Democracy Now! 2026-02-26 Thursday

From New York, this is Democracy Now! Suffice it to say, it is highly unusual to see shootouts in open sea like that. It's not something that happens every day, it's something frankly that hasn't happened with Cuba in a very long time. Four armed Cuban exiles on a speedboat were killed Wednesday in a shootout with Cuban border troops. Cuba says the men were attempting to infiltrate the country. Six other men were injured and are being held in hospital in Cuba. This comes as Cuba's facing a growing humanitarian crisis due to a U.S. oil blockade. We'll speak to Code Pink's Medea Benjamin just back from Cuba, then to the massacre of aid workers in Gaza. An 11-month investigation by Forensic Architecture and Earshot has uncovered how Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinian aid workers a year ago, then tried to cover it up. We'll speak to the investigators in London, then to the Committee to Protect Journalists. 129 journalists were killed worldwide in 2025, making it the deadliest year on record since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting this data in 1992. Israel was responsible for two-thirds of these killings in attacks on the press in Gaza, Yemen, and Iran. We'll look at the record number of journalists being killed worldwide, as well as a new CPJ report on Palestinian journalists being tortured in Israeli prisons. All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. I'm Amy Goodman. U.S. and Iranian negotiators have begun indirect negotiations in Geneva over Iran's nuclear program after President Trump ordered the largest deployment of U.S. forces to the Middle East since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ahead of the talks, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions on 30 people accused of enabling Iran's oil sales and weapons production. This comes as Trump's envoy, Steve Whitcoff, is claiming Iran has enough fissile material to make a nuclear bomb within days. But several nuclear experts say Iran's nuclear program hasn't advanced since the U.S. and Israeli military struck them last June. This is Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Aragji. We were negotiating last June when Israel attacked us and then the U.S. joined that attack. So that memory is still fresh for us. The wounds of that aggression is still alive in our minds. So we cannot forget that once we negotiating with the U.S. and then they decided to attack us. Meanwhile, independent journalist Aida Chavez is reporting that Democratic lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee are trying to prevent a vote on an Iran War Powers resolution sponsored by Congress members Rochanna and Thomas Massey. The bill would require every member of Congress to go on the record about a potential U.S. war with Iran. Four Cuban exiles were killed Wednesday in a shootout between Cuban border guards and a U.S. speedboat carrying 10 Cuban exiles. According to the Cuban government, the men on the Florida-registered speedboat opened fire when Cuban forces approached the boat for an inspection off the northeast coast of Cuba. The Cuban guards then fired back, killing four of the men. and six others were injured are now being held in Cuba in hospital. The Cuban government says the men were attempting to carry out, quote, an infiltration with terrorist ends, unquote. Cuban media reports the men were carrying weapons, Molotov cocktails, bulletproof jackets, and camouflage gear. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. will investigate what happened. Rubio was speaking at a gathering of Caribbean leaders who expressed alarm over the growing humanitarian crisis in Cuba due to the U.S. oil blockade that's cut off the island from desperately needed fuel. On Wednesday, two Mexican Navy ships departed from Veracruz with over 1,000 tons of humanitarian aid for Cuba. Russian officials say they're discussing the possibility of providing fuel to Cuba. And on Wednesday, Canada became the latest country to pledge food aid to Cuba. We'll have more on this story after headlines with Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, who's helping to organize a humanitarian solidarity mission to Cuba next month. She's just back from the island. Dozens of international aid organizations have made a final appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court to prevent a de facto ban on their operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank set to take effect in early March. The 37 international groups, including Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, collectively provide more than half of all food assistance in Gaza, operate the majority of field hospitals, and run all inpatient treatment for children suffering severe acute malnutrition. This comes amidst a surge of violence by Israeli soldiers and settlers targeting Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. On Tuesday, settlers set fire to vehicles and tents in the Palestinian village of Susia. This is Resident Ahmed al-Nawajah. We were shocked when around 30 settlers arrived. They were carrying incendiary materials and burned this tent and that one. They burned the chicken coop. They burned all the furniture. They left nothing. The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem says it'll offer passport and consular services to U.S. citizens in two Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. It's the first time the State Department's offered such services a move the Palestinian Authority condemned, is a, quote, clear violation of international law and a blatant favoring of the occupation authorities, unquote. A New York Times review finds key documents related to a woman who accused Donald Trump of assaulting her when she was a minor are missing from the Justice Department's release of the Epstein files. The missing documents are comprised of FBI memos