AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israel is scheduled to free 110 Palestinians, including 30 children, from its prisons, after Hamas released three Israelis and five Thai nationals held hostage in Gaza since October 7, 2023. The exchange took place as Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Israel and became the first senior American official to enter Gaza in nearly 15 years. Witkoff toured the Israeli-occupied Netzarim Corridor separating northern and southern Gaza, embedded among Israeli soldiers. Witkoff is also meeting today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s scheduled to visit Trump at the White House next week. Netanyahu’s trip comes just two months after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Muhammad Shehada, writer and analyst from Gaza. He’s chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, joining us from Copenhagen.

Muhammad, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what unfolded today in Gaza and, as of the time of this broadcast, what is expected to unfold when it comes to the prisoners released by Israel, Palestinian prisoners?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Sure. Thanks for having me, Amy.

So, today, Hamas released an Israeli soldier that was captured from Nahal Oz, Agam Berger, in addition to two other civilian Israeli hostages that were released in Khan Younis and five Thai workers.

There’s a significance in the way that the release was conducted. Agam Berger was released, basically, in Jabaliya, an area that Israel has wiped out over a process of over a hundred days of systematically destroying every single building in the city. Nothing is left standing. And in Khan Younis, the other hostages were released right in front of Yahya Sinwar’s house, also an area that Israel invaded, wiped out systematically, bombed indiscriminately. So, in both, there is the attempt to say that Israel had no clue throughout these 15 months how to get the hostages out militarily, and the only way to get them out is through a ceasefire, which has been the position mediators have been reiterating for over 15 months.

The other thing is that Netanyahu is trying desperately to use any loopholes in the agreement to collapse the ceasefire. We saw that last Saturday when he was supposed to open up the Netzarim Corridor and allow people to go to northern Gaza, and he withdrew from that last minute, postponed it indefinitely, until mediators pressured him. And it happened on Monday in return for hostages that were released today outside of the framework. Today he’s delaying and procrastinating the release of Palestinian captives and prisoners, citing that Hamas’s release of one of the hostages or two in Khan Younis was overcrowded and hostile to the hostages themselves. So he’s demanding a “safe passage,” quote-unquote, which, in other words, as Israeli media is warning us every single day, Netanyahu is trying everything he could to sabotage the deal from this early on. This is why you had Steve Witkoff go to Gaza to see it with his own eyes yesterday, before he even met with Netanyahu, to signify how little trust he has in the Israeli prime minister, to see the progress of the ceasefire on the ground himself and also to emphasize to Netanyahu that the deal has to be seen through.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Muhammad, could you talk a little bit more about that, the significance of Witkoff’s visit? He was in Saudi Arabia before he came to Israel. He’s the first senior, as you said, U.S. official in years to actually go into Gaza. And today he met with Netanyahu, but also with his far-right Cabinet minister, Finance Minister Smotrich. So, you know, what do you make of this? And your assessment of his work on the ceasefire agreement that was reached, that could not — that the Biden administration failed to reach?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Thanks, Nermeen. Very good question. So, basically, with Witkoff, as you said, it’s the first visit in over 15 years. The last time we had a similar visit was John Kerry, when he was a U.S. senator, in 2009, very brief, didn’t even continue for over a day, so only border areas in Gaza and then left immediately. There was not even the pretense by any U.S. official ever since to want to see what’s inside Gaza. So, this is monumental in the sense that he broke a taboo that has been established for over a decade.

The other thing is that with Witkoff’s visit to Gaza, there’s also, as you said, the meetings with far-right Israeli ministers. The parallel track that he’s working on is the issue with transferring a million and a half Gazans to neighboring countries. And Israeli media, until last night, have been saying that this is a dead-serious topic that he’s discussing seriously with Netanyahu and his ministers. At the same time, we got the pulse of different sources in Israel, like a Cabinet minister who told The Times of Israel that this talk, this rhetoric about transferring Gazans outside, might appease the Israeli far right and allow Netanyahu to carry on with the deal. It might give Israel the alternative victory image, that it couldn’t destroy Hamas militarily, but now they want to maintain Gaza as an uninhabitable territory to push people to leave. So that might give them this alternative victory image. But on the other side, you have Palestinians saying immediately, “We’re not going to leave, no matter what.” Israel tried that repeatedly in 1951. That’s when they first started trying to convince Egypt to take 12,000 Gazans and resettle them into Sinai. Gazans protested, rioted in an intifada in '55 and killed it. My own family were kicked out of Gaza in ’67 to Egypt, and they were living there for about 27 years. They never forgot. They went back to Gaza as soon as there was an opportunity with the Oslo Accords. So it's not something that is going to be workable for Trump to carry out. You have even people from his own camp, like senators, that are saying that this is unworkable, this is improbable.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Muhammad, also, you know, before we move to other issues, the significance of Trump inviting Netanyahu, just as this is occurring, next week to the White House?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, it has two significances. Number one is that the U.S. is signaling that international law is obsolete, that they tossed it into the garbage. The international rule-based order is no longer valid, because you have here someone with arrest warrants on his head by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity being honored in Washington, D.C., and in the White House, the highest executive branch of government.

