speak to this almost directly and same with your colleague on the film, Sanjana, I believe her name is, about how different the analysis that you've done for, for this conflict or this war versus others in terms of the number of children killed, decimation of, of buildings and, and, you know, almost way of life. So I'd also be curious your perspective on the, exceptionalism of this particular war.

Emily Tripp: Yeah, thank you. I mean, we, so we as an organization, I mean, we, we started 10 years ago and we've been documenting conflicts around the world, but we've been documenting, you know, eight years of, of Russian bombing in Syria. We've been documenting civilian casualties from the U.S. led coalition in the war against ISIS.

We, you know, prior to October 7th, we had this vast archive of thousands and thousands of incident by incident cases where civilians have been killed across kind of some of the most dense battlefields, including, you know, things like the battle of Mosul and the battle of Raqqa. People who remember those kind of like extremely intense urban campaigns.

Just as a comparison, we have already documented more incidents of harm in Gaza since October 7th than we did in eight years of that campaign in Syria and Iraq. More incidents than we documented in eight years of Russian bombing of Syria.

And one of the things that indeed my colleague Sanjana was saying so eloquently, I think, in that documentary was, look at those number of civilians that have been killed in that case that we talked about, the December 11th strike. It's more than a hundred civilians. There's very, very few cases we have in a decade of documentation where you have incidents where more than a hundred people have been killed. We've now documented already four of those in Gaza.

If you look at cases where you have more children killed than in any other conflict. You look at, you know, metrics of harm like the number of women and children sheltering those civilians who've been killed at a level many times over in Gaza than we've seen in any other campaign.

And I don't want to say these, these kind of numbers to be cold, because I think it can be cold when we start talking about the numbers in that way. But just to reflect on, you know, it's not hyperbole to say this is one of the most intense campaigns. The incidents speak for themselves.

And just to go back to the point that was raised a little bit earlier, this is not happening behind closed doors. We have been using the same open source methodology for 10 years. You know, 70 percent of the investigations that the Americans themselves did in the war against ISIS into civilian harm originated as referrals from the Air Wars archive. This is a methodology that is known, is understood. These incidents are no secret and we've been publishing in real time as far as we can, but that doesn't seem to have been taking place by any authorities that are working on this conflict.

Tyler McBrien: And speaking of well worn methodologies or, you know, long term work, Lawrence, the, the sound analysis from Earshot was actually quite new to me in this, you know, maybe it was my, based on my own ignorance of the role that sound analysis plays in, in open source investigations. But I thought that was actually one of the most visceral, surprisingly visceral parts of the documentary of actually hearing the shots, measuring the time between them, and then the ability to then sort of geolocate or and then also identify the types of munitions used or the types of weapon used.

So I want to go back to the point you made earlier about the sort of underdeveloped role of sound analysis in open source investigations, and then especially in the context of what we were talking about earlier in sort of the Israeli governments unwillingness or sort of maybe unreliability of their own investigations and how sound analysis can maybe push back against that.

Lawrence Abu Hamda: Sure, yeah. I mean, it's new in many ways, and perhaps it shouldn't be. I mean, there's always more sound evidence than there is visual. What I mean by that is even in a video, where you would have 24 frames per second, you have 44,000 samples per second, right? I mean, so there is just so much more sound.

And what we often do is look between frames. Often, you know, when you're talking about gunshots, missiles, you're looking at things that are traveling exceptionally fast. Sometimes the information between frames is extremely important. Also, because of the ways in which people are trying to stay back away from incidents, you don't get a good look at it, the sound is often really important.

And so either outside of the frame of the camera or even between the frames, you get a lot of information that hasn't really been looked at so closely. I've built this off of more than a decade of my own research and experience, and I think without that, I wouldn't have been able to start Earshot. And that's because there's a real fundamental difference between, let's say, what we do and what sort of audio forensics in the field has, has done in the for profit sort of sector, if you like.

Because they're, what they're often doing is working with police, police forces. They. are using analysis that is informed and based on body cam on CCTV, on radio, police radios, and all kinds of techniques that have developed through a kind of medium that we don't ever have access to, right? We, we've developed all our methods really from and through citizen media. And that requires a wholly different set of kinds of analyses.

And so it's really only now that I could have started to Earshot, having done this work over, over such a long time, and, and sort of developed that. So, you know, in, in one hand, it's, it's alarming it hasn't been done before. On the other hand, it's, I see the whole, sort of the path and what it's taken to get there.

