152. "A War on Children": A Generation in Gaza at Risk (James Elder)

24:58I spent a lot of time with Robert Jenkins, who was your boss in Jordan, a kind of inspirational figure. But give us a sense of the difference between the kind of work that was going on in Jordan, where you were supporting Syrian refugees and providing emergency nutrition and water and the kind of work that you're doing in Gaza. What's the difference between UNICEF with refugees in Jordan and the kind of stuff you're doing in Gaza? The big one would be access. Access and trauma, Rory, that there you have a set population. Yeah, they've lost everything. So let's remember that. I think there's a problem with the word displacement.

25:32People forget the level of trauma that comes into that. So those people have lost everything. But it's a population whereby our greatest challenge to get those children back into school to ensure they've got the nutrition, the water, the health care is around funding. Our greatest challenges in a place like Jordan would be around funding. Otherwise, people know what to do. And it's a really important marker of humanitarian work. So humanitarian work is about going to where people need your support. And it's about making sure you've got the evidence base that your support is making a difference.

26:02So in a place like Jordan, we would know what to do because people like Rob Jenkins have been around. And it's then literally a sense of funding. If we've got the funding, we get the kids in school. We will rebuild the water systems, make sure everyone's got a right amount of water. Make sure that you've got health care, that you've got vaccines, you know, because it's a population that's extremely vulnerable. or make sure education is, we call education a lifesaver because kids get to go into school and get a sense of normalcy, normality and hang out with their friends. Gaza, look at education just to start with education because again, it gets overlooked.

26:34One of the highest literacy rates in the world. If ever there's hope in Gaza, it's because of that ability for Gazans to bounce back, for Palestinians to bounce back. And I don't mean that, Rory, as some sort of cliche. I mean that, I think, because they've been through so, so, so much, so many hardships, but because of this incredible literacy rate, then they've got systems in place. And we saw it during that last ceasefire. I would have colleagues and Palestinians tell me when I went in June and when it was utterly horrific, but saying, James, during the ceasefire, pizza places open, cafes, cappuccinos, that's their ability to bounce back.

27:08That's based on education. Now, 90 % of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. We are in uncharted territory when it comes to, say, trauma. There is, again, not exaggerations. There's no reason for them. Pure, pure facts. We call Gaza a war on children because we've never seen the sheer number and proportion of children killed or wounded in a conflict in living memory. We say that every single child in Gaza needs mental health support because we've never seen a single place where every single child has that level of mental stress. And if this war expands, I know Alistair's worked a lot on mental health.

27:49If this war expands, this trauma doesn't deepen, it calcifies. So we're not just witnessing psychological wounds. We are looking potentially at the slow erasure of an entire generation's chance of recovery. I mean, I've sat with teenage girls who have spoken about living in tents, let the bombs hit me. They're done. They've got nothing left. I mean, that's a horrific thing for more than one particular person to say. There's self-harm that children do. It goes on and on and on and on. So trauma is very, very different. It's unmanageable right now. We try to manage it. UNICEF does. I see amazing, amazing things in Gaza where children are trying to talk to meditate and breathe and to try and think of being in a place.

28:32A little girl explained to me, I try and imagine smelling basil in my grandfather's garden, but they're living in tents and they're being bombed every single night. And their parents are depressed. It's very, very hard for a child to look at their parents and their parents know full well they've lost the ability to protect that child. And the child, if they're a teenager, knows their mum or dad's lost the ability to protect them. So trauma, is aid being denied or not? We now know it is because we've got a 500 % increase in acute malnutrition. in children this year, 500 % this year. The worst malnutrition, as you and I speak, in Gaza, in its history.

29:09That's on a denial of food. Now, the reasons will be given either there's not a denial of food or it's because Hamas is taking it all. There's no evidence base for that. We know that now from US officials. There's also no logic in denying aid. We have dozens of incubators on the wrong side of the border and a huge number of women giving birth prematurely. We have oxygen for children who need that to breathe on the wrong side of the border. It's not allowed in. Why on earth? Would those things be denied? But water, you know, in Jordan, we would get water supplies, we'd get tanks, we'd, you know, we would do drilling, everything we possibly could with the funding, Rory, in Gaza.

