Livestream: Trump misjudged Iran | The Electronic Intifada

The Electronic Intifada Podcast 4 March 2026

The Electronic Intifada Livestreamon 26 February, contributing editor Jon Elmer reported on the US military buildup around Iran.

Two days later the US and Israel launched a full-scale war of aggression against Iran, murdering its leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and declaring that their goal was to topple the Iranian state.

By 3 March, almost 800 Iranians had been killed and hundreds more injured in indiscriminate attacks across the country.

On Tuesday, Iran held a mass funeral for 165 schoolgirls and staff killed in an attack on an elementary school in Minab, a town in the country’s southern Hormozgan Province on the Persian Gulf coast.

Iran is carrying out retaliatory strikes against US military facilities and strategic assets across the Gulf region and against Israel. An Iranian drone strike killed six US soldiers at a base in Kuwait.

The Lebanese resistance group Hizballah joined the fighting, firing missiles at targets in Israel.

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, including residential buildings, have killed more than 50 people and injured another 150.

Iranian strikes with missiles and drones have killed 11 people in Israel and a dozen more across a broader region that is rapidly being engulfed in conflict.

Analyst Muhammad Shehada joined the Livestream to talk about the first major meeting of US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace and the dystopian plans for a “New Rafah.”

That meeting took place less than two weeks before Trump launched the war.

In Gaza, people have had to endure more winter flooding and lethal Israeli attacks as they observe the month of Ramadan, as co-host Nora Barrows-Friedman reported in her news briefing.Watch her report on YouTube and read it here.

Co-host Ali Abunimah talked about how the European Union has accused The Electronic Intifada’s David Cronin of “disinformation” for his accurate and uncontested reporting about the pro-Israel activities of its anti-Semitism coordinator Katharina von Schnurbein.

The EU has used accusations of “disinformation” as a pretext to impose sanctions on other journalists, including German journalist Hüseyin Dogru.

Abunimah interviewed Dogru for a recent episode of The Electronic Intifada Podcast and wrote about his case.

Watch Abunimah’s segment about Cronin here and read Cronin’s own article about the EU’s accusations against him here.

US buildup against Iran

On the Livestream, Elmer reviewed a Fox News clip of Trump envoy Steve Witkoff from 22 February.

Witkoff – who was ostensibly negotiating with Iran at the time –saidthat the US president was “curious” why Iran had not already “capitulated” in the face of the American military buildup.

“One thing about not having a diplomat be a diplomat is he is not diplomatic,” observed Elmer.

Witkoff is a real estate developer.

Trump “doesn’t understand resistance or sovereignty,” Elmer added.

Elmer explained how flight tracking, satellite imagery and open-source photography were used by analysts to track US military movements which would otherwise be classified if the information came from official sources.

He shared a clip of US Air Force officer Major Claire Randolph, speaking on 29 January about how such publicly available information frustrated the US and Israel during June’s 12-Day War against Iran.

“Operational security, especially when you’re talking about a transnational movement with hundreds of aircraft, is really difficult to conceal,” Randolph said.

Even before the war began, US officials provided varying estimates for how long a war could last, which is significant, Elmer noted, because Israel and the US have limited air defense capacity.

During the June war, the US used upa quarter of its sophisticated THAADair defense missiles protecting Israel.

These missiles are expensive and difficult to produce, with the US military receiving only about a dozen new ones each year.

Israel sustained over $1 billion in damage according to Israel’s tax authority.

Operating its air defense systems also cost it about $200 million each day.

As Elmer noted, these figures were for only 12 days of war. The costs and damage were so unbearable that Israel had to seek a ceasefire.

Gaza dystopia

On 19 February, Trump convened the first major meeting of his Board of Peace in Washington.

As Abunimah noted, the gathering assembled US vassal leaders from the region and dozens of marginal states, allegedly to discuss Gaza’s future – while Palestinians themselves were almost entirely excluded.

But even some of Washington’s most loyal European client states boycotted the gathering – although the European Union sent a high-ranking representative, prompting criticism from several European governments.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke at the Board of Peace meeting and promoted the dystopian plans for “New Rafah.”

Blair criticized the governance in Gaza for “extremism, corruption, ineffective institutions” and talked about the investment potential in Gaza.

“Today we set out profound changes necessary to rebuild Gaza for Gazans,” Blair said.

“He’s been to Gaza. He took selfies with the rubble in my own neighborhood in 2014. He saw everything in there with his own eyes. Not a single mention of the destruction,” Muhammad Shehada told the Livestream.

Shehada noted that Blair made no mention of Israel when talking about the catastrophic situation in Gaza.

Shehada is a Palestinian analyst and writer from Gaza and a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. He recently wrote, “Dispelling Trump’s dystopia: A European blueprint for Gaza’s renewal.”

While he was prime minister two decades ago, Blair understood that Hamas had to be engaged, according to Shehada – the same way Irish Republican groups were included in the Irish peace negotiations – and even invited Hamas figures to the UK.

But Blair is now demonizing Hamas and promoting New Rafah – effectively a high-tech concentration camp meant to serve as a model for warehousing the rest of the Palestinian population in Gaza.

“The idea of New Rafah was born as a dystopian mix: Mad Max, Fallout, Hunger Games, Minority Report,” Shehada said, piling on various pop cultural references. “And put on top of it Squid Game to make a capitalist profit.”

Shehada said plans for New Rafah do not include long-term housing. Instead people would live in shipping containers.

This is called “Containerized Smart Housing Solutions,” he said. People would be under 24/7 biometric surveillance and they would not be allowed to go anywhere except to leave Gaza and go into Egypt.

The camp would be run by ISIS-linked proxy gangs cultivated by Israel – a mix of drug dealers, sexual predators, murderers and collaborators, according to Shehada.

He described the scheme as a sham meant to convince the world that Israel is not committing genocide.

Barrows-Friedman compared it to model concentration camps built by the Nazis to assure the world that reports of death camps were false.

Despite the elaborate plans, Shehada does not believe that Trump’s team is really trying to implement them.

“You cannot just expect that people would run begging for shelter, begging for room in this concentration camp,” said Shehada.

So why push it in the first place?

Shehada said that Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and other associates including Aryeh Lightstone view Gaza as “a quick get-rich scam” and a “commercial opportunity.”

You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.

Ali Abunimah contributed reporting for this article.

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.

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