And, you know, you're seeing, what we're seeing now is a couple of things. We're seeing governments incredibly complacent with their audio, right? And perhaps I shouldn't give the game away, but we've caught on several occasions really poor bits of misinformation that the soundtrack just tells you straight away. Explosions that are clearly added on, which we can tell because of the way they resonate through architectural space, distinct from the way the voice is talking, right?

So, added on explosions for that nurse in Al-Shifa hospital, that viral video. Seeing that intercepted phone calls are deeply edited, have been added, have had effects added to them, etc. This is really beneath us as an organization to do this kind of analysis. You know, we, we're used to doing much more hard work and yet we're catching them in very simple ways.

So I think, you know, even it's, it's new that, it's new to the governments that there's someone kind of looking and chasing after them in, in terms of kind of a set of acoustic traces. That will probably change, and we've actually seen that change through the, since October.

Another set of things that has really shifted in this war is that what we're seeing more and more of, which we, which, which I haven't done in the kind of decade long experience I've, I've, I've had of working in this field is seeing the actual media itself being targeted, so journalists. What does that do as a you know, what does that, what kind of artifacts does that produce? It means that a kind of data point is the camera itself, is the microphone itself, right? It's actually being struck, it's being hit, it's being dropped, it's being damaged.

And then, it’s not, you know, before we had to do a lot of work with echoes and distance and figuring out where the, the camera was according to, according to the scene. Right now the camera is the victim. It's, it's collapsing, that, that, that distance is collapsing. And so again, we've had to kind of catch up and develop new kinds of techniques that can respond to that. And that's also a kind of sign that kind of, you know, compression of space from witnesses being far away to the media itself being targeted and being the victims in this has itself been alarming for us to, to see.

Tyler McBrien: It kind of leads into my next question, which is for for Kavitha, there are so many times throughout the documentary where you, you pause and say, you know, the Israeli government, the Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment. I think same goes for the U.S. government on, on many occasions throughout the documentary.

What sort of response or lack of response did you get when you brought these, you know, documentations of quite serious allegations of targeting journalists, killing children, forced displacement, et cetera, when you have not only sort of traditional journalistic documentation, but then you've also marshaled these other types of evidence and analysis across a number of different types of media?

So what was the process like in attempting to get, or, or, you know, or, or failing to get any sort of comment from either the, the Israeli military for their responsibility in these attacks, and then also the U.S. government for their complicity often by circumventing or ignoring their own domestic laws.

Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah. I mean, I guess I'll start with the Israeli military. We kind of knew, we knew from the beginning that they were never going to, they weren't going to give us an on camera interview. We kind of assumed that when we, of course we asked, we did, but I had expected at the very least that they would respond with an email to acknowledge it. They didn't.

And I think, to be honest, I think part of that has to do with what's going on between the Israeli government and Al Jazeera. And the Knesset banning Al Jazeera over the past couple of months. So that was that part, unfortunately.

With the U.S. government, the first email I sent to the State Department was in late January. I told the State Department, we are, we'd like to sit down with Blinken or with assistant Secretary Barbara Leaf, and then, you know, and like starting from that point, knowing that maybe at best we would get Matt Miller.

But, and you know, we also said it's late January, we've got another four months, we have a very large window, you tell us when works for you, you give us, you know, it will take 10 minutes, that's it. And here, like, here's your chance to talk to us about this. And this was before, obviously, we had kind of, like, lined up everything, but just logistically, you have to put those requests in early.

They literally immediately said no. And I mean immediately. And then I kept sending emails. We were trying through different routes, through, like, colleagues who have contacts at the State Department. Same thing. It was, and then it was the same thing with the White House. You know, we tried, you know, they didn't respond initially with the NSC, and then eventually they, they said no, and they referred us to the State Department. Cool.

And then, you know, we, we went to this, we went to the, the press briefings, but that didn't, that didn't amount to anything. It's a little bit hard if you're not part of the core, kind of daily press core. And then, so we ended up doing what we don't want to have to do, but we went to, when Blinken was on the Hill for the State Department budget, in late May, we just went there trying to yell a question at him, which didn't work, which was not fruitful, but you know, we had to try.

But yeah, they didn't want to talk about it and you know, I'm not surprised I think like they're only going to talk when it's in their interest and doing a sit down interview with an investigative documentary team is not in their interest. That's the reality.

Tyler McBrien: I want to touch on another sort of making of the documentary question, but one that also touches on just the realities of being an open-source investigator in general. And that's the question of resilience and the ability to continue doing this work and documenting such horrific incidents. Emily, I'll probably go to you first with how you think about this question.

