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Unknown A
Very fortunate to be joined this morning by Jeremy Skayhill, who is co founder of drops site News, alongside our very own Ryan Graham. Great to see Jeremy.
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Unknown B
Thank you, Crystal. Emily.
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Unknown A
Yeah, of course. So, a lot of developments here. Let's go ahead and put the tweet up on the screen. So you talk about here how Netanyahu is announcing he's blocking once again all humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip after Hamas refused to alter the previous deal and release Israeli hostages. BB is saying his decision was made in coordination with the Trump administration. And in addition, the Israelis have just completely backed away from even a pretense of continuing into phase two of the ceasefire deal to the extent that they even ever had such a pretense, since Netanyahu was always promising some of his coalition partners that it would never go beyond phase one. So if you could, Jeremy, just bring us up to speed here a bit.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I just rewind a little bit. First of all, on February 3rd, there was supposed to be the start of negotiations over the implementation of phase two. Netanyahu refused to ever send any negotiators. Instead, he goes to Washington D.C. and becomes the first foreign leader to meet with President Donald Trump and sits that meeting where Trump floated the Trump Gaza Riviera idea. Netanyahu has just been systematically violating the ceasefire. They've killed upwards of 120 Palestinians inside of Gaza. They've refused to allow almost any of the mobile homes. There were supposed to be 60,000 mobile homes sent into Gaza. Almost none of them have entered 200,000 tents. While there has been food aid and other forms of humanitarian aid going in, it's been far less than was stipulated under the agreement. And so, you know, when we look at what happened over the weekend, basically this is how it went down.
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Unknown B
Netanyahu and Israel took what was sort of a proposal paper from the American side. And everything I'm telling you is based on talking to sources involved with the negotiations. This happens where Egypt or Qatar or the United States, they kind of float proposals as a starting point for discussions. And as the Israelis did repeatedly throughout the Biden Harris administration, they don't even give Hamas a chance to review the proposal or give a formal answer. Israel then announces Hamas has rejected an American proposal for extending phase one of the ceasefire deal. What's interesting too, I spoke to a senior Hamas official who said we hadn't even been given a chance to review the whole thing before we even read in the papers, basically that Israel said that we had rejected the deal. What's interesting though, is Brian Hughes, Trump's National Security Council spokesperson, he was asked directly whether or not the Israeli version of events was true.
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Unknown B
Is this actually an American proposal? He ignored that question and then just kind of paid lip service to the idea. Israel has been negotiating in good faith for 15 months. So what we're seeing here is Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement repeatedly. Israel refused to send negotiators as stipulated under the contract. Israel is continuing to kill Palestinians inside of Gaza. And then Israel is continuing its multi decade arc of front running ceasefire negotiations with the Palestinians and then making announcements that make it appear that it is in fact the other side that's hindering the deal. When in fact, anyone that's read the agreement that Trump promoted as kind of the beginning of the end of this war and peace in the Middle east, the Israelis are the ones violating it. What's going to be interesting is to see how Steve Whitkoff, Trump's special envoy response to this.
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Unknown B
He's an interesting guy. He's very different from Anthony Blinken. The way that Blinken handled these situations where the Israelis just blatantly lied about something that happened in the negotiation was to openly coign Israel's lie. I'm not sure Witkoff's going to go that path. He could. My guess would be that he's going to sort of thread the needle, issue some kind of vague statement that defends Israel and calls on Hamas to come to the negotiating table. But everyone involved with this knows that Israel has been violating the ceasefire and now is blaming Hamas for something that actually Israel has done quite openly.
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Unknown C
Yeah, Jeremy, I was going to ask if you could talk to us a little bit more about that. Actually, it such an interesting dynamic you mentioned, Brian Hughes, but how has the Trump administration navigated this over the last several days? I mean, we were talking about obviously Ukraine earlier in the show, and Zelensky has tried to sort of invoke Hamas, interestingly enough. But so much attention has been on Ukraine in the last few days, despite all of this unraveling in the Middle East. So what is the Trump administration? How have they been responding to the developments?
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Unknown B
Well, you know, a week ago, Steve Witkoff made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows and at the time he was doing those interviews from Miami beach in Florida. And he also, for part of that visit was with Jared Kushner, who, even though he's not in an official position right now in the Trump administration, holds tremendous sway over the events that are going to play out in the Middle East. Witkoff said that he was optimistic that we're going to make it into a formal phase two of the agreement. But he did say that there's going to have to be an extension of phase one. There's another significant event happening this week, which is that the Arab Summit is convening, and they're going to be discussing an Egyptian proposal that is seen as a counter proposal to Trump's Gaza Riviera. And what's interesting about that, I've been talking to Palestinian analysts, and they didn't have a kind of apocalyptic response to Trump's announcement when he was alongside BB about, you know, taking over Gaza as a US Property and building hotels.
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Unknown B
Some Palestinians I've talked to sort of saw it also as a jab toward Netanyahu. Trump didn't say, we're going to turn it into the Israeli Riviera. Trump said the American Riviera. That was, for people that are following this closely, felt a bit like maybe a pushback on Netanyahu and something he wasn't entirely excited about. But the benefit for Netanyahu, and this happens with Trump all the time, he wants to talk about the border wall. He wants to talk about, you know, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden's laptop. That sets the agenda. What was the agenda that was set there? That Netanyahu liked the idea that Palestinians should be removed from Gaza. So it was a mixed sort of message that is certainly genocidal in its kind of overarching intent, but we're in the middle of negotiations here. Wykoff himself has shown that he's willing to poke Netanyahu.