summarizing interviews the agency conducted with the woman in 2019. She spoke to the FBI after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and claimed she'd been sexually assaulted by both Donald Trump and Epstein in the 1980s, when she was just 13 years old. The Times notes, according to the Index of the Epstein Files, the FBI conducted four interviews with the woman and provided summaries of each interview. But only one of the summaries, which details her accusation against Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. On Wednesday, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said he'll resign as a professor at Harvard University at the end of the semester over his ties to Epstein. Summers had previously served as president of Harvard. Summers had been on leave since last November after the Harvard Crimson Student Newspaper detailed how Summers had asked Epstein for relationship advice, how to have an affair with a person he was mentoring. Meanwhile, Bob Kerry, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska, resigned from his role as chair of the company Monolith over his ties to Epstein. Nobel laureate Richard Axel also announced his resignation as co-director of Columbia University's Neuroscience Institute over his association with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The president and CEO of the World Economic Forum, Borja Brenda, said he was resigning after the forum launched an independent investigation into his relationship with Epstein. Meanwhile, Bill Gates has apologized to his staff of the Charitable Foundation over his ties to Epstein. Gates also acknowledged he had two affairs with Russian women that Epstein later discovered. According to a recording obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Gates admitted he first met with Epstein in 2011, years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. A federal judge has ruled the Trump administration's policy of deporting immigrants to third countries to which they have no ties is unlawful. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy said that immigrants challenging the Department of Homeland securities policy, have the right to meaningful notice and can object before they're deported to a third country. In Buffalo, New York, a disabled Rohingya refugee from Burma has been found dead after he was abandoned by Border Patrol agents about five miles from his home. Fifty-six-year-old Nurul Amin Sha'alam was mostly blind and spoke no English. His family told reporters, no one at the Department of Homeland Security warned them or his lawyers that he'd been released from jail and dropped off alone outside a coffee shop on a cold winter night. Minnesota Congress member Ilhan Omar is demanding an investigation into the arrest of her guest at the State of the Union Tuesday night. Alia Rahman was removed from the House chamber and jailed, all for standing silently during President Trump's speech. She described her arrest on Democracy Now! I was not just removed and arrested. I was arrested so physically that two other attendees upstairs attempted to intervene in officers pulling on my shoulders after I told them, I have a torn rotator cuff tendon and multiple cartilage tears in both of my shoulders. In a statement, Minneapolis Congressmember Elhan Omar wrote, quote, the heavy-handed response to a peaceful guest sends a chilling message about the state of our democracy, unquote. Alia Rahman is a U.S. citizen. She was injured last month when federal immigration agents smashed her car window in Minneapolis and dragged her out of her car. She's autistic, reportedly telling them she was disabled repeatedly. She was detained at the Whipple Federal Building and later released without charge. The Trump administration announced one day it's freezing more than a quarter billion dollars in Medicaid reimbursements to the state of Minnesota. In announcing the move, Vice President J.D. Vance cited a fraud scandal that's been linked to a handful of Somali-Americans in Minneapolis. Nearly 1.3 million people in Minnesota received some form of Medicaid coverage or about a quarter of all state residents. In a statement, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz condemned the Trump administration's actions, writing, quote, The agents Trump allegedly sent to investigate fraud are shooting protesters and arresting children. His DOJ is gutting the U.S. attorney's office and crippling their ability to prosecute fraud. And every week Trump pardons another fraudster, unquote. President Trump's nominee to become the next U.S. Surgeon General appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Wednesday, where she declined to encourage parents to have their kids vaccinated against measles and influenza. Casey Means is a wellness influencer, author and entrepreneur. She and her brother Callie Means are key figures in the Make America Healthy Again movement, advisors to Health Secretary RFK Jr. during his 2024 presidential campaign. Casey Means has a medical degree from Stanford University, but did not complete her surgical residency and allowed her medical license to expire in 2024. Under questioning from Senator Tim Kaine, Means repeatedly refused to state whether she agreed with Health Secretary RFK Jr. that there's no evidence flu vaccines prevent serious disease. A mountain of evidence about this. Do you believe that there's no evidence that the flu vaccine has efficacy in reducing serious injury or hospitalization? I... This is an easy one, doctor. This is an easy one. I support the CDC's guidance on the flu vaccine, and I will always be working with the CDC, ACIP, and the agency. So you believe it is an efficacious vaccine to reduce hospitalization? Is or is not? Is. You believe it is? As I said, I support the CDC's guidance on the flu vaccine. Let me just say. The artificial intelligence company Anthropic is dropping