I think it came up very viscerally when there was this one scene with a Red Crescent worker was, was talking about having spoken to Hind on the phone or perhaps it was another child. And, and, you know, the line went dead and he realized that the child had died while on the phone. And he said he dis, he disassociated he reached the stage where he was just mentally cut off.

And, you know, while open source investigators like Forensic Architecture, Earshot Airwars are, are you know, several degrees removed, maybe from that close contact, there's still vicarious trauma. I don't, I don't have to tell you that. So I'm, I'm just curious how you grapple with that and any strategies that you practice or that you tell your, your colleagues to practice.

Emily Tripp: Yeah, I think, well, I think we're very lucky in Air Wars in that we have such a brilliant team and we all try and look after each other. And I know there are a lot of people who've been doing this documentation work in a very isolated way and have been, yeah, particularly on like specific investigations, small, small teams, individuals, just kind of gathering information by themselves. I think a lot of what we do in the way that we kind of take care of each other is to make it a non-taboo subject.

And that comes really from having people on the team from all over the world. I mean, the people who are really leading many aspects of our Gaza work are actually our Ukrainian team. And so they've come and brought their experience, having recently lived through conflict, to the way that we tell and capture stories.

And if you look at a lot of the descriptions that we've got in our assessments, we're really capturing testimonies of people at a level of detail that we never really did before, and was being pushed forward by our Ukrainian colleagues. because they had seen that that level of information was so important to them. So we kind of heard that and made sure that was included.

The person who's leading our research team in general is just a brilliant Syrian colleague who himself lived through war in Aleppo as a teenager. And now has again, brought his experience to the way that we do the documentation work and the way that we talk about our work. And I think each of us in the organization have a very different motivation. We have very different motivation, we have a very different understanding of what accountability means. We have a very different understanding of why we're doing this work and what it's for. But we really try and kind of gather everybody together to make sure that we.

So we've had a couple of these really big meetings. We've had volunteers come. We had one meeting where there was like 70 volunteers on the line who really came forward and said, yeah, like, I really want to help with this Gaza work. And we try and kind of like push them together and make it feel like it's going somewhere. And actually documentaries like this, where the team can see, you know, there are probably about five or six different people who are involved in building out those spreadsheets, and they can suddenly see that on their screens, I think is a really important thing.

But we also have very practical guidelines. I mean, we're looking at really graphic content, and so we have certain standard operating procedures about when you look at the material, when you don't, when you need to look at something, when you don't. You know, I myself, looking, just watching the documentary, had to pause it a few times because, you know, even though I'm in this work every single day, it's really difficult.

And I think, yes, that distance is really important to enable you to keep going and every day kind of move forward, but we also have to look after each other and understand our own limits. And that's also part of our kind of, it's built into our workflow. I don't think we always get it right. I think it's like a constant process of learning and figuring out how to look after each other, particularly when people are so kind of scattered.

And as I said, I mean, this is a level of, of graphic content that we haven't really ever experienced to this degree before. That's not to say that the other conflicts we've worked on have been easy. It's really a kind of constant feature of our work. But yeah, we do our best essentially to try and look after each other.

Lawrence Abu Hamda: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, this was a very tough one in particular, you know, it also hits home very hard. I have a six year old daughter. Her cousin is called Layan, exactly like Hind. That was very difficult. I suppose one of the most heartbreaking things was the fact that Layan and Hind said it. They said the tank is next to me and they're firing at us. And it took all of our work just to be able to hear them as a witness, to be able to lift them from the status of just another victim, another number, into a witness that could be heard and listened to.

And that, in a way, is heartbreaking. It speaks to the futility sometimes of the way we approach our work. It's like, you know, by the time we've investigated one thing, something happens, you know, or something else, you know, goes off and there is a certain futility that you can't help but to fall into sometimes. And at the same time, it's heartbreaking that it required all of this just to hear her, right? It required Kavitha's, like, documentary, it required all these interviews. In the end, they said it. They said it there, and they were ignored.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I want to tease that out a bit, actually, because it did strike me as something of a climax, or a climax, in the documentary where sort of put together all the analysis to then show visually and, you know, audibly that the tank was close enough to the car where the soldiers inside could have seen inside of the car who was in there, which was a child.

