Israel has continued to intensify its attacks across the Gaza Strip as President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he hopes a ceasefire “is going to happen and we're looking for it to happen sometime next week.” His comments come as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed he will travel to the U.S. this weekend and is expected to meet with Trump, his national security team, and U.S. Congressional leaders. Despite Trump’s public campaign for an agreement for a ceasefire in Gaza, Hamas has said there have been no substantive new proposals submitted and that the discussions seem to be exclusively between Israel and the U.S.
Meanwhile, Israel launched a new series of raids in cities and villages across the occupied West Bank Tuesday as part of a continuation of a months-long series of assaults and ground incursions that have resulted in the largest forced displacement operations against Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.
Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous are joined by two Palestinian analysts for a wide-ranging discussion on all of the latest developments: Jehad Abusalim, co-editor of “Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire” and Executive Director of the Institute for Palestine Studies-USA, and Abdaljawad Omar, an adjunct professor at Birzeit University and a writer based in Ramallah.
Photo: Donald Trump speaks to the press on July 1, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images.
why is ther always a delay in starting podcast?
Read " On Palestine " by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe
Israeli responses to Iran's calling for the destruction of Israel, saying one bomb will do the trick, and enriching uranium far beyond that needed for peaceful uses of nuclear energy are not attacks. They are self-preservation.
Hamas can end the suffering in Gaza at any time -- by surrendering and telling its fighters to lay down their arms so the demilitarization of Gaza and the deradicalization of the Gazans can begin. Israel is fighting to prevent Hamas from fulfilling its vow to inflict 1,000 October 7's on Israelis, a vow that was cheered by Gazans.
how about ending Israeli occupation .
hamas was created to fight the occupation
What "Occupation"? Israel removed all security personnel and Israeli civilians from Gaza well before Hamas was elected by the Palestinians living in Gaza. Hamas claimed an Israeli "blockade" prevented Hamas from developing the area's economy; yet, Hamas managed to spend $1,000,000,000 building its extensive system of terror tunnels, with fortifications deliberately embedded so deeply amid the Gazan populace that Israel's response to Hamas attacks would inevitbaly kill some civilians depite Israell's exemplary efforts to avoid civilian casualties.
1967
In 1967, Egypt and Syria instigated a war against Israel with the open intention of destroying the Jewish state and annihilating her people. Israel responded preemptively (after Jordanian troops fired on western (Israeli) Jerusalem) and succeeded in liberating Gaza and the "West Bank" (Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem), areas that had been seized by Egypt and Jordan in wars of aggression in the 1940's. Israel also succeeded in taking the Golan Heights (from which Syrian forces had been staging attacks on Israeli communities for decades). Israel offered to withdraw from newly-liberated land in exchange for recognition and peace but the Arab League rejected the offer; there is no record of any Palestinian leader having objected to the League's "Three NOs of Khartoum" so that the Palestinians could build a state. Nor had Egypt or Jordan made any move toward granting Palestinians any degree of autonomy during their illegal occupations of Gaza and the "West Bank."
1948
In 1948, Arab leaders went to war, trying to prevent the Jews from getting a modern state in their ancestral homeland. Had those leaders helped the Arabs of Palestine prepare for the autonemy offered them by the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, there could have been a Palestinian state co-existing with the Jewish state without a single drop of blood having been spilled.
Instead, Arab-initiated violence saw the creation of two refuge groups. Between 400,000 and 700,000 Arabs fled or were displaced from Palestine and
1,000,000 MIzrachi Jews were subsequently driven from their homes in the Muslim countries of the MIddle East and North Africa. Some of the MIzrachim emigrated to France or the U.S. but 800,000 of them were absorbed and uplifted by tiny Israel (at a time when food was being rationed in Israel, Israel was also rehabilitating survivors of the Holocaust, Israel was recovering from damages inflicted by Arab armies, and Israel was dealing with terrorist incursions from land grabbed by Egypt and Jordan. The descendants of the 800,000 Mizrachim comprise the majority of Israel's current Jewish population and every position in Israel's governance (except Prime Minister) has been filled, at one time or another, by someone with roots in the MIzrachi communities.
In constrast, Arab countries, with vast landholdings and oil riches (for some), refused to grant citizenship to Arabs who'd fled or been displaced from Palestine. Their descendants have become 6,000,000 "Palestine refugees" on UNRWA rolls, told they will remain in limbo until Israel is forced to give them the homes the "refugees" claim their parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents, ... lost when the State of Israel declared independence. But the "refugees" have grown up seeing Arabs honored and rewarded for killing Jews. Granting them citizenship (as expected from democratic Israel) would be the death knell of the Jewish State.