At the same time, the other significance is Trump has been showering Netanyahu, lavishing him and his far-right extremist ministers with an enormous, unprecedented gift bag from the moment he walked into office. Some of these gifts are under the pretext of bribing Netanyahu to agree to the ceasefire, but other elements in there have to do more with an extremist, messianic pro-Israeli agenda. So, for example, you have a U.S. immediate lifting of all sanctions on Israeli settlers and extremist groups that the Biden administration imposed. You also have an immediate process to sanction the International Criminal Court and collapse it because it dared to go after Israel. You have that visit to Washington, that Biden was reluctant to extend to Netanyahu despite Biden’s full complicity in the Gaza genocide. And you have other gift bags that are being showered on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu to buy their complicity and silence.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about UNRWA. International staff working for the U.N.'s main agency serving Palestinians have been forced to leave Israel after its ban on the agency came into effect. This is the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United — I want to go to the UNRWA spokesperson, Jonathan Fowler, who said Israel's decision could trigger a collapse of humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

JONATHAN FOWLER: We’re responsible for over half of deliveries inside the Gaza Strip, over half of the aid coming in. You know, UNRWA, I mean, has been described repeatedly — not by ourselves, but, you know, by others — as the backbone of the international aid operation, because the rest of the aid operation is just — the U.N. presence is just a few hundred people. A few hundred does not equal 5,000. Without UNRWA being able to operate, there’s a very real risk of this — the humanitarian operation collapsing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this is extremely significant, Muhammad, UNRWA out as all the Palestinians are flooding into northern Gaza. If you can talk about both of these issues? Of course, UNRWA is larger than Gaza. It’s serving millions of Palestinians throughout the Middle East.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Precisely. Well, UNRWA is Gaza’s lifeline. If you take it out, this is a death sentence to Gaza’s population. Since the ceasefire was enacted, my inbox has been flooded with messages from colleagues, from family members, from friends and loved ones, who are literally begging to help to find them any place to stay, to help to even find a tent in northern Gaza, to help to find food to put on the table. If you take UNRWA away, it gets only way worse than this. Whatever rudimentary, basic level of survival that is sustained in Gaza now with the little aid that’s coming in, a lot of it is going to be explicitly banned by Israel, because the Israeli legislation, it bans any imports to Gaza with UNRWA’s label on it, as well as dismantling UNRWA’s network also in Lebanon, for example, where Palestinians are living in refugee camps in abysmal conditions. UNRWA is a vital lifeline there.

But it’s not only a matter of service provider. UNRWA has played a transformative role for many Palestinians. My own father, whose family were kicked out in '48 by Israel to a refugee camp, the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, he would have been a barefoot child with no life, with no income, with no purpose, if it wasn't for — in part, for UNRWA providing the infrastructure for education that brought him up as the doctor that I was very proud of until his death because of Israel’s blockade. I myself wouldn’t be standing in front of you now and speaking English and even knowing about politics or the history of the conflict or the history of the Holocaust, if it was not for my UNRWA educational system. I would have not had an educational opportunity. So, if you take all of that away from Gazans, it falls into Israel’s plan to prevent any capacity in Gaza to maintain organized human life, so that people would have to leave, so that Gaza is being emptied out completely. And that’s the main concern.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Muhammad, finally, if you could talk about the continuing Israeli assault in the West Bank, in particular, on Jenin?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: So, basically, part of the gift bag that Netanyahu gave to his extremist minister Bezalel Smotrich to agree to the ceasefire in Gaza was to extend the war goals, under the radar, quietly, to include the West Bank. So, now the West Bank, from Israel’s perspective, is a war zone. So, that’s why you have, for example, Israeli checkpoints booming and skyrocketing all across the West Bank, despite the IDF chief of staff, who is a settler himself, Herzi Halevi — he is not a pro-Palestinian left wing, but that IDF chief of staff, he warned Netanyahu and Smotrich. He said, “Don’t put these checkpoints. It will lead and push Palestinians to take to arms, to armed resistance, to resist Israel’s occupation.” But Netanyahu overruled him. In Jenin, you have a way worse dynamic than the rest of the West Bank, where Israel is trying to turn it into a clone of Gaza — ethnic cleansing, pushing people out and destroying homes systematically, one after the other. All of it is to explode the West Bank, to use it as a pretext for a major war to push Palestinians out. That’s the agenda of Israel’s extremist ministers at the moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, we thank you so much for being with us, writer and analyst from Gaza, chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. And that does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks so much for joining us.