And, and you know, as you were saying, Lawrence, it, it took all of that work, all of that analysis, all of those, people, volunteers, just to get enough corroboration to believe this child's words, which I thought was a very emotional and dramatic climax. But to get back to, you know, the story, Kavitha, I just want to give you the opportunity to, to open up, you know, any of the other stories that were told in the documentary that you wanted to make sure that we highlight and, and what aspect of the, of the conflict you were trying to get across with with their stories.

Kavitha Chekuru: Sure, I mean, I guess the one I would probably bring up is the one at the very end, which is the executions. And so that was the Salem family. And the, and I will say the one, you know, that with that, we actually identified that case when we were looking into allegations of arbitrary executions. And then the team on the ground, they said to us, oh, by the way, this family, just a week before that attack suffered, you know, a huge airstrike. And that was how we then went to the December 11th airstrike.

And before I go into the executions, I actually just want to make sure I say, we couldn't have done any of the work we did without the journalists in Gaza that we worked with, who, while doing this, you know, the filming and the documentation on the ground, they're living through all of this at the same time.

The producer in the North, Hussein, before in December, when the ground troops, the, you know, things got much worse, his four year old daughter was shot in front of him. And then he was shot, he was injured in the same attack and had to have surgery while the team was filming. So I just bring that up, but and, you know, they're also going through starvation. So it's, journalists in Gaza are doing such immense work and I really feel like the whole industry could be supporting them more.

But when it comes to the execution story, you know, so the, you know, because for your listeners, if they're not familiar with it, the story is it's on December 19th in Gaza City, a group of Israeli soldiers in the five days preceding, five or so days preceding December 19th, they had essentially laid siege to a residential building that was owned by the Anan family.

And people could not go in and out, in or out. The, some of the witnesses we spoke to said that no one fought back, so they would have known that it was just civilians, that there weren't any fighters there. And then on December 19th, the Israeli forces entered the building. They separated the men and the women. They beat both groups of people, and then they executed at least 11 men.

After they left the building, the soldiers were still outside and they started shelling the building and also using quadcopters. And that resulted in not only a number of people being even more injured, but the Salem's daughter, four year old daughter, Nada, was killed by shrapnel.

And the way we pieced together this, this case, it was, it was a lot of work. We, you know, we started with the testimony of survivors. And from there, you know, there was satellite imagery which showed tanks one block from the residential building on the morning of December 19th. And then we were also, after the soldiers left, some of the survivors started trying to get in touch with family outside of Gaza.

And so we were able to speak to the people that, speak to the person who sent the message and speak to three people who received the messages and then verify those messages from the group chat they went to, so it was kind of. And then the next day. When the soldiers finally left the area, civilians were, other civilians were able to enter the building and they took a video. And so we were able to verify that video.

And in addition to that, the net afterwards, once these survivors were able to get to the hospital, the Al Jazeera news crew that was nearby filmed their testimony, which has been, which was consistent with their, the later testimony they would give us. So it was all those things that kind of pieced together this really horrific case that I think, unfortunately, is not uncommon. We actually looked into a number of other allegations of arbitrary executions specifically in the north, and we focused on this one because we had to just kind of devote our resources to one case.

And I think one of the things about it that speaks to the U.S. role is that, you know, for many years now, the U.S., various U.S. administrations, not just the Biden administration, have not been enforcing the Leahy Law. And that's despite, you know, Josh Paul has said this many times, other former State Department officials have said this. Patrick Leahy himself has said this, right, that the State Department has just not, they have a whole different process.

And I know you've covered this on Lawfare before, but they have a whole different process when it comes to Israel and the Leahy Law. And, you know, I think Josh Paul gets to it really clearly that, that kind of lack of enforcement then leads to a system and culture of impunity. And when you have that kind of impunity, it really emboldens bad actors, essentially, to do, to be even worse.

So, you know, in addition to these executions, there's, I, you know, I think that there's, it kind of ties into all those TikTok videos we've seen of Israeli soldiers themselves documenting their own war crimes so brazenly.

Tyler McBrien: First, I just want to say something that speaks to your first point that for listeners who haven't seen the documentary yet, it ends with a dedication to the journalists of Gaza and in particular three of your Al Jazeera colleagues who were killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. So I think that, that really speaks to what you were saying in the beginning.

And I completely agree that the, the quote that you mentioned that Josh Paul gives really encapsulated, I think this earlier question I, or the answer to this earlier question I had of, you know, why focus on the U.S. role and what role does the U.S. play in the war in Gaza?