29:43Water is controlled. Israel turns on or off the electricity, that's the desalination plants. They control the fuel coming into Gaza. That's where the trucks can operate. There are lines going from Israel into Gaza where they open all those. That's the water. everyone in Gaza has a below emergency level of water. So you combine 21, 22 months of bombardment, denials of food and water and sanitation, of course, and that's that horrific collision on a child's body. We'd never see that. Well, we wouldn't see that in another war zone, much less a refugee camp where we have some control over things. Okay, James, Rory, quick break and then back for more.

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31:42James, when you were speaking like that, I kind of, this may be unfair, I had a kind of picture of Ben Gavir and Smotrich and some of the more extreme elements of the Israeli government kind of cheering that on. This is what we've been trying to do. It's like, what feels so horrific about what you're telling us is these are acts of strategy. These are acts of policy. Well, I worked with UNICEF always felt pretty straightforward in a way. I learned through my backpacking days and my parents just a simple sense of, I think, a couple of things. One was the idea of community service and the other is opportunity.

32:22The idea of just simple opportunity. My dad used to say, I don't go in the lottery because I've won the lottery of birth, right? Going up middle class and I realized that it's all about opportunity and that's what I thought UNICEF tries to provide. So I'd go around the world. Alistair, you try to talk about the opportunity, get a kid in a classroom, give them the right nutrition, allow their brain to develop because malnutrition is not just about a thin child. It's about lifelong impact on mental development. And you would just advocate for all these rights of a child. Gaza is the first place I've been where I feel like I've got to advocate that they're children.

32:54The first thing it seems like I've got to do is advocate that they're people, that they're worthy of these things. And that has been obviously jarring and deeply troubling. How do you, I mean, you come across as an incredibly sort of positive and enthusiastic and engaging person. Do you, when you're there with the pillow over your head, do you not get completely devoid of hope, literally hopeless? There's been almost, maybe the best way to answer that is I just never felt that hope was mine in a way that particularly, you know, six months ago, Palestinians would still hold on to hope. You know, a mother, I never forget when there was talk of a ceasefire in 2024 and a mother, it was very close.

33:39It looked very close to people. I have been sceptical. It looked very close. And she said, my goodness, this is the first night in like 10 months. I can promise my daughter, she had a seven-year-old daughter, I can promise my daughter in the tent, she will go to bed and she will wake up. I'll promise her that. You felt this hope. And then, you know, 12 hours later, the bombing started and that hope was absolutely blown up. The same way the Palestinians had incredible literacy rate, they're aware of international humanitarian law. I've had more than a few Palestinians say to me, you know, because I will explain to them the outpouring of pressure around the world, of young people, of people who are so frustrated by this impunity that's occurring.

34:21And they'll say, look, we do appreciate that, but we understand that international humanitarian law doesn't apply to us. So I don't feel like mine is hope or despair and mine to have or not have. But I certainly now feel that a few months ago, it's running very, very, very, very thin on the ground. And now, because I get messages every day from people and there is a generosity and a grace that I've rarely seen. And I know it can sound like a cliche, but, you know, I tell people I'm going back into Gaza. What do you need? And they're like, no, no, no, just to see you. And of course, you take your medicines.

34:55But because there's a pride and a humility, which is immense. But as a young woman said to me, you know, I thought the worst thing about starving would be the hunger. The worst thing is the humiliation. It's so humiliating. So, yeah, Gazans, Palestinians right now, as they think of a new offensive in Gaza City in pushing three quarters of a million of people to an area where it's already one toilet to a thousand women. Yeah, their hope is running very, very thin. I ask every person I see, whether I know them as a friend, whether I've met them, a colleague, or just in a sort of quasi-journalistic sense, how are you?

