Thinkers Forum, Sept. 24, 2025: Amid Israel’s attack on Qatar, what’s next for the Middle East? We speak with Professor Stephen Zunes, who provides insights, analyzes the positions of key players, and explains everything you need to know about the evolving situation in the region.
Category: Gaza
Interview: Israel’s air strikes in Qatar
CNA (Channel News Asia), Singapore, Sept. 10, 2025
Interview: How will Israeli attack in Qatar affect efforts to end Gaza war?
AlJazeera television, Sept. 10, 2025.
Stephen Zunes, was one of the three guests.
Israel’s bombing of a residential building in the capital, Doha, that was housing Hamas leaders, has drawn global condemnation. Fighter jets fired missiles into a residential compound in central Doha, where leaders of Hamas were meeting to discuss a US proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Interview: Israel’s attack on Gaza City civilians
KPFA-FM/Pacifica, Sept. 5, 2025; segment begins at 40:00.
Israel’s attack on Gaza City increases civilian death toll.
Interview, BBC: Thousands demand peace at Tel Aviv rally
BBC Television, September 6, 2025, (4 mins.).
Zunes’s analysis of latest developments in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.
Ongoing genocide in Israel/Palestine and U.S. culpability now
Project Save the World Forum, Substack, August 30. 2025 (1 hour).
Zunes’s conversation with longtime peace activist Jennifer Bing of the American Friends Service Committee and Canadian Peace Studies scholar, Metta Spencer… in a candid, unfiltered exchange [that] captures the tremor of a moment when the usual defenses crumble under the weight of new evidence, new voices, and a new generation whose sightlines had previously been blocked from public view… Zunes lays out the “international legal definition of genocide” as it applies to the Gaza crisis. He points to the targeting of journalists, healthcare workers, and first responders; to scenes of people dying in line for food; to the denial of basic sustenance and medical supplies. [source]
Interview: Israel ramps up Gaza genocide, dependent on U.S. support
KPFA-FM Pacifica Radio, September 5, 2025, with Kris Welch.
Zunes’s segment begins at 40-minutes, just before he joins a news conference to help read names of 18,000 Palestinian children Israel has slaughtered, so far.
Hamas’ control of Gaza brought on by US policy
Zunes’s letter to the editor in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Sept. 4, 2025
Hamas’ control of Gaza brought on by US policy
Many thanks to Tim McGirk (Guest Commentary, Aug. 21) for his open letter to Rep. Jimmy Panetta, who continues to support Trump’s policy of facilitating Israel’s war and famine on the civilian population of Gaza. The former Time magazine Jerusalem bureau chief correctly noted a number of Panetta’s dishonest appraisals of the situation.
Unfortunately, McGirk’s review of Gaza’s history may have led some readers to believe the people of that territory elected Hamas to rule them. While this extremist Islamist party did win a plurality in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, they shared governance with the moderate Fatah party until 2007, when the Bush administration pushed Fatah to forcibly remove Hamas from government.
In a brief civil war, Hamas was defeated in the West Bank, but was able to violently seize power in Gaza, where they have tragically remained in power ever since. If the Bush administration hadn’t kept supporting Israel’s occupation and settlements (thereby weakening the moderates) and hadn’t meddled in internal Palestinian politics, Hamas’s control of Gaza and the subsequent horrors would never have occurred.
—Stephen Zunes, Santa Cruz
Democratic Leadership Still Hasn’t Caught Up to the Party’s Base on Gaza
In These Times, September 4, 2025, by Stephen Zunes
Nearly two years in to the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, there are clear signals the Democratic Party’s
base is moving far away from supporting the Israeli government and its war machine. And while party leadership is beginning to show some hopeful signs it might be starting to listen to constituents’ changing attitudes on the issue of Israel and Palestine…
Interview: Rabbis protest of ongoing genocide in Gaza and growing Jewish resistance
KSQD Community Radio, August 18, 2025 [1-hour]:
Zunes and Rabbi Chaim Schneider discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the growing Jewish resistance to what is being done in their name.
On Monday, August 11, roughly 18 San Francisco Bay Area rabbis and cantors sat down in the street, after speaking in front of the barricaded Israeli Consulate building, in opposition to Netanyahu’s plan to re-occupy the Gaza Strip and to express dismay at the unrelieved starvation and suffering of the people of Gaza and all hostages–on both sides–enforced by the Israeli and U.S. governments. The civil disobedience action yielded no arrests, although the group escalated from blocking Montgomery Street to sitting in the intersection of Montgomery and Sacramento for approximately half an hour of singing and prayer.
