Do you guys talk about the future at all, like beyond just the day to day and whatever that may entail, but like what life might look like in weeks or months? Do you guy talk about that?

Well, the first days of the war, we were talking about the future, the next day of the war, but then you can say that we kind of lost hope.

When I first spoke to Mahmoud Jarousha in late May, 2024, he was feeling down. Mahmoud and his family had already been displaced three times since October 7th. As Israel waged its war against Hamas and Gaza, his dreams for college and a career had been put on hold. He was feeling very different, though, when he sent me a voice message in January of this year.

Hi David, the atmosphere here in Gaza is electrifying.

There was news that a second ceasefire was about to take effect. You could hear just how much his mood had improved.

We are much happier than you could imagine. We sit together and we ask each other questions like what's the first thing you're going to do when they declare the ceasefire? What will you do when you go back to our destroyed house in Gaza?

'That optimism was short-lived. The ceasefire lasted just eight weeks. Amos released 33 hostages, but phase two of the deal never materialized. Fighting resumed, and Israel implemented a total blockade of humanitarian aid, which lasted for months. Well, this week, Mahmoud sent me another voice note.

What is happening here in Gaza right now is beyond imagination, inhumane and devastating.

'Hunger has swept through Gaza. Aid agencies say the enclave is on the verge of a full-blown famine. Doctors are struggling to remain upright while treating the wounded. Horrific images of mothers holding their skeletal children have gone viral.

In my family, we have reduced the number of daily meals to one in order to survive.

Mahmoud said what little food exists in the markets is outrageously expensive, and because there's no cooking gas, even firewood is pricey.

We saved some money by using our furniture from the damaged apartments of our house. You know, it is quite sad to watch your furniture burn in front of your eyes.

The international outrage at these dire conditions has forced Israel to relax restrictions on aid in recent days. But is it enough? And could this moment be a tipping point in the war? My guest today is Arwa Damon. She's a former CNN correspondent and the founder and president of the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance. We're gonna talk about what it would take to bring real relief to Gaza. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind. We're back in a bit.

So, Arwa, when was the last time you were in Gaza?

Uh, that would be in December of last year. I did try to go back in February and March and I attempted five times to enter and then finally got the full on denial of entry from Israel.

Well, so these horrifying images we've seen recently of mothers holding babies that are just skin and bone, did you think that that was where this was headed at the time when you were there last?

At the time, no, not to this degree of severity. I mean, there's something that we need to recognize in that what we're seeing right now and the challenges that we as aid groups are facing right now are not necessarily new, but the scale and scope of them is look all along the course of these last nearly two years right now, we at various points in time have seen. You know, the screws on aid being tightened and eventually slightly released to the point where we have largely as a humanitarian community been able to stave off the worst of it. Right now, we're not able to, we can't.

It does seem like these images and stories have sparked international outrage in a way that we hadn't really seen up to this point. Does it seem like there's been a shift in public opinion? Cause it's not like there has been a shortage of horrifying and upsetting images over these nearly two years the war has been going on. So why does this moment feel different?

Because I do think that we've reached a point where what's happening in Gaza is undeniable.

'Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a bold-faced lie.

Israel is repeating the same old refrains of how it's letting aid in, of how there's plenty of food in Gaza. We heard Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself even say that starvation doesn't exist in Gaza

There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza. We enable humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza. Otherwise, there would be no Gazans.

But the story on the ground is entirely different.

Well, how did things get so bad? Like what's been going on over the last couple of months that has led us to this point?

Well, what happened in March was that Israel broke the ceasefire and then very shortly afterwards completely shut off all humanitarian aid access. So for two months, nothing entered the Gaza Strip, not even a grain of rice. Then in May, we had the establishment of this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that was set up under the auspices that we in the humanitarian community are infiltrated by Hamas and that Hamas is basically stealing our. The aid from us and then using it as a means to exert control over the population. This is categorically, first of all, untrue. Irrespective of that, the GHF did start working.

In a world where the quest for survival can turn deadly, none has been deadlier than trying to collect aid through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private American organization backed by Israel.

