The Electronic Intifada Podcast 26 August 2025
Large online platforms often remove content from Palestinians and their supporters and then claim it was a mistake, Zahzah explained on The Electronic Intifada Livestream for 21 August, in a discussion of how tech firms actively collaborate with Israel’s crimes.
Also, on this episode, executive director Ali Abunimah took an in-depth look at how one of Israel’s top cyberwarriors escaped the US after being arrested and charged in a child sex-crimes sting.
Meanwhile in Gaza, a 15-year-old orphan survived being shot in the head while trying to get food for his eight siblings. That was one of the harrowing incidents associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman reported in her news brief as Israel escalates its mass murder and starvation of Palestinians.
Israel’s forced starvation has killed 269 people, according to the health ministry in Gaza.Survivors could suffer permanent disability, including cognitive issues, according to Dr. Thaer Ahmad who spoke to Barrows-Friedman in a separate episode of The Electronic Intifada Podcast.
Contributing editor Jon Elmer’s resistance report focused on resistance operations against Israeli troops who invaded the Zaytoun area in northern Gaza as well as the Israeli army’s severe shortage of soldiers.You can watch the whole program in the video above.
Complicity with genocide is a choice
Omar Zahzah – assistant professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University – told the Livestream that by claiming to remove content in error, platforms repress speech while dodging accountability for systematic censorship.
The previous week, Twitch abruptly took down The Electronic Intifada Livestream’s in the middle of the broadcast. Twitch claimed The Electronic Intifada had violated one of the streaming platform’s rules.
Editors lodged an immediate appeal. By the time the Livestream ended, Twitch said it had made a mistake and put the channel back up.
”But by that time we lost viewers. They never told us in that initial notice what they claim our violation was,” explained executive director Ali Abunimah – citing this as a possible example of the tactics Zahzah was exposing.
Tech companies are complicit in more direct ways as well: Microsoft’s Azure cloud service is used in Israel’s genocide as former and current Microsoft employees told the Livestream in May.In recent days, Microsoft workers have been protesting outside the company’s headquarters.
Microsoft has acknowledged the protests and announced on 15 August that it is hiring an outside law firm to investigate. But it seemingly pre-empted the supposedly independent probe by asserting: “ We have found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict.”According to Zahzah, many Western tech firms employ veterans of the Israeli military’s notorious cyberwarfare division Unit 8200.
“ This shadowy cyber unit that is responsible for direct surveillance as well as creation of many of the fatal algorithmic AI targeting platforms that we’re seeing unleashed in Gaza right now,” Zahzah said.
Microsoft alone employs about 250 Unit 8200 veterans and Nvidia, Meta, Google, Intel and Apple employ dozens more, according to Drop Site News.
Unit 8200 likely played a direct role in the assassinations of Palestinian journalists including Anas Al-Sharif, as The Hind Rajab Foundation’s Dyab Abou Jahjah explained on last week’s Livestream.
“ They don’t need to go to one of the most elite repression units of a colonial government in order to bolster their products,” Zahzah said, emphasizing that these tech firms knowingly choose to work with Israel during a genocide.
Zahzah notes that online platforms were meant to be an alternative to tightly controlled corporate media but have taken on the same pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian biases.
Still, Zahzah shared some reasons to stay hopeful and motivated.
One of the most powerful voices in his book is that of Asem Alnabih, writer, engineer, spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality and a frequent contributor to The Electronic Intifada.
Alnabih – who spoke to Zahzah from Gaza – feels that Palestinians have already proved the futility of tech censorship.
Inspired by Refaat Alareer, the beloved educator murdered early in the genocide, Palestinians have strategically used online platforms to raise consciousness and humanize Palestinians, bypassing gatekeepers and reaching people directly.
Zahzah said Alnabih’s optimism should prompt us to resist feelings of impotence and despair.
“ We need to ask ourselves who does that feeling benefit?” Zahzah said. “Companies, the Israeli colonial project and the entities that support it need us to feel powerless.”
Resistance report
In our previous show, Jon Elmer predicted that resistance operations would be mostly limited to firing artillery at the Israeli army as it confined itself to defensive positions before a planned invasion of Gaza City.
In the past week, however, Israel mounted a surprise attack in the Zaytoun neighborhood, on the outskirts of Gaza City.
“ But immediately we saw the resistance hit them as soon as they came into that neighborhood,” Elmer said in his latest report, noting that the resistance carried out operations within 24 hours of Israeli troops invading the area.