its core safety pledge in scaling its AI models. The company reversal comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an ultimatum to Anthropics CEO Dario Amadei to grant the Pentagon full access to the company AI models by Friday Hexeth reportedly threatened to cancel a million Pentagon contract and to declare Anthropica supply chain risk, and even said he might invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its AI models for military use. Amadei had previously warned against the use of artificial intelligence to help the U.S. government conduct mass surveillance and develop autonomous weapons. This comes as NBC News reports that in December, Anthropic agreed to allow the U.S. government to use its AI systems for missile and cyber defense purposes. And Brazil's Supreme Court has sentenced five men to prison terms after convicting them applauding the 2018 assassination of Rio de Janeiro City Councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes. Among those found guilty were former Congressmember Chiquinho Abrazio and his brother, Domingos. Marielle Franco is a black lesbian known for her fierce criticism of police killings and Brazil's impoverished favela neighborhoods. On Wednesday, her widow, Monica Benicio, celebrated the Brazilian Supreme Court's unanimous ruling. Marielle becomes a symbol, but because society has made her so, because it believes that this country can be much better than it is now. Justice for Marielle is not a slogan. It's a life task. It's the fight for building a society where people like Marielle and Anderson can live, flourish, and never be murdered for being who they are. And that's the message we leave here today, written in the history of Brazilian democracy. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. And I'm Nermeen Sheik. Welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. Four Cuban exiles were killed Wednesday in a shootout between Cuban border troops and a Florida-registered speedboat carrying 10 Cuban exiles. According to the Cuban government, the men on the speedboat opened fire when Cuban border troops approached the boat for an inspection off the northeast coast of Cuba. The Cuban troops then fired back, killing four of the six men. Six others were injured and are now being held in Cuba. The Cuban government says the men were attempting to carry out, quote, an infiltration with terrorist ends, unquote. Cuban media reports the men were carrying weapons, Molotov cocktails, bulletproof jackets and camouflage gear. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said, Quote, Cuba has had to face numerous terrorist and aggressive infiltrations from the United States since 1959 with a high cost in lives, injuries and material damage. A rigorous investigation is being carried out to clarify the facts, he said. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. will investigate what happened. Suffice it to say, it is highly unusual to see shootouts in open sea like that. It's not something that happens every day. It's something, frankly, that hasn't happened with Cuba in a very long time. And but but we're going to find out. We're not going to base our conclusions on what they've told us. Marco Rubio, who's Cuban-American, was speaking at a gathering of Caribbean leaders in St. Kitts and Nevis. At the meeting, regional leaders expressed alarm about the growing humanitarian crisis in Cuba due to a U.S. oil blockade that has cut off the island from desperately needed fuel. The Trump administration recently threatened new tariffs against any nation that sends fuel to Cuba, which has been under a U.S. economic embargo since 1962. The U.S. has been ratcheting up pressure on Cuba since early January when U.S. forces attacked Venezuela and abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores. On Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced it would partially ease the blockade and allow Cuba's private sector to import Venezuelan oil, but restrictions remain on the Cuban government. The U.S. move is widely seen as another attempt by the Trump administration to weaken the Cuban government. We go now to Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink. She was in Cuba two weeks ago providing humanitarian aid. She was also just in Venezuela. Code Pink, the Progressive International and other organizations are planning to launch a land, sea and air humanitarian solidarity mission to Cuba in late March. So, if you can deal with this breaking news, the 10 Cuban men, apparently, in a speedboat headed to Cuba, explain what you understand happened. At this point, four are now dead, six have been taken by Cuba. I understand that a boat that was carrying weapons and people who were going to infiltrate Cuban waters and somehow escape the U.S. Coast Guard, because they're not allowed to even go to Cuba, managed to get within one mile of Cuba's northern province of Santa Clara. and that they were approached by a Cuban Coast Guard that wanted their identification. The U.S. boat opened fire, and in the shootout, there were four Cubans living in the United States who were killed and six were wounded. I should say that when the U.S. blows up boats in the Caribbean, when there are people in those boats that weren't killed, it goes back to kill them all. Instead, Cuba took the six to a hospital for treatment. I also want to say that the brother of one of those murders said, it was quoted in the AP story today, that his brother had fallen into a diabolical and obsessive quest to change the Cuban government. A diabolical and obsessive quest. And I think that characterizes U.S. policy for the last 60 plus years. So, Medea, could you say a little bit more? What is known about these 10, the four killed, the six detained? Were they all Cuban nationals, any of them American citizens? They were all Cuban nationals living in the U.S. in Florida. Two of them were on a Cuban