HOSTS: Brett King (Lead Host), Jason Henrichs, JP Nicols

GUEST: Arwa Damon (Founder, INARA; Former CNN Senior Correspondent)

What Is Happening on the Ground in Gaza and How Does It Affect Human Survival?

HOST (Brett King)

Today I’m coming to you from the Bosphorus in Istanbul. This episode is a departure from our usual format as we speak with Arwa Damon, founder of INARA, the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance, and a longtime CNN correspondent who has reported from conflict zones worldwide. Her perspective brings necessary clarity to the humanitarian, psychological, and financial realities facing civilians in Gaza.

How Do You Maintain Mental Health While Reporting in War Zones?

HOST (Brett King)

You’ve spent years in Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, and other conflict areas. How do you keep your mental health intact amid such brutality?

GUEST (Arwa Damon)

It’s been a journey. For the first decade, I didn’t use healthy coping mechanisms. What changed was realizing I couldn’t depend on “hope” as fuel, because hope disappears in these environments.

QUOTE:

“I don’t need the light. I can learn to operate in the dark.”

To stay grounded, Arwa uses:

• EMDR therapy
  
• Mind-body breathwork practices
  
• Conscious reframing of emotional triggers
  
• Her three cats — a small but meaningful source of stability
  

She emphasizes that hopelessness isn’t a flaw, it’s a weapon of war used to break people psychologically.

Why Arwa Founded INARA: What the World Wasn’t Seeing

What Does INARA Do?

GUEST (Arwa Damon)

INARA began in 2015 while I was still at CNN. I kept encountering severely injured children who were falling through the cracks, no access to medical care, trauma support, or long-term rehabilitation.

Today, INARA operates in:

• Gaza
  
• Syria
  
• Afghanistan
  
• Turkey
  
• Egypt
  
• Ukraine
  

Core mission:

• Medical treatment
  
• Trauma and mental health support
  
• Long-term holistic care
  
• Emergency humanitarian response
  

QUOTE:

“People who have nothing are so generous with the little they have.”

Arwa describes moments where civilians sheltering from bombs still insisted on offering tea, food, and dignity, even while bleeding soldiers lay nearby.

How Do People in Gaza Survive Financially With No Banking System?

HOST (Brett King)

In Breaking Banks, we discuss financial inclusion. What does “financial survival” even mean in Gaza right now?

GUEST (Arwa Damon)

There is no functioning financial infrastructure.
No ATMs. No banks. No payroll. No safe liquidity.

People survive through:

• Remittances from family abroad
  
• Black-market Hawala networks charging 40% fees
  
• Small improvised businesses (e.g., solar-powered charging stations)
  
• Community sharing and micro-support networks
  

Example:
If someone abroad sends $100, the family receives $60 after Hawala fees.

Prices are catastrophic:

• $60 buys two kilos of vegetables
  
• A basic tent costs $1,000
  

QUOTE:

“The amounts people are surviving on are absurdly low.”

Connectivity is also broken:

• People crawl toward the border to catch faint Israeli cell signals
  
• Hospitals serve as Wi-Fi hubs
  
• Rubble cafés operate on damaged fiber lines
  

These failures expose global fragility in crisis-response systems, a major theme in the LDO framework around systemic vulnerability and infrastructure fragility.

How Is AI Being Used in Modern Warfare,  and Can It Ever Aid Humanitarian Response?

AI as a Weapon

GUEST (Arwa Damon)

AI systems now play a direct role in identifying and striking targets. Israeli operations use tools like:

• Lavender
  
• “Where’s Daddy?”
  

These models track individuals to their homes, a major shift in autonomous warfare.

QUOTE:

“AI is already being used in Gaza. Lavender and Where’s Daddy track targets directly to their homes.”

Can AI Help Crisis Zones?

Arwa says no — not without:

• Power
  
• Connectivity
  
• Infrastructure
  
• Safe corridors
  

Humanitarian logistics in Gaza are blocked not by inefficiency, but by access control.

AI cannot move vegetables across a closed checkpoint.

This is a critical insight for global banking and fintech audiences exploring AI-driven service delivery, infrastructure limitations, and digital humanitarianism.

Why Understanding Context Is Required for Any Chance at Human Solidarity

HOST (Brett King)

How can societies build consensus when polarization is accelerating everywhere?

GUEST (Arwa Damon)

People shut down when confronted with ideas that challenge their sense of truth. Emotional maturity, individually and collectively, is essential.

QUOTE:

“Understanding someone’s context doesn’t mean agreeing with their actions.”

Arwa explains:

• Trauma shapes entire populations
  
• Epigenetics shows we inherit emotional responses across generations
  
• Compassion requires deliberate exposure to uncomfortable narratives
  
• The goal is not to convert but to connect
  

She stresses that Gaza’s suffering cannot fade into another “accepted normal.”

