by Marc Steiner | Feb 4, 2026 | Gaza, health care, Israel, Palestine, Podcast, Politics and Movements: International, Politics and Movements: US, The Marc Steiner Show
Hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed, medical supplies blocked, and doctors killed or detained—leaving children amputated without anesthesia, patients dying from infections, and families facing starvation and freezing conditions. Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle, Dr. Nidal Jboor, and Dr. Maysa Hawwash, founders of Doctors Against Genocide, explain what’s happening inside Gaza and the West Bank, why silence from governments and medical institutions is enabling mass death, and how doctors are organizing globally to end genocide.
Credits:
Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And what’s not great or good nor acceptable is what’s happening in Gaza is what Israel is carrying out in the Gaza Strip and the utter devastation of the entire world. As of this broadcast, 72,000 people have been killed. Among them, over 20,000 children, over 171,000 have been wounded, maimed, or crippled. And countless numbers lie still under the rubble. It is devastation of unimaginable proportions. Let me add this, that in Israel itself, over three quarters of a million people have demonstrated in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to demand the end of the war in Gaza. And today we bring you a conversation with three Palestinian doctors. We’ll talk with us about what’s happening in Gaza, what’s being done to stand up to it, how to end this war, and what’s happening to the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Our guests are the founders of Doctors Against Genocide, commonly
by Jon Queally | Feb 4, 2026 | Article, Economy, Economy and Inequality, immigration, labor, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint
by Maximillian Alvarez | Feb 3, 2026 | east palestine, Economy and Inequality, Podcast, Politics and Movements: US, sacrifice zones
It’s been three years since a Norfolk Southern “bomb train” carrying toxic chemicals derailed in the small town of East Palestine, OH, on the night of Feb. 3, 2023. Three days later, Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to make the disastrous and completely unnecessary decision to vent five giant carloads of vinyl chloride into a ditch and set the contents on fire, releasing a massive chemical plume into the air, exposing residents in East Palestine and the surrounding areas to deadly toxins in one of the worst industrial disasters in US history. Three years later, residents are still getting sick, many have been financially ruined, they have been abandoned by their government and Norfolk Southern, and forgotten by the public. And, as Katya Schwenk details in a blockbuster new report for The Lever, residents are still waiting for the restitution they were promised from the $600 million settlement that Norfolk Southern agreed to pay to resolve residents’ class-action lawsuit over the derailment.
Guest:
Katya Schwenk is a journalist based in Phoenix, AZ, and a reporter for The Lever. Her reporting and essays have appeared in The Intercept, the Baffler, the American Prospect, and elsewhere.
Additional links/info:
Katya Schwenk, The Lever / The Real News Network, “Three years later, life in East Palestine, Ohio, is still derailed”
Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “America’s toxic future looks like East Palestine, Ohio, today”
Credits:
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News,
by Maximillian Alvarez | Feb 3, 2026 | east palestine, Economy and Inequality, Politics and Movements: US, sacrifice zones, video
Everything changed for Laurie Harmon and her neighbors on Feb. 3, 2023, when a Norfolk Southern “bomb train” carrying hazardous chemicals derailed less than a mile away from her home in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. Three days later, Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to dump and burn five tanker cars full of vinyl chloride, blasting a massive chemical plume into the air and exposing residents to toxins that have poisoned their bodies and homes. Three years later, Harmon and other residents are still suffering the toxic fallout from one of the worst industrial disasters in US history.
Additional links/info:
Laurie Harmon Facebook page
Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Residents in this small town ‘left for dead’ after industrial disaster”
Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “An industrial disaster wrecked my home. Now I’m living out of a hotel”
Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “A billion-dollar company poisoned my home and destroyed my town”
Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “They poisoned a whole community. The EPA helped cover it up”
Credits:Filmed and edited by Maximillian Alvarez
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Laurie Harmon:
Anybody who lives far away and you watch some of the major news stations and you read things on Facebook, everything’s fine here and everything is not fine. I’m telling you this from experience.
Speaker 2:
We are following breaking news as we come on the air. This morning. A trained derailment forces hundreds from their home in Ohio,
Speaker 3:
Date of emergency in Ohio, after a train derailment and massive fire, some of the cars were carrying hazardous
by Katya Schwenk | Feb 2, 2026 | Article, east palestine, Economy and Inequality, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, sacrifice zones
This article was first published by The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.
On a balmy evening last September, Michael Fowler stumbled out to the south rail line in East Palestine, Ohio, and sat down in the middle of the tracks. His dog, a white Chihuahua, was beside him. The sun was setting. He waited perilously for the next oncoming train.
He wouldn’t have to wait long. Dozens of times a day, freight trains blare through East Palestine, cleaving the small Ohio town in two. The stretch of tracks on which Fowler sat was just a few hundred yards west of the site where two and a half years earlier, a Norfolk Southern train carrying tank cars full of toxic chemicals derailed and burned. The accident sent dark plumes of smoke over the town, leached toxins into local creeks and soil, and ignited a national reckoning around rail safety, one that has since delivered few reforms.
Fowler, 54, was upset with Norfolk Southern, an East Palestine police officer later reported in a sworn affidavit. He had not received the money he was promised from the $85 billion rail company — his cut of the $600 million settlement that Norfolk Southern had agreed to pay to resolve residents’ class-action lawsuit over the derailment. Eighteen months after the settlement’s announcement, still no check had arrived.
That September night, Fowler had decided to take matters into his own hands. He hoped to “cost the railroad money,” the police officer wrote, by putting himself in the path of the trains, which ran so close to his home that he could see the tracks from his front lawn.
Fowler was not the only East Palestine
by Maximillian Alvarez | Feb 2, 2026 | ICE, Minneapolis, Podcast, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, video, Working People
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
Alex Pretti was murdered while showing his humanity in the most clear way, helping another human. We ask for justice now. We demand eyes out of our communities. We demand investment in our future and not our capture. We demand that no money is invested in a machine that clearly threat to public justice and will murder with impunity.
Speaker 2:
Alex, he came to the rescue. I saw the video like 50 times like everybody else. A woman was being pushed down by a large man who was armed and he went to her rescue. He was beaten, he was sprayed, he was put to the ground and he was shot 10 times. And Alex’s boss is in that building right over there. And what did he do? He sends out a freaking tweet or whatever the hell it was. It was a political tweet saying, we acknowledge he worked for us. Shame. Yes, shame. What did Secretary Collins convey to over 450,000 VA employees? He doesn’t give a shit about any of ’em. I would say that Alex is a hero. He will be remembered as a hero, and we should all be very proud that he was a VA employee, that he was a federal employee. Thank you. We
Speaker 3:
Don’t want to stand idly by as our families are torn apart and our comrades are murdered, especially when our own institutions are profiting from this injustice. And as we mourn and grieve the tragic loss of our organizers,