35:30It sounds a stupid thing to ask. And no one really has an answer now because there's a level of trauma that's cut through and how they are, their answer is I'm surviving. Everyone says I'm surviving, whether it's in Arabic or English. It's a daily sense for struggle. So I feel that irrespective of my sense of hope, Palestinians is running out. James, one of the things that is happening is that UN agencies and NGOs are having to change their attitude towards the death of their colleagues and the risk they're facing. I mean, I remember Médecins Sans Frontières, which is operating very courageously in Gaza at the moment, pulled out of Afghanistan when I was there in, I guess, 2002, because some of their staff had been deliberately targeted and killed.

36:17And they said, this isn't good enough. We're not going to operate in a country where people are deliberately targeting MSF vehicles. But in Gaza, it seems as though you've entered a very, very different world. I mean, the risk appetite now, I mean, certainly that's maybe the wrong way to put it, but the number of staff that you're losing from the UN and from NGOs was almost unimaginable 20 years ago. People were not taking those kind of risks because quite understandably, I remember even people saying this in Afghanistan in the 90s, look, we're here to develop humanitarian assistance. We're not trying to martyr ourselves.

36:50We're not trying to get ourselves killed. No, look, I think the Secretary General's been amazing and all the UN agency, the bosses have been very clear on a stay and deliver a stay and deliver approach. It's immense. Now, of course, international staff make that decision. International staff have their families. I sit with those international staff. I know some very stressed spouses and children when people are in those places, but they make those decisions because on a good day, it's game changing. On a good day, you're saving a life. Palestinian staff are simply extraordinary. On one hand, they don't have a choice to leave, which is, again, like all the things I never imagined I would see or understand with this conflict of, you know, it's one thing to have your home destroyed and Palestinians are maybe like many others, but maybe not.

37:39It's very much a place I find everyone puts 20 or 30 years of every single penny into brick and mortar and that's gone in a second. Then they're living in a tent. Then you've had your mom and two sisters killed. Then there's no schooling and then there's no food and you still can't leave. So whether it's our colleagues or our partners, because for UNICEF, it's kind of one and the same. You know, if I've got a Palestinian colleague who works for UNICEF, it's just very similar to a doctor who works in a hospital that we support. Now, those doctors, I'm talking about surgeons or head nurses who go and do 20-hour shifts and then go back and live in a tent, without a doubt, having had family members, dear family members killed, wake up at five o 'clock in the morning, try to think of ways to find water for their family, then go to the hospital to work, very distracted in a sense, hoping that, you know, knowing that if their family, someone dies, they won't be with them and they work.

38:31So yeah, there is no operating environment. I don't think that we've ever encountered like this, but I think that stay and deliver sense is very, very important, but it's, yeah, it's been pushed consistently to its edges. Traditionally, the aid in Gaza was delivered through the professionals that have done this for decades all the way around the world. The UN agencies, the big relief agencies, the big international NGOs, in the same way, I guess, that I've seen these kinds of operations operating in other humanitarian zones around the world. And then a decision was made basically to stop that and replace this with a whole new framework, which has resulted in these queues and hundreds of people being killed.

39:14Tell us about what this change was. Explain a little bit for an ordinary lesson of what that change was and what's now happening. Yeah, so the arguments that were made by Israeli officials were of Hamas stealing all the aid, the aid diversion. Now, the good news on that front is, and UNICEF had said for 18 months just to show the evidence, as had others, you know, UNICEF, this is not the first war zone we've worked in. We have what's called last mile distribution. You track it. You have third-party monitoring all the time. Humanitarian aid is more than just food. It is those incubators. It is vaccines.

39:46It's all these things. But the good sense was to show what humanitarian aid can do. And obviously, we could talk, you know, your experience, Rory, from Jordan, or we talked about Afghanistan or Ukraine or Yemen, Ethiopia, what humanitarian aid is and how we do it. But we don't need to look to those examples because just during the ceasefire earlier this year, we saw 400 distribution points, exactly what humanitarian aid must be. Go to where the people are. You have to, of course. If you don't go to where the people are, how can you ask children who've had their parents killed or the elderly or the wounded or anyone?