And the problem with the GHF is that access to its distribution hubs, of which there are only four, so if you just think about that for a second, there's only four locations for more than 2 million people to go to collect aid from. And those locations require people to cross through Israeli red zones where they've been coming under fire both by the Israeli defense forces and for the gun for hire foreign GHF contractors.

'Sixty percent of all aid-related killings since late May have taken place near GHF sites, according to a CNN analysis of Palestinian health ministry data. GHF rejected what it called false and exaggerated statistics and said there is violence around all aid efforts in Gaza.

What we're also additionally seeing, though, is that because aid trucks are so scarce, because there is such scarcity, that even trucks that are collected by aid organizations are being looted by crowds of desperate Gazans. And if this happens in the Israeli red zone, those crowds are, again, also coming under fire by the IDF.

'A CNN investigation into one of the first GHF-linked shootings in early June pointed to the Israeli military opening fire on crowds of Palestinians. The Israeli military denied it then. The military now regularly acknowledges that troops have opened fire on Palestinians heading to aid sites, often describing the shootings as warning shots.

So it all goes back to what is being created because of scarcity, which is why we need this massive flow of trucks into Gaza.

You mentioned the steps that Israel has taken. They've paused military activity in certain areas. It's clearing the way for air drops. Is any of that a meaningful step in the right direction?

'Not unless it leads to more. Air drops are extraordinarily ineffective. And as we've heard numerous aid organizations saying a distraction, something of a grotesque distraction. If we look at all of the air drops that were carried out, for example, in the first 24 hours since those air drops began by Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates, they amount to barely a couple of trucks at best. And people have been injured. And so it's not only just highly inefficient, it's also very, very costly. And air drops cannot and will not meet the needs of the people, and they won't even begin to stem the starvation. And basically during, let's call them normal times, pre-October 7th times, Gaza used to receive five to 600 trucks a day. And this isn't just food. This is also, you know, medical supplies. This is all so shelter supplies. This is also anything that you would need to actually sustain life and function. Right now, the situation is so dire that that would be the bare minimum that we would need see come in. This little trickle of trucks that we're seeing coming in now that Israel announced this pause and announced that it would be opening humanitarian corridors. They're not enough to stave off the scarcity or the starvation. And so as long as we have this sort of drip feeding of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the suffering that we're seeing right now is going to continue. And so we, at the bare minimum, need hundreds of trucks to be going into Gaza every single day.

Yeah, I was going to ask what would a humane, fair, orderly process actually look like? But it sounds like you're saying that there are still a lot of challenges even if the right amount of trucks we're getting in.

The challenges are massive. And I mean, look, I wrote about the issue of looting actually for CNN over a year ago. And we in the humanitarian community, we've been repeatedly saying that it's not Hamas that is stealing our aid because the looting happens again in the red zone that is completely controlled by Israel. And it's always been a massive challenge. And we had long speculated that the only way for armed gangs to exist in these red zone. You know, moonscapes, would be with Israel's knowledge, because again, Israel is fully in control of these zones. We can only cross them through a laborious movement request process where Israel either approves or doesn't approve our presence going through these areas. Now, what was quite interesting was that actually Benjamin Netanyahu himself admitted in June that Israel has been arming gangs. And at the time. When he made this statement, he actually defended the decision of Israel arming the gangs, saying that they were helping the IDF in the fight against Hamas. But the point is that when we have to cross through these areas, we have always been facing looting by these armed gangs. And the only time that we have been able to sort of see conditions where the looting doesn't exist, again goes back to points in time, i.e. The ceasefire. When aid is not scarce. Because there becomes no financial value to actually looting an aid truck if the aid that's on that truck doesn't have value in the market.

'Yeah, and just to those Israeli claims that the aid is being stolen by Hamas, a recent internal review from the US government found no evidence of widespread theft of US-funded aid findings the Israel Defense Forces reject. But on the US side, President Donald Trump seems to recognize the gravity of the situation, or at least that the public sentiment seems to be turning against Israel.

