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The World Needs to Adopt a Real Humanitarian Goal: Removing Hamas From Gaza (PART ONE)
Palestinian women react at the site of an Israeli strike on a house, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip December 1, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
As a doctor who spent a lifetime of work in epidemiology and environmental medicine, I have extensive experience thinking about how external factors drive public health outcomes — preventable disease and premature death.
I have studied the negative public health impacts of asbestos, pesticides, unsafe driving, cigarettes, and more — and made recommendations aimed at reducing these dangers.
Much of this work occurred in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That experience has much to say about the catastrophe we have witnessed in Israel and Gaza, and which we risk reoccurring, if we do not address the intergenerational indoctrination and incitement in the Palestinian world.
As an environmental epidemiologist with significant work studying genocide and incitement, I see indoctrination in genocidal ideology as a form of hazardous exposure with toxic effects on all age groups — but with specifically dangerous impacts on the young. Exposure to such indoctrination and incitement can be likened to frequent or prolonged exposures to toxins such as lead, asbestos, and tobacco smoke. The impacts are both immediate and long-lasting. We should act accordingly.
October 7th
It’s critical that we see the Hamas massacres on October 7th and the resulting war in Gaza not just as a geostrategic milestone, but also as an incident in environmental medicine with impacts on both Israeli and Palestinian lives.
The barbaric attacks on Israel were systematic. For one day, Hamas waged total war — raping, murdering, and kidnapping — and setting out to make Israel’s Gaza envelope communities uninhabitable, which many still are, more than a year later.
Israel has responded by defending itself and seeking to defeat Hamas militarily. Because Hamas has placed itself within and often underneath the civilian population, this has required a brutal and grinding kind of warfare, combined with internal displacement of Gaza’s population, especially in its north.
For Gaza, this has been an epidemiological catastrophe. Whatever Gaza once was, it no longer is.
While some in the public health and humanitarian community blame Israel for this destruction, that would be a mistake.
The predicate for all of the public health losses was the ideology that made Israel’s military action inevitable.
Poisoned Minds, Not Poisoned Wells
In a disease model, we must look for the risks and causes of the disease, not merely the symptoms, if we are to heal the patient. The same is true in epidemiology: We must identify the content and effect of toxic exposure in a community. The legendary epidemiologic discovery came in 1854, when John Snow deduced that a cholera epidemic in London could be linked to a single water pump on Broad Street.
In this case, we are not looking for a contaminated well. We are looking for contaminated minds — the contaminant is the ideology of Hamas.
Hamas and its enablers have indoctrinated all Gazans in this ideology, from cradle to grave. Many of the thousands who came across the border to murder, rape, and loot on October 7 were not only uniformed and trained Hamas terrorists, but ordinary Gazans who joined in on the genocidal massacre.
They were motivated to commit murder and rape by what they were taught at home, at school, at mosques, in the streets, and on social media. If they had no formal training to kill, they didn’t need any.
It is rare that a society becomes so sick to the core that mass murder becomes a socially acceptable norm. Hamas terrorists bragged to their parents. They were greeted as conquering heroes and were eligible for large cash awards and free apartments. This is a culture in which genocidal massacre is celebrated.
Critics of Israel’s offensive into Gaza say it will only create more supporters for Hamas. That is absurd. Gaza already is dominated by intergenerational indoctrination of an extreme version of jihadist Islam.
It is critical that we recall Gregory Stanton’s seminal “Ten Stages of Genocide,” which speaks to this issue specifically. Genocide follows a distinct pattern, from classification of the enemy to symbolization of the enemy, to discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and finally, denial.
Just as Palestinian society has been shaped by genocidal motifs of demonization, delegitimization, and glorification of terror, it is also not destined to serve the cause of genocide. This was not inevitable. There are many traditional and religious societies in the Arab world similar to Palestinian Arabs which do not engage in any of the kind of genocidal or pre-genocidal steps of Hamas.
More than Hamas
If the problem is man-made, then the solution will be man-made. First, let us dispense with the fiction that destroying Hamas’ hardware, its fortifications above ground, and its tunnels underground is sufficient.
If Israel exits Gaza only having killed Hamas operatives and destroying Hamas infrastructure, it will have achieved very little of lasting value. It must take on the hard work of removing genocide indoctrination and incitement.
Like any epidemiological matter of any consequence, this will take many years.
Many public health epidemics and mass exposures in the past such as typhoid, cholera, exposure to asbestos, and lead took many years to prevent or control, and required a generational commitment of the entire medical and policymaker community.