40:21You go to where they are and you make sure your aid is making a sizable difference. We had 400 points. UNICEF sometimes would go door to door looking for malnourished children. And we saw all the indicators we want to see, right? Across the UN system, all the agencies, you saw malnutrition going down, disease going down, access to water and food going up. Ceasefire broke or was broken and all that suddenly ended. And under what have now been demonstrably shown to be not true in terms of aid diversion, those arguments, there was this creation, as you say, of this aid mechanism, the GHF. They operated from four, from only four sites.

40:57So as we talked about earlier in terms of the criticisms around the UN and so on. There's been a systematic attempt to sideline, sideline a tried and tested humanitarian system. And you suddenly had 400 aid distribution points turning into four. So these four sites were, as you say, they were heavily militarized, they were private contractors, and they were guarded outside by the IDF. Now, the reason the UN said even before these opened, even before they opened, we're very clear you can't work with these for two simple reasons. One is you can't put four distribution points in the very south of the Gaza Strip.

41:38You have to have them all over the Gaza Strip. You must make aid accessible. The other is you can't make people walk through a militarized zone to get to aid. You have to demilitarize aid. You simply must. And on paper, that made so much sense to me. You can't make people walk through a war zone to get to aid. Unfortunately, that was what was set up. And then when they started, we started seeing mass casualty events. We started seeing civilians shot when they were entering them. And we've now had explanations. The Israeli Defence Forces have explained that they felt threatened and so on. But you're asking civilians to walk through those areas.

42:10So the whole thing, it would have been ludicrous if it wasn't so lethal. But James, could that have been done without the willing, the desire of the Israeli and American governments that that is what should be created. How does that happen politically? Yeah, I don't know politically. I only know that obviously, you know, Israel's occupying power has full control over who does or doesn't do aid in Gaza and the funding mechanisms and so on. I'm not privy to. And those were the systems set up, those four systems. And I've never seen anything where, you know, Alistair, key message documents, you're looking through all your evidence about these things.

42:56I've never seen something so stark where the messaging I read and then I went to Gaza just as these things opened and I had grandmothers in tears. I wasn't going to talk to them about the GHF. I was going to talk to them about our caste distribution or why children didn't have the baby formula. I had grandmothers in tears saying, how can I go to these places? It's the same people who get food every time. It's the strong. It's the young. It's not the most vulnerable. So you're not hitting a target audience. Then I would talk to families who would literally make democratic decisions. They're like, we're starving.

43:25You know, the physical change I see in families is immense. And you'd have a young guy going, I'm done. I've got to help my family. I cannot see my parents look like this. And they'd have a discussion. They'd say, no, you're not. And these young people would go down. I remember speaking to one young guy and he said to me, James, we went, we were in the cage, we were in the area, we did everything we were told. We waited for four hours. And then at one o 'clock in the morning, a quadcopter came over and was shooting at people. Why would they do this? Now, why would they do this? So those were the systems.

43:54And I think it's more than 30 mass casualty events. I know that certainly hospitals, field hospitals, have had more people, have had days where they've had more engine come in from those sites than from general attacks and general warfare. I myself was very early on seeking out children just to see if children had been going to these sites and met a little boy, if I may just briefly tell his story, little guy, Abdul Rachman. I went to Nassau Hospital. He was 13. Immense, immense young boy. Anyway, he was in the hospital. His father had given them, the last of the family, money to go and buy bread.

44:35And he'd gone out onto the street and he'd seen, because this was the very early days, First three or four days, information was very sketchy about these things. He'd seen people moving en masse to this place and he thought, I'm going to go and get a box of food for my family and operate a box of food. He went down there and what has now happened dozens of times, there was shooting, there was gunfire. He actually got hit by shrapnel from a tank shell. It went through his abdomen. When I met him in hospital, he was in immense pain. He was one of those people I say who I heard, not just saw. He was screaming because he hadn't had painkillers for seven hours based on a sheer lack of painkillers allowed to go in.

45:12He wanted to tell his story. His mother had a medical evacuation form, which wasn't worth the paper it was written on. But he wanted to tell his story. This little boy, as he told his story, he sat up through this most immense pain. This brave little kid, but he didn't want to lie down, I guess. He wanted to sit up next to me. He was holding under my hand as he told his story. his dad, proud father, is in tears because the boy's sort of apologizing almost for, you know, putting his parents in this situation, telling me that he just wanted to get food for his family and so on. And I saw him again a week later.