wanted list for prior criminal activities, attempts at terrorism. And we're learning as the time goes by about the others of them. This has happened before. While Marco Rubio said it's unusual to have a shootout in the seas, that's true. But it is not unusual to have terrorists infiltrating Cuban territory. In fact, there are in the history blowing up of tourist hotels so that tourists would be afraid to go to Cuba and constant attempts to infiltrate. Of course, there are hundreds of attempts to kill Fidel Castro. The southern Florida Cubans are obsessive and diabolical, and they must be stopped. And unfortunately, they are represented in our government, in our Congress, by people like Representative Maria Salazar and also by Carlos Jimenez and D.S. Ballard. And they're represented at the highest level of government by our U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Well, let's go to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is, as we mentioned earlier, Cuban-American, speaking on Wednesday. What the Cuban people should know is this, that if they are hungry and they are suffering, it's not because we're not prepared to help them. We are. It's that the people standing in the way of us helping them is their communist party. That's who's standing in the way. If they move out of the way, we're more than happy to work with individual Cubans so they can have an opportunity to feed their families and build their economy. But we are not the impediment. They are. So, Medea, that is Marco Rubio. If you could explain, you were just in Cuba a couple of weeks ago. I mean, Cuba has been under sanctions, sorry, a U.S. embargo since 1962. But explain what's happened in the last months when sanctions have been so tightened that prices are so high for basic items. I mean, as he mentioned, people are hungry, that they're totally out of reach. And also the food scarcity that there is now in Cuba. Yeah, what Marco Rubio said would be laughable were it not so tragic. On January 11th, Donald Trump said that no oil and no money would be going to Cuba, zero. This is, as you said, a policy that has been going on for over six decades now. And it has been tightened in such a medieval siege type of way by Donald Trump. to stop all oil from going to Cuba has created a terrible crisis where workers don't have transportation to get to work. When they get to work, there's no electricity. Students are having a hard time getting to school. The hospitals are having a hard time functioning. There's a terrible scarcity of medicines. The food is scarce and high-priced. Farmers now don't have access to irrigation or fuel for tractors. This is a tragedy that's been going on and has been exacerbated since COVID. And with U.S. policies of putting Cuba on the state sponsor of terrorism list, which is something Donald Trump did. And unfortunately, Biden waited to the last week of his presidency to lift and then it was put on right again. This means that Cuba can't function in the world trade system. It can't use the international banks. These sanctions that the U.S. put on are not just to stop U.S. companies. They're designed to stop other countries and companies around the world from dealing with Cuba. And so you don't have fuel. The garbage piles up in the streets. The mosquitoes proliferate. Mosquito-borne diseases proliferate. There's not the ability in the hospitals to take care of people. Cuba, once known for a lower infant mortality rate than in the United States, It's now infant mortality rate is rising. This is a tragedy. It's condemned every year by the world community, by everybody except the United States and Israel. And yet it keeps going on. And I think now, finally, the world community, and especially in Latin America, is rising up to say, no, we cannot let this keep going on. Canada has announced $8 million in funding for Cuba as the country grapples with President Trump's oil embargo, as the U.N. warns of a humanitarian catastrophe in Cuba. Can you talk about what CodePank, Progressive International and other groups are doing? Talk about what you plan for the next weeks. Yeah, we are excited to announce that on March 21st, there will be a convergence in Havana of people arising, getting there by boat, by plane. There are also a group, the People's Forum, that will be collecting and is collecting lots of solar panels, taking them through Mexico to ship to Cuba. And people can also come on their own. We have chartered a plane from Miami that will fit 100 people. And we will be going the delegation that is Code Pink Progressive International and Global Health Partners leaving on March 20th to 23rd. You can join us. Go to the CodePink.org page and it's the first thing that will pop up. This is a time actually to go to Cuba. The Cubans have asked people to come in solidarity to see the conditions there for themselves. We have to, especially in the United States, where we have such a responsibility for this catastrophe that is going on right now. We have to go there. We have to raise money for Cuba. And we have to protest Cuba policies in Congress. Call your congressperson. We have to show Marco Rubio that the U.S. community is absolutely opposed to a policy designed to create hunger and desperation. Finally, you also just came back from Venezuela. We're in New York, not far from where the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife are imprisoned at the detention center in Brooklyn. The USS Gerald Ford, the largest aircraft carrier that was used in that attack and the abduction, is now nearing Iran in a massive military buildup. not clear if Venezuela, the U.S. attack there, will be the model for perhaps an attack on Iran. But tell us about, in this last minute, what you found in Venezuela. We found that people are horrified by what the U.S. did of coming in and abducting their president and the first lady on bogus charges. People also