De-Nazification as a model
There is, however, a model for this process, and it comes from America and its allies as they sought to de-Nazify Germany and pacify Japan after World War II. These efforts were comprehensive and driven by military dominance.
In Germany, the process included the Nuremberg trials, which did much to expose the world — and Germany — to the horrors of the Nazi genocide program. But it wasn’t enough.
The process was not perfect. Many former Nazis avoided punishment; some innocent Germans were unfairly accused. The Allied forces confiscated all media — including school textbooks — that would contribute to Nazism or militarism. Art extolling Nazism was similarly banned and shunted aside. This was not a libertarian exercise.
But it succeeded. Germany had, at that point, emerged from roughly a century of bellicose militarism and deep antisemitism. It had started two world wars and carried out an industrial-scale program of genocide. Few believed it could ever be anything but a source of human misery in the heart of Europe.
The Germany of today — peaceful, global, and prosperous — would have seemed to be a mirage. In fact, General Dwight Eisenhower, Allied commander in Europe, predicted the de-Nazification of Germany would take 50 years.
In Japan, too, the efforts were monumental. Japan had been a militant and bellicose society, with deep racial animus towards its neighbors and the West, for several centuries. Not only were its military and military industries disbanded, but outward signs of patriotism were banned in public life, including schools.
Massive other changes, including the introduction of a parliamentary democracy, the political rights of women, and basic free speech rights, were enshrined in its new constitution. Again, as in Germany, textbooks were censored and control over schools was strictly regulated.
Elihu D. Richter is a retired head of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Hebrew University School of Public Health and is the founder of the Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention.
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US Immigration Judge Rules Palestinian Columbia Student Khalil Can Be Deported
Mahmoud Khalil speaks to members of media about the Revolt for Rafah encampment at Columbia University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, in New York City, US, June 1, 2024. Photo: Jeenah Moon via Reuters Connect
A US immigration judge ruled on Friday that Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil can be deported, allowing President Donald Trump’s administration to proceed with its effort to remove the Columbia University student from the United States a month after his arrest in New York City.
The ruling by Judge Jamee Comans of the LaSalle Immigration Court in Louisiana was not a final determination of Khalil’s fate. But it represented a significant victory for the Republican president in his efforts to deport foreign pro-Palestinian students who are in the United States legally and, like Khalil, have not been charged with any crime.
Citing the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, Trump-appointed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio determined last month that Khalil could harm American foreign policy interests and should be deported for his “otherwise lawful” speech and activism.
Comans said that she did not have the authority to overrule a secretary of state. The judge denied a motion by Khalil’s lawyers to subpoena Rubio and question him about the “reasonable grounds” he had for his determination under the 1952 law.
The judge’s decision came after a combative 90-minute hearing held in a court located inside a jail complex for immigrants surrounded by double-fenced razor wire run by private government contractors in rural Louisiana.
Khalil, a prominent figure in the anti-Israel student protest movement that has roiled Columbia’s New York City campus, was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, holds Algerian citizenship and became a US lawful permanent resident last year. Khalil’s wife is a US citizen.
For now, Khalil remains in the Louisiana jail where federal authorities transferred him after his March 8 arrest at his Columbia University apartment building some 1,200 miles (1,930 km) away. Comans gave Khalil’s lawyers until April 23 to apply for relief before she considers whether to issue a deportation order. An immigration judge can rule that a migrant cannot be deported because of possible persecution in a home country, among other limited grounds.
In a separate case in New Jersey, US District Judge Michael Farbiarz has blocked deportation while he considers Khalil’s claim that his arrest was made in violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections for freedom of speech.
KHALIL ADDRESSES THE JUDGE
As Comans adjourned, Khalil leaned forward, asking to address the court. Comans hesitated, then agreed.
Khalil quoted her remarks at his hearing on Tuesday that nothing was more important to the court than “due process rights and fundamental fairness.”
“Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process,” Khalil said. “This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, a thousand miles away from my family.”
The judge said her ruling turned on an undated, two-page letter signed by Rubio and submitted to the court and to Khalil’s counsel.
Khalil’s lawyers, appearing via a video link, complained they were given less than 48 hours to review Rubio’s letter and evidence submitted by the Trump administration to Comans this week. Marc Van Der Hout, Khalil’s lead immigration attorney, repeatedly asked for the hearing to be delayed. Comans reprimanded him for what the judge said was straying from the hearing’s purpose, twice saying he had “an agenda.”
Comans said that the 1952 immigration law gave the secretary of state “unilateral judgment” to make his determination about Khalil.