45:44His situation was deteriorating on the day I left Gaza. That mission was two weeks long. On the day, the very day I left, he died of those injuries. He died because his family was starving and he tried to go to one of these sites to get food. Now, yeah, when humanitarian aid, that's not how humanitarian aid is delivered. You know, when WHO, WFP, UNICEF, all braid partners on the ground delivering aid, people are not being killed when we're vaccinating or giving nutritional supplies to mums and malnourished babies. That doesn't happen. I think it's very important just to reinforce what you said there, which is that aid is delivered all around the world by UN agencies, as you say, World Health Organization, World Food Programme, UNICEF, and others.

46:27and I've never seen it be necessary for people to kill hundreds of people trying to feed them. James, last one, I guess, from me, which is, what is the process of rebuilding? Let's imagine that a ceasefire comes. What's then involved for you and other humanitarian partners over the next three, six months that would follow a ceasefire in trying to support and assist? I think one of the things that struck me when I was last there, because I'd been through Gaza City a lot, getting aid supplies there, but I'd never stayed there. And when I was in Gaza City, something that gave me hope, Rory, in terms of that rebuild, was standing on the very top of a building and looking to see how much was still there.

47:07I mean, I've seen Khan Yunus going from being a city to being rubble. I've seen the same of Rafa. So seeing one hand, how much physical structure was there, hearing those stories about during the ceasefire and about people having cake and cappuccino and how UNICEF suddenly went from having nothing to 100 ,000 children into classrooms, systems that's on the back of Palestinians that you can't recreate an education rate like a 98 % literacy so that gives me that gives me immense hope so the first things you would be doing are the health system there's a health system that has been systematically devastated and again we're talking some hospitals that you know I don't say world-class I don't want to divide the world into sections but you know genuinely the very best of health care that I've seen but that has been utterly utterly decimated because of course we're always talking when we talk about children with the wounds of war who can't get out of Gaza.

47:57Medical suppliers can't get in, children can't get out. We're forgetting 50-year-olds with cancer. We're forgetting children with leukemia, all those things. That needs a very fast rebuild. So immense amount of rebuild to a health system. Nutrition will be first and foremost. We are at a point now whereby because we've had so many deprivations of food coming into the Gaza Strip, You start to see cognitive decline, can last a lifetime. So we have to have to address nutrition and healthcare as the most immediate priorities. Then my colleagues will talk to you about unexploded ordinances, all those things, a rebuilding setup that I can't speak to.

48:35I don't have the expertise when we look at the sheer devastation of homes, 60, 70 % of homes that have been damaged or destroyed. So it is a huge, huge, almost unfathomable about, and as I say, to speak to what Alistair said before, but I found some hope because, I don't know, I saw some of those structures. I understand those education rates. I understand that Palestinians, how they have that ability to recover. Really simple things too, Alistair. I've got a young colleague. She's immense. She's 25 years old. When I walk through those hospitals, When I walk across children with limbs removed and mothers in tears, she's doing the same thing, this young woman.

49:19And she's still there living with her family, even though the family home's been blown up. And she was talking to me about the ceasefire, saying, James, I wish you saw it. I wish you saw how we bounce back and respond. She said, you know, we love life. Now, I say that because Palestinians feel that. I think maybe they felt a fragility, maybe something. But there is something there for it, which means no matter what's happened, they've driven and got these education rates that are the envy of the region. There's something that has this ability to bounce back. So donors will have to step up massively in ways we've never seen.

49:52But Palestinians on the ground have that ability to recover. But it's not limitless. We've seen that attack on healthcare. We've seen that attack on doctors. We saw so many professors killed in those first months, so many teachers. So I'm not being blithe to the enormity of the challenges. I'm just saying that there is something very special about that ability to recover. But yes, as you say, right now, it's a prayer for a ceasefire because all talk is that this gets worse for that population. Your job is kind of, you know, to make the world aware and it's to make people care. And I was saying to Rory on the podcast recently, I was talking to a guy who works in the kind of environmental field.