Elmer regularly highlights that the resistance is organized into territorial units, each responsible for its own area. This is why fighters can respond quickly to Israeli attacks. They don’t need to travel between areas of Gaza.
Videos of resistance operations in Zaytoun provided a clear view of a new, locally manufactured weapon: a lighter version of the Shawaz explosively formed penetrator called the “Barq” or “Lightning Bolt.”
These can be carried two at a time and thrown into tanks, Elmer said.
On multiple occasions seen in resistance videos, Israelis have left the hatches of their armored vehicles open – apparently due to poor or malfunctioning air conditioning amid intense summer heat that can push temperatures inside as high as 60C.
Soldiers have been complaining about this but in the meantime the resistance has adapted.Israel short of soldiers
Israel continues to raise the alarm about its lack of soldiers.
At one point, Israeli army radio said about half of reservists recently called for duty failed to show up. To make up the shortfall, Israel is now trying to step up recruitment of military-age Jews aged from around the world, with a focus on the US and France.
Israel has long relied on foreign Jewish recruits and even before October 2023 about 1,200 Americans were serving in the Israeli military at any given time.
How a top Israeli official escaped the US after pedophilia arrest
Mainstream media are largely ignoring a massive story – the escape of senior Israeli cyberwarfare official Tom Artiom Alexandrovich from the United States after he was arrested and charged with trying to lure someone he believed to be a 15-year-old girl for sex.
In an in-depth report for the Livestream, Ali Abunimah showed how official US accounts on how Alexandrovich was able to bail out of jail and board a flight back to Israel do not add up.
He also showed how Alexandrovich’s defense attorney David Chesnoff has made big campaign contributions to Steve Wolfson, the Nevada prosecutor in charge of the case.Wolfson has been accused of failing to prosecute at least one other accused rapist who has given him large amounts of money, as well as giving a sweetheart deal to another wealthy Chesnoff client allegedly caught with large amounts of drugs.
Alexandrovich’s arrest report shows that after he was detained, he was immediately interviewed by US agents from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, and he informed them that he worked for the Israeli government and that he planned to leave the US as soon as he could.
The Trump-appointed acting US attorney for Nevada, Sigal Chattah – the top federal prosecutor in that state – has also played a controversial role in the case.
She has so far declined to press federal charges against Alexandrovich, significantly reducing the leverage of the justice system to bring him back to the US.
Chattah ran a failed campaign for Nevada attorney general stressing that she is Israeli born and identifies proudly as Israeli, and has made numerous genocidal statements against Palestinians, including demanding that Israel “wipe Gaza off the map.”
Despite this, the US government did nothing to stop Alexandrovich leaving, despite the fact that he faces a serious felony charge carrying up to 10 years in prison. Typically, foreign citizens charged with a serious crime are considered a flight risk.
They are often denied bail and kept in prison or released on restrictive conditions, such as having to surrender their passport or submit to electronic monitoring or house arrest.
Israel, as Abunimah explains in a recent article on the Alexandrovich case, is a notorious haven for Jewish sex criminals and pedophiles, because it rarely agrees to extradite them for prosecution.
It remains to be seen whether Alexandrovich, whose next court date is 27 August, ever comes back to the United States to face justice.
Abunimah noted at the end of his segment that Israeli impunity appears to extend not only to the mass murder of Palestinian children, but even to crimes targeting children in the United States.
Remembering JoAnne Lingle, who stood with Palestine
At the end of the livestream, Abunimah highlighted a moving tribute to activist JoAnne Lingle, written by Edward E. Curtis IV for The Electronic Intifada.
Curtis writes that Lingle was a “quiet, yet fierce example of activism not often associated in contemporary times with nice, white, Midwestern Christian women.” She was arrested many times while protesting and spent a lot of time in the West Bank as part of the Christian Peacemaker Teams.
Lingle passed away on 2 May 2025 with no press coverage. Curtis said it was important that her contributions not be lost to history.
Abunimah expressed a similar sentiment on the livestream and noted that Lingle also supported The Electronic Intifada for 20 years.
“[This article] honors JoAnne Lingle but it’s also a way of honoring so many people who have worked and are working in solidarity with Palestinians.” He said so many people, “ work silently away from the limelight in this global struggle for justice.”
You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble and Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program. Michael F. Brown contributed pre-production assistance and this writer contributed post-production assistance.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Ali Abunimah contributed reporting for this article.
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