I want to sort of end with a question about continuing to tell stories from Gaza amid so many other stories from Gaza and, and this, this deluge of horrific imagery that has become almost tragically routine and had to cut through maybe mounting desensitivity, especially in the United States and perhaps Western Europe, to really get through to audiences to continue to tell these stories.

If you have any, you know, mantras of your own or, or strategies of your own to continue to tell stories in ways that will, you know, get people's attention and, and, and capture audiences. Kavitha, I'll start with you, but I, you know, I can open it up afterwards if people have additional thoughts.

Kavitha Chekuru: I mean, I guess in terms of kind of like keeping going and kind of cutting through the noise and things like that, I think the most important thing is that journalists should be centerings of the Palestinians in their reporting. There's just such a steep level of dehumanization in the Western media, in the way that they report and really don't report on Gaza. You know, the attack on al-Mawasi was horrific.

And I understand that obviously the attack on, on Trump was, is, you know, that is an insane story and deserves reporting. It's just all of a sudden now Gaza's just gone from the news, from the mainstream media. And it, but this was happening well before the attack on Trump. The mainstream, I, I, I kind of, I think the mainstream media has like such a deep level of kind of responsibility in the way that this war has been, has played out.

And so, yeah, I think it's just centering Palestinian voices, which doesn't happen as often as it should. And then also just, you know, doing these kinds of collaborations, like the worst, the war is just getting worse and worse and worse. And so I feel like different organizations working together is the only, only way to like, keep going.

Samaneh Moafi: No, I mean, I, I wanted to build on that. In the sense that we're in a context where we have Gazans taking images, documenting, filming their own children in blood, right? Their own neighbors, their own parents in blood on the ground. And they're filming it, they're picturing it, they're filming it, and they're finding a way to put that online, on social media, on in news with the hope that there will be somehow a path to accountability.

That maybe this one image will tell the truth that will make the world push for a stop and, you know, for a kind of, for, for this, for this genocide to stop. And I think it's our task to really honor these images. And how do we honor these images as investigators? It's by studying them carefully. It's by, you know, looking at them frame by frame, pixel by pixel. Trying to pull out, making, you know, like building the world of which this is this is a kind of like a frame so that others who are not in Gaza can actually see can, can open their eyes, can kind of, you know.

With the case of Hind, as Lawrence was saying, Layan says, and Hind keeps saying what's happening, but the world cannot see. It's, it seems to be unclear so on and so forth, and so we take the labor of looking at the car, reconstructing the site, figuring out where all the bullet holes are, where could've been where would've Hind been seen, what would've been the lines of shot so this can be seen this investigative work.

This investigative work that as you were saying, and that's kind of like Kavitha, Lawrence, Emily, we're all kind of like saying, it's a collaborative work also that, you know, you have an art or you have an architect, you have a kind of like a sound analyst, a journalist, a kind of data analyst all sitting together, building this intersection around a testimony, around one frame, one kind of like, image, one soundbite. With the hope that maybe this will, this is, this will stop or this will, this will contribute to to some sort of accountability.

Lawrence Abu Hamda: Well, I mean on that last point, I would just say that I think it's not only about getting the attention of people now. I mean, yes, we need to do that. But at some point that also feels like that maybe the work we do has to sort of have recourse to another timeline, another, you know, temporality. So it's not just about the media cycle and the news and what's now pumping, what's now happening and where people's attentions are now.

You just keep going because you hope that there's an accumulation of things that you can continually point to and each case builds on the last, right? Each case, refine the techniques for the next, right? And so I think that's what allows it to, to keep going in a way. It's not, it's not the attention span of, of people, I think, that is the fuel for this. It's the idea that these need to be documented and we need to believe in a, in a, in a, that accountability can happen.

As Ghassan Abu Sittah said very clearly, and I really agree, if we do not have accountability here, what will the next war look like? What will the next war look like? If this is ignored, what happens next? If we believe that there's no rules here, what happens next? And we're already seeing now, Russia escalate, right? These, these are not going to be isolated crimes. These are going to spread unless we do this careful work and bring from all sort of institutions and counter institutions accountability here.

Emily Tripp: Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to a little bit of what I was saying earlier and also just to echo all my brilliant colleagues on the call. I mean, accountability isn't one thing. It can be lots of different things, and it shouldn't just be dependent upon one particular international system or order.

And I think there has been a tendency, particularly as, you know, we can learn from many other contexts, you know, looking at Syria, for example. You know, what happens when accountability or the mechanisms for accountability fail? What happens when you can't see the immediate kind of justice in inverted commas?