are horrified that the U.S. people don't even know care that over 120 people were killed in that operation. Also, that there has been this economic warfare against Venezuela as well, designed to create hunger and designed and led to a mass migration that then the U.S. doesn't want the Venezuelans here anymore. They create the problem and then go in and say, OK, we're going to fix it. We're going to take Venezuela's oil and start rev up production. But it was the U.S. that led to the decline of the production by not allowing the spare parts to come in, by not allowing the companies to actually work there. So we're calling for the freedom of Nicolas Maduro and Celia Flores. We're calling for a lifting of the sanctions because they haven't been lifted. We're calling for the U.S. to recognize the government now of acting President Delce Rodriguez so that there can be diplomatic relations. But I just want to say to close that this is a time of the Monroe Doctrine being accelerated now to the Donroe Doctrine, where the U.S. thinks that it can go into any country in Latin America. And now they're focusing on Venezuela and Cuba, but they have their sights said on Colombia, on Mexico, on other places. And we cannot allow us to go back to the days of gunboat diplomacy where the U thinks that it is allowed to violate sovereign nations and it can have hegemony over the hemisphere These are sovereign countries We must leave them alone Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, was just in Cuba providing humanitarian aid. Code Pink, along with Progressive International and other groups, are leading a land, sea and air humanitarian solidarity mission to Cuba later in March. We'll link to your new article, Suffocating an Island, What the U.S. Blockade is Doing to the People of Cuba. Coming up, an 11-month investigation by forensic architect Jernir Shad has uncovered how Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinian aid workers a year ago, then tried to cover it up. Back in 30 seconds. PIANO PLAYS The New York City Palestinian Youth Choir performing Una Dicom. I call out to you at the historic Riverside Church. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shek. We turn now to Gaza, where almost one year ago, Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers in a sustained two-hour attack on a rescue convoy and then attempted to cover it up. The soldiers buried 14 bodies in a shallow mass grave and crushed the rescue vehicles with heavy machinery. The ambush took place in the early hours of March 23, 2025, in the area of Tel el-Sultan in southern Gaza. Those killed include eight aid workers with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, six Palestinian civil defense workers and a U.N. relief agency staffer. The independent research groups Forensic Architecture and Earshot have painstakingly recreated a minute-by-minute accounting of what took place. The 11-month investigation draws on audio and video recordings from the scene, open source and satellite imagery, and the in-depth testimony of two survivors. this is a clip. To give you an idea, it was still dark. We crossed the ambush site without noticing the vehicle. Then we met Saleh and Ashraf's ambulance at the Eklimi crossroad. Forensic architecture built a 3D model based on the testimony and available visuals, while earshot used echolocation to analyze the more than 900 shots fired. They concluded that Israeli forces were in an elevated position when they began firing, then moved towards the aid workers while continuously firing. Paramedic Rafat Radwan was recording on his cell phone from inside one of the vehicles when the attack started, showing the ambulances had their lights on when the attack started, contradicting Israel's initial claim that the convoy had approached suspiciously with their lights off. The sounds of Israeli gunfire were recovered when Rawan's cell phone was found after his body was exhumed. For more, we're joined by two of the investigators. Samaneh Moafi is assistant director of research with Forensic Architecture, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan is the founder and director of Earshot. He's been described as a private ear rather than a private eye. For his work as an audio investigator was recently profiled by The New Yorker magazine. They're both joining us from London. Samaneh, why don't we start with you? Tell us about the day, what happened, what was understood at the time, and then what you found as you dissected what took place. On the day, shortly before 4 a.m. in the morning, there is an airstrike in Al-Hashashin. two recrescent ambulances are sent to rescue those who are injured and one of them loses contact so time passes the recrescent sends more ambulances to search for the lost ambulance and then they're joined by the civil defense by a civil defense ambulance and a fire truck and they find the missing ambulance, they approach it, and then upon approaching, they're shot at again. Our investigation brings and kind of shows a detailed analysis of what exactly took place, minute by minute, from the beginning to the days and weeks and months that follow. And Samaneh, could you also talk about the broader context in which this incident occurred, what the situation was in Gaza at the time when this incident occurred, March 23rd last year, 2025? Of course. So a ceasefire had begun in January in Gaza, on the 19th of January. on the 18th of March the ceasefire is broken by a series of nighttime airstrikes by the Israeli military about 400 Palestinians are killed in these nighttime strikes we have on the 20th of March leaflets dropped by the Israeli military across Gaza with genocidal messages the incidents This airstrike in Al-Hashashin happens on 23rd of March, right? So five days after the break of the ceasefire by the Israeli military. Then the attack happens on one of the ambulances. Then it's