Interview: Israel prepares takeover of Gaza City
KTVU, Bay Area television network affiliate, news show
August 23, 2025: Zunes’s analysis of the worsening situation in Gaza. In the Middle East as negotiators try to broker a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel’s military is preparing to invade and occupy Gaza City. The Israeli defense minister on Wednesday said there are plans to call up 60,000 more reservists and extend the service of another 20,000. The military is urging Palestinians to head south…
Analysis: How will the US respond to Israel’s killing of Al Jazeera crew?
DAWN Newspaper, August 11, 2025: Stephen Zunes, the chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, says he believes Israel’s killing of Al Jazeera’s crew will increase public pressure on the US government. “The American people are waking up,” Zunes told Al Jazeera from San Francisco.
“I’ve dealt with issues around Palestine, US policy, for more than 40 years. It really strikes me the way that the attitude is shifting. And I think this killing is really going to, at least on the civil society level, going to only increase pressure on the United States to stop giving this blank check to Israel in the face of atrocities, including genocide. “But unfortunately, I don’t see a shift in terms of Washington’s policy,” he said. Zunes also described the killing of the Al Jazeera correspondents as a warning to other journalists, noting that it came hours after Netanyahu said he would allow foreign reporters into Gaza for the first time since the war. “It’ll be interesting to see who he allows in and what restrictions they have, and perhaps these murders are a sign that you better not report anything critical,” he said.
A Two-Year Road to Genocide. Israel-Palestine Conflict. Its Past, Present, and Future.
Wyoming Star, August 13, 2025, ByJoe Yans, quoting Stephen Zunes
Stephen Zunes: … This is not a religious conflict, first and foremost, and that hasn’t stopped extremists, both Jewish and Muslim, from trying to turn it into one. Not to mention some Christian fundamentalists in the West. But in these two competing nationalisms, Israel ultimately won. And while Zionism for Jews was a national liberation movement for historically oppressed people, like many of the nationalist movements arising during the late 19th Century, it felt more like a colonial settler enterprise, like the French in Algeria or the British in Rhodesia… And because of the support from the West and their own technological prowess, the Israelis have had the upper hand, not only claiming 78% of historic Palestine in the First War, which led to the fleeing and expulsion of the majority of the indigenous Palestinian population, but, since 1967, they’ve had effective control of the rest of Palestine, giving the Palestinian Authority these tiny urban enclaves, surrounded by Israeli settlements…
Webinar: Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as a Partner in the Crime of Genocide
Arab Organization for Human Rights, UK, August 8, 2025, sponsored this panel on the misnamed “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” the ongoing massacres, and the political implications, featuring: Zunes, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, former GHF contractor Anthony Aguilar, and three physicians who have worked in Gaza. See Zunes’s ten-minute segment here (or below, starting at 1:09:00)
Iran Vows Stronger Response If U.S., Israel Attack Again
FO° Talks July 30, 2025 [25 mins.]
Fair Observer’s Rohan Khattar Singh speaks to Professor Stephen Zunes about Iran, Israel and the United States… Trump has brought back the “Maximum Pressure” policy back on Iran with new sanctions, and for the first time, direct military strikes on Iranian soil. Zunes doesn’t believe Iran was building nuclear weapons, but after the recent strikes by Israel and the US, Tehran would now like to build some as a deterrent and is now closer to Russia and China. Also Israel’s military operations and Apartheid conditions in Gaza…
Interview: Ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza
KPFA Evening News (Sunday) – July 27, 2025 [begins at 4:40]
Interview: Hunger and war in Gaza
KTVU July 21, 2025, Bay Area network affiliate [begins at 2:00]
As fears of hunger in Gaza grow, countries are calling for an end to the war. In a joint statement on Monday. Twenty-five nations have described recent deaths in the territory as “horrifying.” Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, on how this statement could impact Israel.
Interviews: Israel, Syria, Gaza developments and ongoing mass killing
KPFA-FM Pacifica Network, July 19, 2025: Zunes
discusses Israel, Syria, Gaza, and other recent developments
[segment starts at 12:30] and July 13 on mass killing
[segment starts at 13:15; Note: Each broadcast must
load before you can drag the pointer to when it begins]
Video: Israelis continue to say no to war.
Zunes Facebook Video July 17, 2025: Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the leadership of both parties in Congress continue to say yes. As the U.S./Israeli-imposed famine on Gaza increases, I keep getting solicitations to contribute to Democratic candidates who insist on arming and funding Israel’s siege, bombing, and occupation. Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership refuses to support their party’s nominee for New York City mayor who opposes such war crimes…
Video: What are the chances of a Gaza ceasefire deal soon?
CNA (Channel News Asia) July 6, 2025 (9 mins.)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said July 6 he hoped an upcoming meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump could “help advance” a Gaza ceasefire deal, after sending negotiators to Doha for indirect talks with Hamas. Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and director of the Middle Eastern studies program at the University of San Francisco, discusses on CNA’s Asia First why he believes a lasting ceasefire in Gaza remains unlikely.
CNA.Asia & CNA YouTube channel