And I think we all have to do a really good job of finding out exactly what accountability means to the Palestinian, the Palestinian whose child has been shot or to the person who's lost the entirety of their family in a single airstrike. And I think our job as documenters is to do that work, you know, not just of the documentation, but also of the listening and figuring out how can we make sure that all of the stuff that we're doing, all of the material that we're collecting can eventually be handed over to a locally driven form of accountability, no matter what that looks like.

And I think part of that, of course, is the journalism and is the media and is the awareness. The, there are lots of other parts of it. There's the work that exactly as, you know, people like Josh Paul are doing on pushing policies but there's also work, you know, going on in, in kind of military circles and how you change military norms around civilian casualties. So I think all of that is a kind of huge, broad brush.

And when it comes to kind of cutting through the noise, I think the thing that I always try and tell myself is that it's not really about me. It's not about what I'm interested in. It's not about what, what gets me up in the morning. It's about, do I understand what the work, you know, if the work that we're doing is strategic and has a really good impact and is empathetic at the end of the day.

And I think that's what came across really well. In the stories that were told throughout that documentary and the work of all of the, you know, really brilliant journalists at Al Jazeera and elsewhere in Gaza who are doing this, you know, really difficult work.

Samaneh Moafi: I think there is also something to be said in terms of kind of like understanding incidents. And I think this is something that's Emily in Emily's work, we see this kind of done really, really well, that we're not in the case of Gaza we're not looking at individual incidents that have their own logic and kind of like sit outside of the context, but we're actually looking at a system, a kind of like a systematic way of destroying hospitals, medical infrastructure, a systematic way of mass displacement, a systematic way of of killing children, right?

I think this is also our task, to to point to that any, any incidents that we're looking at, it's, it's important to kind of like, come to that bigger scale and show it as part of of the context that it is.

Lawrence Abu Hamda: Can I just add one little thing?

Tyler McBrien: Please, Lawrence.

Lawrence Abu Hamda: I did find it remarkable that Matthew Miller, Matthew Miller is a spokesperson for the State Department, his last word on, on the murder of Hind Rajab and her family was that the Israeli army has actually asked for the Palestinian Red Crescent to give them the phone recordings so that they can do their own investigation and that was refused.

Okay, now that was the last word on this from the State Department, right? That's, that's astounding knowing, you know, it's really treat us like idiots, right? I mean, we have, we, that work, that, those calls are in the open source, no matter that. But it's also that they have all of the information, drone footage, all of the geolocation of where all of their tanks are. I mean, let's not, let's not, let’s not make people out to be idiots.

You know, that that is an army that with its all, all its system of documentation and film and footage. It is, it is producing a mass amount of media that it itself has access to. It knows exactly what happened on that day and could do it like that, right. And so the, the, the, it was preposterous to have someone say that from some, something like the, the volleys, the, the lofty heights of the State Department.

Almost to say that if only they could have access to open source information, you know, as if we are somehow privileged as investigators, right? I mean, it's, it's, it was an absurd retort. And, and I found it, and you could see that he was incredibly satisfied with that answer. And then he just walks off and that's the last line on this. And I find that that's not challenges absolutely, you know, shocking, really shocking.

Kavitha Chekuru: I'm just going to add to that, so Nebal Farsakh, the spokesperson for the Red Crescent, after Matthew Miller said that, she was asked by The Intercept if that was true, and she said no, no one's gotten in touch with us.

And I should also add, COGAT, which is a department or arm of the Israeli military that handles coordination, they told The Washington Post, they confirmed that they gave that map to the Palestine Ministry of Health and then to the Red Crescent so that the Red Crescent ambulance could go to Hind. So, an arm of the Israeli military has acknowledged that they gave, that they were aware of what was happening, and the State Department has just chosen to ignore that.

Tyler McBrien: I mean this, I think this directly speaks to the importance of the work of investigators and documentarians, who shouldn't have to be getting to the heart of the matter, because as you mentioned Lawrence, others have the capability but maybe not the willingness, but no less speaks to this importance as I was saying.

So with that, I really want to thank the four of you for taking the time and speaking with me today. I would like to also encourage any listeners who have not yet seen the documentary to watch it. It's called “The Night Won't End: Biden's War on Gaza.” And it's part of Al Jazeera's Fault Lines series. So thank you all so much for joining me.

Emily Tripp: Thank you so much.

Kavitha Chekuru: Thanks for having us. This was great.

Samenah Moafi: Thank you.

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