followed by a kind of like an attack and an execution of a convoy of rescue workers who come searching for the missing ambulance. and then I can also say what happens after. Immediately around, we've been able to show that the attack continues for over two hours. So until 7 a.m. in the morning, where we have the last recording of the night, of the night, we can hear sounds of shooting, right? At about 8.30 a.m., leaflets are dropped in Talasultan, telling people to evacuate their homes. At this time, we also have a series of kind of like earthworks beginning on this area. So we have the construction of pits that then are used for interrogation. We have the construction of checkpoints. On the very same road, we have the burying of the bodies and we have the burying and crushing of the ambulances and the emergency vehicles. At this point, by this point, two UN vehicles had also arrived on site and were also attacked. One of the two survivors of the incident from the rec recant, on their orbit, was used as what he described as a kind of a human tool to monitor the checkpoint, to do the work for the Israeli military, to separate Palestinian men from women, and then put the ones that the Israelis are saying into interrogation pits. And so that's kind of like that's the early hours, right? We see the construction of these earthworms at a satellite image that is available from 11 a.m. on that morning. Now, if we pass, so kind of like what follows is a destruction of a clearing of Talas Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. And then what we have is a kind of a turn, right? So we have the militarization of aid. So by this point, there has been months that no aid is entering Gaza. And we have kind of like a construction of four sites for distribution of aid. But of course, what they're doing is luring Palestinians in so that they would be killed again. One of these eight distribution sites is actually constructed right by the site of the massacre and the execution of aid workers in Tella Sultan. I want to bring Lawrence Abu Hamdan into this conversation. It's an amazing story, the crushing of the ambulances and burying them to hide what had taken place. But Lawrence, can you explain the role of your organization, Earshot, in analyzing the gunshots, what exactly took place, what you found, how many shooters, their locations? Again, you've been called, rather than a private eye, a private ear. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. So, you know, this is a classic case for an organization like Earshot. We do audio analysis for human rights and environmental advocacy. And when we have a case like this where the evidence is really heard but not so much seen, right, because the main piece of evidence that was taken by Rifat Ridwan, he was holding the camera to his chest as he was covering from the gunfire. And so you see very little, but you hear almost everything that happens. And you hear it in stereo. So what we could do is, over 11 months, analyze each of those gunshots and sort of piece together the whole story of what happened. And what we found out is that they start firing from an elevated position where the vehicles would have been in full view, about 40 meters to the southeast of Rifat's position. Then they begin advancing after about four minutes of gunfire. This is really intense gunfire. So, you know, in those first five minutes, you're talking about 850 shots fired. At the towards the last minute and 30 seconds of that video, the Israeli soldiers walk in as they're firing. They move at a walking pace of about one meter per second. And then they arrive at the position of the aid workers. There we start to hear new echoes that we don't hear on the rest of the recording. Those are the echoes reflecting off the ambulances themselves, indicating that the soldiers are in and amongst the ambulances as they're firing at the aid workers for the last shots. These are when the video cuts. And we assume these are the moments of the execution. They're within meters of the aid workers. And actually, our analysis could go one step further, is that by sort of looking at the orientation and the organization of the ambulance around the shooter, we could see which was the most likely one that was producing each echo, right? So each shot produced three echoes. And we could configure that and triangulate that between the echoes to find that for one of the shots, the 860-second shot fired that night was fired from as close as one meter to one of the paramedics, Ashraf Abul Abda's position. and this is the moment where we hear the last sounds of him, his last voice, his final movements. So we really suggest that this is the shot that executed him. Another key part of our audio analysis was to confirm the witnesses as the survivors as really the most reliable source of documentation for this event. In every key moment, we could corroborate what they said and how they explained the event and including some very small details that we could hear and pick up. The movements of ambulance, someone tried to escape. We hear it on the recording. The use of specific weapons that happened much later, two hours later. So I really want to push that forward while I'm with you today, is that it took a year's worth of work for us to really corroborate those testimony, but those survivors have been saying this information all along. So we're trying to get them the audibility with this case. We want them to be heard finally as the most reliable narrators of this event and to amplify their voices. And we see this time and time again. We also, together with Forensic Architecture, published our joint investigation into the killing of Hind Rajab. Again, Hind says it over and over again. The tank is next to me. They're firing at me. It took our work to show that, yes, the tank was 12 meters away. But she's not a tragic victim of war. She is a witness to the