Chapo Trap House, Democracy Now!, and Breaking Points highlight new Drop Site scoop

While Instagram blocked it

One thing the national debate about Biden’s fitness for office has done is push the war on Gaza and Israel’s lower-scale ongoing war with Lebanon almost entirely off the front pages and the cable news shows. Yet ceasefire talks have resumed and Israel’s attack on the West Bank – which, btw, is not run by Hamas! – has rapidly accelerated. (This drone footage is not of Gaza, it’s Tulkarem in the West Bank.) 

CIA Director William Burns is traveling to Cairo to join the talks after significant concessions from Hamas, which has been demanding a full, permanent ceasefire as a condition for any deal. My colleague Jeremy Scahill is reporting that, according to high-level officials within Hamas, the group is open to making a preliminary agreement for a first phase, with the understanding that a permanent ceasefire would be on the table and a priority for moving to other phases. “If you look to the text on both sides, it is easy to bridge the gaps,” a Hamas official told Jeremy. “Israel is working very hard in order not to achieve an agreement, because I think that this agreement will dismantle the coalition in Israel. I think this will be the end of the political career for Netanyahu.”

While American officials are able to negotiate with Hamas, here at home, it’s much more controversial. Scahill did an interview with Democracy Now! this morning about his reporting, and it was repeatedly taken down by Instagram, which told users it “goes against our Community Guidelines on dangerous individuals and organizations.” (Scroll to the bottom for an image.) Ask anybody in Gaza, the IDF is also dangerous, but you’re allowed to interview them.

The ceasefire talks are going on in a media environment in which the American public hears routinely from one side of the war and quite-simply-never from the other side. That leaves gaping holes in our understanding of that conflict. It also leaves some glaring questions unanswered: What was Hamas thinking on October 7? Why did they launch the attack? Do they consider it a success despite the human cost of the response? 

Scahill explored these thorny questions directly with Hamas officials, some of whom agreed to speak on the record, and we published his first dispatch this morning. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so. There’s much more to come in the days and weeks ahead. You won’t find this kind of reporting anywhere else. 

Jeremy and I were on Chapo Trap House yesterday talking about his reporting, as well as about Drop Site News in general. We also went on Breaking Points this morning.

A snippet from Jeremy Scahill’s story: 

On a tactical level, the October 7 operations exceeded Hamas’s projections. “It was very surprising for us how speedy one of the strongest brigades in the Israel Army—the Gaza brigade is one of the strongest, most sophisticated groups of their army—to collapse within hours without any serious resistance, and that even the state as a whole, for hours and maybe days, continued to be paralyzed, were not able to respond in the proper professional way,” said Dr. Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau and a former government minister in Gaza.

“They were able to create this image of undefeated, undefeatable army, undefeatable soldiers, the long hand of Israel, which can hit everywhere or strike everywhere and come back, relax, to drink at some cafe in Tel Aviv, like what they have done in Iraq, in Syria, Lebanon, everywhere. I think it has shown that [Israel’s self-promoted reputation] was not reflecting the reality.” The attacks, he said, showed Palestinians and their allies that “Israel is defeatable and liberation of Palestine is a good possibility.”

…

Naim credited the October 7 attacks and the nine months of armed insurgency against the invading Israeli forces for elevating the plight of Palestinian liberation to the center of global attention. “This popular support everywhere, especially in America and Europe, do you believe this would happen by a workshop in Washington, D.C., discussing between Palestinians and Americans how to run Rafah crossings?” he asked. “Unfortunately, this is the way. There is no other way.”

Ghazi Hamad, the former Hamas deputy foreign minister and a longstanding member of its political bureau, told me that no one involved with the planning of the October 7 attacks that he spoke with predicted the full scope of Israel’s response and that many Hamas leaders expected a more intense and prolonged version of previous Israeli attacks on Gaza. “This is a point that is very sensitive,” he said. “No one expected this reaction from the Israel side, because what happened now in Gaza, it is a full destruction of Gaza, killing about 40,000 people, destroying all the institutions, hospitals and everything. I know the situation is horrible in Gaza. It's very, very hard. And we need at least ten years to reconstruct Gaza.”

“This war is totally different,” Hamad said. “Totally different.”

Read the full story here.

And if you missed it yesterday, check out my interview with Dem megadonor Dmitri Mehlhorn, who made the case for why Biden will stay in the race.

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More soon,

Ryan

P.S. Here’s what happened as we tried to share a clip of Scahill’s interview on Democracy Now.