But we're gonna be getting some good strong food. We can save a lot of people. I mean, some of those kids are, that's real starvation stuff, I see it. And you can't fake that.

He said, you can't fake starvation like the world is seeing. He said Israel has a lot of responsibility to let the aid in.

And I told Israel, I told Bibi that you're going to have to now maybe do it a different way.

Vice President J.D. Vance says Israel needs to do more to get aid into Gaza. So beyond just the strong words, are there levers the administration can pull with Israel and Netanyahu to get things up to a level that aid groups say it needs to be at?

Yes, of course. The US has the biggest lover of all, which is its military assistance to Israel and its military support to Israel. So the US most certainly has the levers that it can use right now. You know, many in Gaza themselves or many observers around the world, all also firmly believe that if the US actually were to decide to improve the situation in Gaza, It can decide and it can change things right now. Only the US administration has the power to say to Israel, open the border, let the trucks in, let humanitarian organizations do their job.

Meanwhile, inside Israel, we saw two Israeli human rights groups come out and accuse Israel of genocide this week, something Israel has strenuously denied throughout. Does that kind of pressure make any kind of difference?

'One needs to hope. I mean, look, from the get-go, we've been seeing this massive campaign by Israel to discredit us as humanitarian organizations and to discredit anyone who has been attempting to talk about what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza. But now they're hearing it from their own, but you also have former Israeli leaders like Ehud Olmert coming out and himself very blatantly saying Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza.

But at the same time, there's been reporting that very little is shown on Israeli media of the suffering inside Gaza. So the Israeli public may be not seeing the images that the rest of the world.

Yeah, that's very true. And it's quite interesting because I actually do hits talking about the humanitarian situation on rare occasions on Israeli media. And the public in Israel does not have access to what's been happening, at least not through their traditional news outlets. And it is also important to remember at this stage that the vast majority of Israelis, irrespective of how they feel about Gazans themselves, they do care about and rightfully so. The fate of the hostages. And so what cannot get lost in all of this is, whatever Israel is doing to Gaza, it is also doing that to the hostiges themselves.

If there's no food for the general population, the hostages certainly won't have access to any of that either.

No, and, you know, the bombing risk, the only time that we really saw, you know, hostages being able to go back home has been during periods of either a pause or a ceasefire.

I guess finally Arwa, you and your team have had a lot of FaceTime with people on the ground in Gaza. What do they tell you about what they think the world is missing or doesn't understand about what their going through right now?

I think the hardest thing and, you know, look, we have a team, you know, in Gaza right now. We have our staff in Gaza. Right now they are from Gaza. And I got a message from one of them the other day that just said, Arwa, I'm hungry. Why is this happening to us? And then he very quickly apologized and said, I am sorry. I didn't mean to sort of unleash on you, even though he really hadn't. And he said, I'm sorry, I just, I am so weak. I'm barely able to get up and get through the day. Except he does every single day. And he goes to our medical clinic and he works with the patients who are coming in and he does what he can. Our program coordinator a few weeks ago went and carried out a family visit because this mother had shown up hysterical at our medical clinic. Her children were starving. She had twin babies who had some of the worst reddish diaper rash I've ever seen because they'd just been sitting in basically pee and diarrhea filled diapers for hours on end. And while Yousra was there, one of the older kids told her that it was his birthday. And he wasn't asking for a cake, he was asking for bread. And so she ended up actually going back on her own time, finding a couple of loaves of bread, stacking them on top of each other and sticking a candle in them for this little boy. And the thing is, is when you talk to people, it's not necessarily that they... I mean, they know that the world is watching what's happening. They know that everything is all over social media and TV. And so they're not asking themselves, you know, does the world know what they're asking themselves is how can the world to know and not do something about it?

Well, Arwa, thanks so much for the perspective. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

On Tuesday, international outrage against Israel continued to grow. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the UK would recognize a Palestinian state in September unless Israel takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza and meets other conditions. It follows last week's announcement from France that it too will recognize a Palestinians state starting next month, a move Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said would quote 'reward terror.' That's it for us today. We're back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then. Thanks for listening.