crimes being perpetrated against her. And we're trying to get Palestinians that audibility by listening so intensely to these crimes. Hind is a little five-year-old, six-year-old girl who was killed by an Israeli tank. Her whole family, her aunt and uncle and her cousins, had already been killed in this car. And there this Asken Amnane the documentary The Voice of Hindra Jabb that tells her story Following an internal military inquiry the commanding officer back to the killing of the aid—Palestinian aid workers of the 14th Brigade, received a letter of reprimand for, quote, his overall responsibility for the incident. And the deputy commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion involved in the incident was dismissed from his position due to, quote, his responsibilities as the field commander and for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief, unquote. No criminal actions recommended by the inquiry. Lawrence, finally, as we only have a minute to go, if you can comment on this and also your being able to figure out some of the names, if only the first names of the Israeli shooters, the Israeli assassins. Yeah, with the really limited resources we've had, you know, two phone calls to the Palestinian Red Crescent headquarters and one recording taken under extreme duress, we've been able to piece together this crime. There is no reason why the Israeli army, with all of its GPS coordinates, its drones in the sky, couldn't have done this internal investigation at a way higher resolution than we can have done. So we expect, you know, this is simply an obstruction of justice. It is a flagrant war crime to attack medics and to kill them from and execute them from meters away. And so we just do not find it adequate at all, the response to this crime. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, director of Earshot. Also, Samaneh Moafi of Forensic Architecture, assistant director of research. We thank you so much for being with us. We'll link to your new report, Israeli executions of Palestinian aid workers and efforts to conceal evidence. Coming up, we speak to the Committee to Protect Journalists about the torture of Palestinian journalists in Israeli prisons. Stay with us. Thank you. Song Tsionghar New York City Palestinian Youth Choir, I call out to you. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermeen Sheh. We now turn to the treatment of Palestinian media workers held in Israeli prisons since October 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists reviewed testimony and evidence from 59 Palestinian journalists, finding strikingly consistent reports of beatings, forced stress positions, sensory deprivation, sexual violence, including rape, starvation and medical neglect while detained. The journalists lost an average of 52 pounds in Israeli prisons. Most of them were held under Israel's so-called administrative detention policy and were never charged with any crime. The Committee to Protect Journalists recently released its findings in a report headlined, We Returned From Hell. Palestinian journalists recount torture in Israeli prisons. This is part of the testimony of Palestinian photojournalist Shadi Abusido. He was detained in the notorious De Teman prison for over 100 days. I was filming the suffering of people in Al-Shifa medical complex, and I am a civilian. He ordered me to take off all my clothes, so I did. Then he tied my hands behind my back immediately and said to me, you will learn the meaning of journalism in Tel Aviv here. He tied my hands, blindfolded me, and the first thing he did when he finished was break a rib here. That was the welcome. After that, he made me sit for more than 10 hours in the cold. It was in March, more than 10 hours sitting naked in the winter. Not to mention that he would come and beat me with punches. And that was just the beginning, along with the verbal insults. For more, we're joined by Sarah Kouda, Middle East and North Africa Regional Director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, joining us from Paris, from France. Welcome to Democracy Now, Sarah, explain what you found. Thank you, Amy. To be honest, this report was one of the most difficult reports to work on because you are listening to human beings who are describing inhuman conditions they had to face for months and some of them for years. The scale of these testimonies point to something far beyond the isolated misconduct that Israel tries to convince the general public. Across 58 testimonies from the 59 journalists that we interviewed, they described reoccurring sets of abuse from beatings, starvation, sexual violence that even reached to actual rape in so many cases and medical neglect directed at journalists because they are journalists and because of their work. This exposed a deliberate strategy by Israel to intimidate and silence journalists and destroy their ability to bear witness to what is happening in Gaza. Torture and abuse inside the Israeli prisons have been reported on for so many years, but the scale and the intensity of the abuse and torture since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza has increased and intensified. And Sarah, could you tell us, have the Israeli authorities responded at all to your findings? In a single case, they did respond to us. And the response was that they treat all prisoners under the international human law, and they investigate in any misconduct that happens inside the prisons. But when we sent our emails and messages to the Israeli prison facilities and to Itmar Ben-Gafir office and the ministry, they did not respond to any of the testimonies of the journalists that we interviewed. And how many of these journalists remain in prison, Palestinian journalists? Until today, we have 32. So until the day of publishing the report, there were 30 journalists who are still in prison. But as of today, we have still 32 