AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, I wanted to ask you about Gaza and the West Bank. The latest news, Israeli attacks since dawn have killed at least 54 Palestinians, including people seeking food, the attacks coming as Gaza health officials recorded another 13 deaths due to starvation, three of them kids, bringing the number of starvation deaths in Gaza to more than 360. According to a leading global monitor, more than half a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are suffering catastrophic hunger due to Israel’s blockade. This comes as the world’s leading genocide scholars’ association has approved a resolution establishing Israel’s policies and action in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide as found in the Genocide Convention, constituting war crimes and crimes against humanity. I wanted to play for you Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

MELANIE O’BRIEN: This resolution declaring what is happening in Gaza as genocide passed by an overwhelming majority, far beyond the two-thirds majority required.

AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, if you can respond to this genocide finding by the largest genocide scholars’ association, and the conditions in Gaza, and now, what, I think it’s been established, something like 42,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been displaced, and the killings by Israeli settlers of Palestinians continues?

RAMI KHOURI: Yeah. First of all, what the Israelis are doing in the West Bank and Gaza and elsewhere, in East Jerusalem, is nothing new. It’s just a bigger scale, and it’s more out in the open. It’s reported now, especially by social media, and even Western mainstream media has started to talk about it. Progressive media, honest media like yourselves, have been talking about it for many years. But the world sees now what has been happening in Gaza. And we keep sending the message that this has been going on since the 1930s, when the Zionist movement came in and said, “We want a Jewish state,” in a land that was 93% Arab, Palestinian. But this is an ongoing genocide.

And the statement by the International Association of Genocide Scholars is very significant, not at the level that is going to suddenly stop the genocide, but it’s significant because of the nature of this group. I talked yesterday to my friend Omer Bartov, who you’ve had on your show. He’s a leading Israeli American genocide and Holocaust scholar, teaches at Brown University. And I asked him, “Why is this important?” And he said, “It’s important because the nature of this group.” This association is a relatively conservative group. There’s another more leftist, progressive, dynamic association, but these guys are pretty low-key. They’re careful about what they do. And the fact that they came out with such a big majority — I think 85% of them voted that this Israeli is — Israel is carrying out a genocide — that’s significant, because it makes it pretty obvious to the whole world, if anybody needed more proof, that even conservative scholars, independent, serious students of this gruesome process of genocide and the Holocaust and mass atrocities, they are coming right out and saying this is a genocide.

The big question is: What will happen next? Will this —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

RAMI KHOURI: — spur any of — will any of the major Western powers take action? Will the signatories of the Genocide Convention do what they’re supposed to do, which is stop the genocide by any means possible?

AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, we want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian American journalist, public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C.

Democracy Now! produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Nicole Salazar, Sara Nasser. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.