Khalil should be removed, Rubio wrote, for his role in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.”
Rubio’s letter did not accuse Khalil of breaking any laws, but said the State Department can revoke the legal status of immigrants who could harm US foreign policy interests even when their beliefs, associations or statements are “otherwise lawful.”
After Comans ended the hearing, several of Khalil’s supporters wept as they left the courtroom. Khalil stood and smiled at them, making a heart shape with his hands.
Khalil has said criticism of the US government’s support of Israel is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism. His lawyers told the court they were submitting into evidence Khalil’s interviews last year with CNN and other news outlets in which he denounces antisemitism and other prejudice.
His lawyers have said the Trump administration was targeting him for protected speech including the right to criticize American foreign policy.
“Mahmoud was subject to a charade of due process, a flagrant violation of his right to a fair hearing and a weaponization of immigration law to suppress dissent,” Van Der Hout said in a statement after the hearing.
The American immigration court system is run and its judges are appointed by the US Justice Department, separate from the government’s judicial branch.
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Hamas Releases Video of Israeli-American Hostage Held in Gaza
FILE PHOTO: Yael, Adi and Mika Alexander, the family of Edan Alexander, the American-Israeli and Israel Defense Forces soldier taken hostage during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, pose for a photograph during an interview with Reuters at the Alexander’s home in Tenafly, New Jersey, U.S., December 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Stephani Spindel/File Photo
Hamas on Saturday released a video purportedly of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander, who has been held in Gaza since he was captured by Palestinian terrorists on October 7, 2023.
In the undated video, the man who introduces himself as Edan Alexander states he has been held in Gaza for 551 days. The man questions why he is still being held and pleads for his release.
Alexander is a soldier serving in the Israeli military.
The edited video was released as Jews began to mark Passover, a weeklong holiday that celebrates freedom. Alexander’s family released a statement acknowledging the video that said the holiday would not be one of freedom as long as Edan and the 58 other hostages in Gaza remained in captivity.
Hamas has released several videos over the course of the war of hostages begging to be released. Israeli officials have dismissed past videos as propaganda that is designed to put pressure on the government. The war is in its eighteenth month.
Hamas released 38 hostages under a ceasefire that began on January 19. In March, Israel’s military resumed its ground and aerial campaign on Gaza, abandoning the ceasefire after Hamas rejected proposals to extend the truce without ending the war.
Israeli officials say that campaign will continue until the remaining 59 hostages are freed and Gaza is demilitarized. Hamas insists it will free hostages only as part of a deal to end the war and has rejected demands to lay down its arms.
The US, Qatar and Egypt are mediating between Hamas and Israel.
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Some Progress in Hostage Talks But Major Issues Remain, Source tells i24NEWS
Demonstrators hold signs and pictures of hostages, as relatives and supporters of Israeli hostages kidnapped during the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas protest demanding the release of all hostages in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Itai Ron
i24 News – A source familiar with the ongoing negotiations for a hostage deal confirmed to i24NEWS on Friday that some progress has been made in talks, currently taking place with Egypt, including the exchange of draft proposals. However, it remains unclear whether Hamas will ultimately accept the emerging framework. According to the source, discussions are presently focused on reaching a cohesive outline with Cairo.
A delegation of senior Hamas officials is expected to arrive in Cairo tomorrow. While there is still no finalized draft, even Arab sources acknowledge revisions to Egypt’s original proposal, reportedly including a degree of flexibility in the number of hostages Hamas is willing to release.
The source noted that Hamas’ latest proposal to release five living hostages is unacceptable to Israel, which continues to adhere to the “Witkoff framework.” At the core of this framework is the release of a significant number of hostages, alongside a prolonged ceasefire period—Israel insists on 40 days, while Hamas is demanding more. The plan avoids intermittent pauses or distractions, aiming instead for uninterrupted discussions on post-war arrangements.
As previously reported, Israel is also demanding comprehensive medical and nutritional reports on all living hostages as an early condition of the deal.
“For now,” the source told i24NEWS, “Hamas is still putting up obstacles. We are not at the point of a done deal.” Israeli officials emphasize that sustained military and logistical pressure on Hamas is yielding results, pointing to Hamas’ shift from offering one hostage to five in its most recent agreement.
Negotiators also assert that Israel’s demands are fully backed by the United States. Ultimately, Israeli officials are adamant: no negotiations on the “day after” will take place until the hostage issue is resolved—a message directed not only at Hamas, but also at mediators.
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