50:35that he said this thing, he was at the Plastic Summit, that he worries that we're in an era of shock and yawn, that we just get so overwhelmed by the shocking stuff we see, whether it's climate, whether it's war, whether it's Putin, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Gaza, whether it's all the bad stuff going in the world. I just wonder, in the 20 years you've been working for UNICEF, has it become harder to make people care? Yeah, I think I'd break it into almost two parts. So I agree on the, there's a real problem with empathy. There's people that, you know, algorithms without a doubt, Alistair, are just feeding people too much information.

51:19There's a complete empathy fatigue. And we know that people are more likely to care if they see a single child than if they see multiple and they're seeing crises everywhere. But I also, I talk to young people. I try to make a habit of hearing from other generations, checking my own confirmation bias and listening. And I hear a lot of young people who care greatly about what's happening now. And actually, to me, it's troubling as well. It's almost part of that trauma. There's that trauma that's taking root, being forced into Palestinian children. I think of young people around the world, Alistair, this young generation of, you know, where, I don't know, where war is live stream and hypocrisy is laid bare.

52:01And people say, yeah, well, we've always, there's always been global hypocrisy, but not seeing news 24-7, not as you say, young people have an umbrella of a climate crisis. And now they're seeing, you know, on one hand, the world's response to attacks on Ukraine. On the other hand, the world's lack of response to attacks on Palestinians. So they're seeing human rights broken. They're seeing that, I don't know, I think it's becoming corrosive and they're learning that justice is very selective. That worries me deeply about a young population who are very empathetic. And I completely understand why some populations want to turn away.

52:38Of course, everyday people, I really do. My goodness, I want to turn away. Never will, but I understand that. I don't think that leaders do. I don't think member states should turn away for a millisecond. I certainly know that the Palestinians, girls, boys, mums, dads, grandmothers, they don't get to turn off. My last question, and thanks so much for talking to us and for being so, I don't know what the word is really, but just so clear and graphic, I guess, about what you've seen, is how you as an individual cope when you go home. So you're Australian, we all know that, and you're back home now in Brisbane and you're with your kids.

53:17And is there a part of you that goes through the experiences you've been through and then gets home and thinks, God, you know, why isn't everybody shouting about this all the time? Why are we not caring enough? Why are we not doing more? Or are you able just to kind of put things in boxes and say, well, I go there, I do my job, I try my best, then I come back and I just have to try and get on with the rest of my life? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I read it, Lindsay. I think it's kind of indulgent to do my own sense, but in a shorthand, yeah, I don't think you can process it all. And it's certainly not something I can box because I've met so many people in Gaza, so many colleagues who are still on the ground, so many families who I'm in touch with almost every day, who just, who, again, their generosity in terms of giving their own time and their pride.

54:13They're not asking for anything. If anything, they're just asking for a sense of what's happening around the world. But then you hear the stories and you hear a story like I did the other day of one of the young people I'd met whose mother had now just been killed a few days ago. So no, it doesn't leave. I used to get, when I was in Ukraine in the early stages of the war, Alistair, I'd come out and people would say, what about you? How are you? And I would tell a sort of anecdote because it didn't feel very comfortable. And I'd say, look, I remember I was once at a hospital and it was a 14 year old boy who had, he'd been told to, he could leave on a certain route with his family.

54:50That was untrue. And there'd been an explosion. He'd lay under a, he told me this story. He lay under a car and he watched his mum burn to death. As he told me this, he broke into tears. And I told the counselor, enough, enough, this, come on. And she said, no, he's never talked about this, James. He needs to talk about it. So he told me that he lost his leg. And I went to a hospital that was underground, a maternity hospital. And it was just a It was the cruelest thing I've seen because it was all these young mums and they were meant to be celebrating with, you know, husbands and mother-in-laws and shower teas or whatever you call these things.