journalists who are in prison. We were able to contact one of the journalists, a female journalist, through her lawyer. And she did report on being beaten and that she was abused inside the facilities. She also told us or she told her lawyer and her lawyer told us that she did submit a complaint regarding the abuse and the torture. And in return of her complaint, she was put in confinement and solidarity confinement. And we wanted to continue by looking at your other report. The Committee to Protect Journalists has found a record 129 press workers were killed worldwide last year. The Israeli military was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings worldwide due to attacks on journalists in Gaza, in Yemen and Iran. More journalists and media workers were killed last year than in any of the previous three decades for which CPJ has collected data. And the previous record was set just the year before, in 2024. The number of journalists killed in Sudan and Ukraine also rose. But journalists were not only killed in conflict zones. CPJ documented journalists killed in Bangladesh, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mexico, Nepal, Peru, the Philippines, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as well. They were targeted often for their reporting on corruption and crime. According to CPJ, there have been very few transparent investigations and no one has been held accountable for these deaths. Sara Kuda, if you could talk about the wider findings of this CPJ report. 100 percent. To start with, because the biggest or the biggest number of journalists being targeted and killed, it was in Israel. This shows the systematic pattern that Israel is using to silence the journalists, by killing them, targeting them, imprisoning them, intimidating them, and also smearing them. So this is in the context of Israel. Worldwide, we see that the journalists are being targeted because of their work. It is now the most dangerous time for journalists to work since we started documenting in 1992. They tell us that this profession is becoming a very dangerous profession and journalists might be killed just because they are trying to convey the truth for everyone in the world. We have in this in this report, we have documented even new patterns of targeting the journalists. We documented using the drones and it is a very high technology, sophisticated technology to target civilians. It was widely used in Israel, where at least 28 journalists were killed in Israel by drones. It was also used in Sudan widely by the RSF, used in Ukraine by the Russian military, where they killed four journalists in Ukraine targeted by drones. It was also used in single incidents, once in Yemen and once in Iraq. So we can see that there's a new global trend in targeting journalists. Also, the smearing. We have seen that Israel used the smearing campaigns as a tool to target the journalists or justify killing them after they killed them. In so many incidents, in 2025, journalists have been smeared for months, some of them for years. Like Anas al-Sharif, who was killed in August 2025. He was smeared months before he was killed because of his reporting on starvation and mass killing in Gaza. And then he was killed after being smeared. Other journalists were killed. And after they were killed, the Israeli authorities and the IDF said that they are terrorists. And we targeted them because they are terrorists. So we are seeing that the smearing is being used to justify killings and to target killings with full impunity. with no accountability or justice. Also crimes, organized crimes. In Mexico, per se, journalists, few journalists were targeted and killed because they were trying to expose corruption inside the country. And because of that, they were killed. So we can see now that the journalists are not only being killed by military or governments, they are also killed by organized crimes. And this is very this is something very alarming for us at the CPJ. And as the report mentioned, few investigations happened and no one was ever held to account to these killings. And so, Sarah, obviously you documented the killing of journalists in active war zones like Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. But you just mentioned Mexico. But in addition to Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Bangladesh, Pakistan. Can you tell us, are these killings that are mostly carried out by the state or by? Mostly by the state, some of them by organized crime groups, but mostly by the states. In Saudi Arabia, since you mentioned Saudi Arabia, the journalist who was killed is Turkey Jasser. He is a prominent journalist who was in prison four years before he was charged with a death sentence. And then he was hanged and killed last year, unfortunately, by the Saudi Arabia government. In Yemen, the journalist who was killed was killed by the Houthi army, which is a terrorist group, a terrorist-designed group. Zahra Kouda, we want to thank you very much for being with us, Middle East and North Africa, regional director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. We'll link to both of CPJ's reports, record 129 press members killed in 2025, Israel responsible for two-thirds of deaths, and we'll link to your report, We Returned from Hell, Palestinian journalists recount torture in Israeli prisons. That does it for our broadcast. Democracy Now! Produced with Mike Burke, Dina Guzder, Nermeen Shaikh, Maria Tarasena, Nicole Salazar, Sarah Nassar, Trina Nadura, Tim R.A. Studio, John Hamilton, Robbie Karenhan, Hany Masoud, Safwat Nassal, Sam Al-Khaf, our executive director, Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, John Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike DiFilippo, Miguel Negara, Hugh Grant, Karl Marxer, Dennis Moynihan. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh for another edition of Democracy Now! Thank you.