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Unknown B
He certainly is a militant supporter of Israel. He certainly is a Zionist. He certainly is very anti Hamas. But he also has spoken with a diplomatic language that you didn't often hear from Antony Blinken. And, you know, Witkof also visited Gaza and saw the vast devastation that was there. That narrative was not actually all that great for Netanyahu. Maybe some of the really rabid, you know, kind of bloodthirsty people within Israeli societies were happy about it. But Witoff also managed to give a fairly accurate assessment of just how horrifying the destruction was in Gaza. So while I'm not like, you know, beaming with hope that Wick Hoff is going to save the day and that the Palestinians are going to get liberation, I do think that we're in a strange situation where potentially Trump could accidentally do something that would have been better than if things were left to Biden and Harris.
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Unknown B
And just one I'm not really a political journalist, but one political note, I find it disgusting to watch these kind of blue MAGA partisan Democrats who never made a peep about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris facilitating a genocide, now up in arms about Trump's AI video when they had nothing to say when their candidates were actually the ones creating the situation that now Donald Trump is presiding over as president. I mean, it just shows the rot at the center of some of our politics that partisan considerations are more important than what are your principles.
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Unknown A
Yeah, of course on the other side you had, you know, people who were claiming to be antiar who are now perfectly fine with the hey, let's just go ahead and ethnically cleanse the whole thing and take it for ourselves for sure.
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Unknown B
I mean there'a deep sickness on the other side of this as well. And you know, my favorite people are the ones that have both the, you know, the Ukrainian and the Israeli flags and their sort of Twitter bios. But absolutely. And that extends crystal to the free speech thing. Like J.D. vance when he went to the Munich Security Conference, he said things that are absolutely true about Europe's approach to free speech. But perhaps the most pervasive and serious violation of free speech in Germany, for instance, is the criminalization of speech opposing Israel's genocidal war where you have not just Arabs in Germany being hit with criminal violations, but Israeli Jews who live in Israel are being given criminal violations for using the term genocide to describe what Israel is doing. And you don't hear the Barry Weissces of the world rallying for, you know, the free speech protection of people in Europe who are opposing Israel's war.
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Unknown B
It just shows how kind of opportunistic and non principled so many of these voices are both among partisan Democrats and among many people within the MAGA movement or the so called anti cancel culture movement.
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Unknown A
Yeah, well of course he wouldn't want to bring that up because they're bringing that same criminalization right here domestically investigating Columbia University and these other places and threatening pro Palestine protesters with deportation. So I think that would be a little uncomfortable for them to bring those pieces up. Not to mention that they're align with that particular censorship. They're just opposed to censorship that happens to go against their own political ideological valence. Jeremy, just to go back to the deal, like what are the moving pieces now? What do you think is going to happen next? And also you guys have been doing such a great job covering what's happening in the occupied West Bank, Israel bombing Damascus and just being like, hey, we're just going to take over parts of Syria. Oh, and by the way, I know we said as part of our ceasefire deal, we're going to withdraw from Lebanon.
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Unknown A
We're not going to do that. We're just going to occupy Lebanon as well. It really looks like if you had listened to the most hardcore lefties or the most insane Zionist settlers at the beginning of this conflict of what was likely to happen and what their ultimate goals were, you would be much better served and have a much clearer understanding of the direction things we're heading in versus trying to glean these things from certainly the mainstream press.
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Unknown B
U.S. yeah. I mean, look, Benjamin Netanyahu is without a doubt a US backed arsonist running around the Middle East. And in the case of Syria, we're talking about Israel saying that the Syrian military cannot have any presence just south of Damascus, the capital of the country. And then when, when you look at the broader picture, 90% of the, not just the refugee camp of Janeine, but the broader Janine area have been forcibly removed from their homes. Israel is going through systematically knocking down houses, bulldozing up the roads, causing a sort of sense of terror to just emanate all throughout the West Bank. At a time when then Secretary of State Marco Rubio bypasses Congress, issues an emergency authorization to transfer 4 billion, roughly $4 billion worth of American bombs, guidance systems, armored bulldozers to go to Israel, at a time when Netanyahu is contemplating possibly ratcheting up military attacks on Iran again, when Israel is continuing to occupy five positions within Lebanon, when Israel is threatening all out war on parts of Syria, when Israel is trying to formally annex and terrorize the Palestinians of the west bank, when Israel is threatening to cut off
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Unknown B
electricity and water supplies right now to the Palestinians of Gaza just as Ramadan is beginning, and while Netanyahu and his people are continuing to try to use the stamp of legitimacy of the United States to lie about who's actually violating the ceasefire, the question is going to be called very, very soon on what Donald Trump's agenda actually looks like for the Middle East. And it's pathetic that we sort of have to hope that he accidentally stumbles into something less than a continuation of the genocidal war. Such is the reality that we find because of a failure to stop this war, when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were president.
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Unknown A
Jeremy, so great to have you. And I was saying to Emily earlier, it's just incredible what you and Ryan have done at drop site and how indispensable you've become so quickly. Not that any of us are surprised by that, but kudos. To your to you for your work because it's been so important.
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Unknown B
But the Breaking Points Counterpoint community has been just an incredible boost for us and will always remain deeply grateful for the work that you all do.
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Unknown A
That's really kind of you to say. Thank you so much. Jeremy. Great to see you.
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Unknown B
You too. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.
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Unknown A
And if you'd like to get the full show ad free and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up@breakingpoints.com.
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Unknown B
That'S right, get the full show helps support the future of independent media@breakingpoints.com.