55:20And they were underground and they were in the dirt. And I just walked out of this and it was just been a bad day. And it was winter and I sat outside and sort of hunched over and had a moment. An old Ukrainian woman came over and I don't know, she thought I was Ukrainian or something. And she said something and tapped me on the shoulder. And my sense was she was sort of saying, it's okay, you'll be okay. And I snapped out of it and I thought, get over yourself. You get to leave here, you know. Oh, and that was always my response there. Gaza's different. You don't leave Gaza, not until this ends, not because of what it's doing to the people, because of what it's doing to international norms, because of the dangers of what impunity there is doing to, you know, the international systems and things that have given a lot of people a lot of security over the time.

56:01And simply because, yeah, I know some of those seven-year-old and 17-year-old kids are intense tonight. So no, I said shorthand, but it's not. No, it doesn't leave. but, you know, I've got a rock star wife and good kids, so you dive into family and you feel very, very, very lucky. Well, thank you so much for talking to us and keep on keeping on. Thank you, fellas. Thank you very much.

56:26Well, that was pretty, what's the word, pretty harrowing at times. I do think actually it's interesting how his voice, he's like a storyteller, isn't he? because I think he's part of the filling of the gap of what happens when you cut media out. It's also remarkable that the UN has enabled him to do that. I mean, the UN is at its worst as one of the most repressive bureaucracies in terms of giving people freedom. And you can imagine the political sensitivities around this from member states and others. And UNICEF depends on a lot of its funding from traditionally enormous amount of its funding from the US and other European governments.

57:12And the Israelis presumably will be protesting day in, day out about his attempts to talk about what he's seeing on the ground in Gaza, and yet he's doing it. And as you can imagine, I mean, it'd be very unusual actually, if you think back to your own life, to have a government spokesman in a government department speaking quite that openly about problems in UK prisons or problems in the health service. I think it's wonderful. And I think it's wonderful because I've always felt that that's what's lacking in international development. I would have loved to see, even back in the day before Gaza, people running UN agencies and their spokesmen and ambassadors speaking with that kind of detail.

57:49I mean, so much of it is the sort of being able to get the concrete example. Politicians are often just not that good at communicating the the kind of detail that brings it alive. And he's absolutely right about how people will relate much more to an individual child than talking about thousands and thousands of children. I think that's a skill he's obviously developed over time. But at the same time, he was also very, I sensed, very conscious of his own political position. Every time he mentioned October 7th, he talked about it being the terrible events. he didn't really want to get pushed too hard on the politics.

58:28And there was a moment where he said, and they opened fire and there's only one place they could have opened fire from, which was a military checkpoint, which was him saying they were shot by Israeli soldiers, but he didn't quite bring that down. And he didn't particularly want to sort of say that, you know, Ben Gavir and Smoltrich are terrible. And he's doing it through storytelling, which in a sense is what journalism is as well. Just to sort of round off for listeners, The story he's telling is from UNICEF, whose prime responsibility is children. And they're there with other big UN agencies, WHO that focuses on health, World Food Programme, that focuses on food.

59:04But then there are all these other NGOs. The biggest UN agency, of course, is UNRWA, which is losing hundreds of people a year. But there have also been casualties with World Central Kitchen, with the Norwegian Refugee Council, with the Médecins Sans Frontières, Tierra, the Danish refugee council, where one of their own staff headquarters was hit, which they'd deconflicted. And then, of course, there's the story that we talked about a few weeks ago, which is the deliberate attack on hospitals. We probably haven't talked enough about the deliberate attack on journalists. The killing of Sri Nabu Akil, the Al Jazeera correspondent now going back many months, but now the more recent killings of Al Jazeera correspondents on the ground, four of them including one who Israel claimed was a member of Hamas.

59:54No, I thought he was very, very impressive. We should put in the newsletter the article that he wrote for UNICEF from which I quoted, and also another very moving piece he wrote, I think it was in The Guardian. I also noticed he's pretty professional. When you said my last question. That was the first time that he actually mentioned the word donors. Dollars are going to have to step up. So that's the other thing. In these situations, you must never miss up an opportunity to reach out to the donors. Anyway, it's a great organization. They're working under massive, massive pressure. And I'm very grateful that he came on.

1:00:34Thank you, Alistair. See you soon. Bye. See you soon. Bye-bye.

1:00:43Thank you.