Kat Lonsdorf
speaker
695 appearances
75 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 25 Aug
Kat Lonsdorf’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 60 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 13.
Appearances
Yeah, so President Biden put those sanctions in place to try to de-escalate violent Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Those attacks have increased dramatically since the war in Gaza began. There have been some attacks on Israeli settlers, too. Even just this weekend, there were Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian villages. They burnt cars and other property.
Settler groups said that this was timed to coincide with the release of Palestinian detainees and prisoners in accordance with the Gaza ceasefire deal. President Trump now canceling those sanctions on Israeli settlers, you know, certainly coming after what happened this weekend, really doesn't discourage that kind of violence.
It's made life throughout the West Bank difficult, even in the areas not directly affected. The West Bank consists of a series of checkpoints and designated roads for Palestinians, and most of those have been closed by the Israeli military, making travel throughout the area really hard.
And on top of that, many Palestinians in the West Bank worry that Israelis' military focus is shifting over to them now that there's a ceasefire in Gaza. I talked to 53-year-old Walid Amira in Ramallah about this the day the ceasefire in Gaza went into effect. He told me, of course the war is coming here.
The Israeli government wants to prove something to their people, and the West Bank will become the place where they can prove it, he said.
Yeah, I mean, several of President Trump's appointees, you know, are very pro-Israel. Mike Huckabee, who will be the next U.S. ambassador in Jerusalem, has visited Israel several times and argued that the West Bank belongs to Israel. Elise Stefanik, who is set to be the next U.N. ambassador, said in her confirmation hearing yesterday that Israel has a right to the West Bank as well.
So if Israel does make moves to annex the West Bank, it seems likely the U.S. administration will give them the green light to do so.
Not quite. So we're waiting on a vote later today by the larger Israeli government, but it is expected to pass there with a majority of the votes. It is possible that it could still be challenged in Israel's Supreme Court. It's expected to make it through that too, though. So there are a few more steps, but it does seem likely that a ceasefire could start as early as Sunday.
Yeah, it's been a tense time here since this was announced by mediators back on Wednesday night. It was announced by Egypt, Qatar and the U.S. and even Hamas back then. But Israel did not confirm it. Netanyahu's office put out a statement saying that Hamas had come back with last minute changes to the deal. That still had to be worked out. And Hamas denied that.
So it was a little unclear what the holdup was exactly. Meanwhile, there has been a disagreement within Israel's security cabinet. Two far right members were very, very against this deal. Both of them threatened to leave Netanyahu's government if the deal did go through. And that would collapse his coalition and throw Israel's government into a tailspin.
You know, it seems like those that has been a bit smoothed out, although both of those ministers did vote against the deal in the security cabinet vote this morning.
We know several Israeli hostages will be released that first day in exchange for several Palestinian detainees. We also know that the fighting will stop in Gaza and Israeli troops will start to withdraw. The plan is for it to stop for at least six weeks. Over that time, 33 of the remaining 98 hostages should be released and around a thousand Palestinian detainees are also expected to be released.
There's also supposed to be a significant increase in the flow of much needed humanitarian aid to Gaza. And also in that time, negotiations for the next phase of this deal will also take place in the hopes of, you know, continuing the ceasefire with more releases and more withdrawal of Israeli troops.
Yeah, the fighting is very much still ongoing. Israel says it carried out around 50 airstrikes in the past day. It says it killed a Hamas fighter who participated in the 2023 attacks on southern Israel that started this war. Meanwhile, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the time since this deal was announced on Wednesday night, many of them children, according to civil defense reports.
in Gaza. So, you know, the cost, the human cost of keeping this war going is still very, very high. Our producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, says that people there are feeling anxious. They're worried that the fighting is going to get worse before it gets better.
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