What Everyday Gaza Teaches About Humanity

Arwa shares powerful moments:

• Starving children helping unload food trucks before taking their share
  
• Families offering tea in the middle of bombed-out homes
  
• Laughter and dignity used as acts of resistance
  
• The stark contrast between generosity of the poor and indifference of the wealthy
  

QUOTE:

“If I could bring everyone into one moment, they would understand, and everything would change.”

How Listeners Can Support INARA

Arwa encourages:

• Donations (even small)
  
• Local fundraising efforts
  
• Keeping conversations alive
  
• Advocating for continued visibility
  
• Preventing today’s crisis from becoming “the new normal”
  

She emphasizes:
“We don’t even know how much we can do until we try.”

Raw Transcript:

People have different opinions about how to do this, and I’m very much of the thinking, and my journalism is kind of centered on this, of, you know, I don’t need to hit you on the head with a frying pan, but I need to try to gently draw you in and show you. And I think this is especially important right now because things are so polarizing. I think we need to, as individuals, emotionally mature, but also collectively as, you know, societies and nations.

Today I’m coming to you from the Bosphorus in Istanbul in Turkey. And this week we’re having a little bit of a departure from our usual show. We managed to catch up with Ava Dayman, who runs Inara, a charity, a non-NGO, working in Palestinian on the Gaza Strip, looking at the humanitarian crisis there.

Ava is an American Syrian, previously was a reporter for CNN, and so has a really unique perspective on what’s going on in Palestine. And, you know, we thought it’d be interesting to give a bit of perspective on this humanitarian crisis, and particularly how it affects people living there in terms of access to financial services and, you know, just basic needs. So here is my reporting with Ava Dayman.

Ava Dayman, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Brett King. My pleasure.

It was nice to hear you talk today. And I actually took some time before we were catching up now to take a look at some of the work you’ve done on CNN previously and things like that. The first thing I want to ask you is, you know, you spend time in these war-torn conflict areas.

You’ve been in Syria, in Palestine, recently in Gaza. You spent time also in Afghanistan. So I want to ask you, how do you, in the depth of these conflicts, how do you keep your mental health in good shape? It’s actually been a journey.

You know, I think, you know, for the first probably 10, 15 years, not healthy coping mechanisms. And what has really helped me has been, you know, not just the work, as we call it, but shifting my thinking. Because what I’ve now realized, and it’s these small little moments, is that if you look for the light, because it’s so hard to find and it’s so hard to see, it can sink you even deeper.

And I’ve come to this realization of, I don’t need the light. I can turn water in the dark. The situations of extreme hopelessness that we see that are literally an arsenal, are a weapon in the arsenal of war.

It’s still a recreation of situations that are so enormous, so hopeless, so helpless, that you’re driven into paralysis or apathy. I’ve realized that I don’t need hope. Hope isn’t my motivator.

That’s not why I keep doing what I do. And that realization gave me some of my power back. But in the more practical sense of it, EMDR worked really well for me.

And I also started working with this guy, Simon, who does sort of mind-body balance and a lot of breath work. But, you know, everyone has their own techniques for dealing with it. And I got three cats.

The three cats must help. They do. They do.

Tell me about the non-profit that you run and the work you’re doing for people who aren’t familiar. Yeah. So it’s called INADA, which in Arabic means Ray of Light, but it’s the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance.

And I basically established it while I was still at CNN back in 2015, because by that point, you know, I had seen so much. I’d been through so much, mostly in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. And I kept coming across all these kids in these war zones that were injured and they weren’t getting the medical treatment that they needed.

And I was actually in a very dark place. And out of that came this idea of, well, hang on a second, maybe I can do something for these kids and maybe I can build an organization that focuses on these cases that other charities are not providing treatment for. And that’s what it initially really focused on is medical and mental health treatment for children who have complex injuries.

But since then, we’ve expanded into a much more sort of widespread, broad, very holistic approach. And we work in Afghanistan, Syria, Gaza, Egypt, Turkey, and we have had a couple of projects in Ukraine. But it’s also because, you know, when you spend that much time in these places, there’s a few things that you realize.

And I think for me, the big lesson has really been, this is so striking, people who have nothing are so generous with the little that they have. You mentioned that a couple of times. Yeah.

And to me, it’s still mind blowing that someone who has just been displaced, who is just starting to, you know, set up the scraps of their tunt, would invite me in for a cup of tea. Or how, you know, in Mosul in 2016, the Iraqi Special Forces unit I was with, we were ambushed by ISIS. And we ended up sheltering with these civilians.

And, you know, literally, I mean, the soldiers were like bleeding out in this courtyard. The women and children were hiding in a dark corner. All I could see was the whites of their eyes.

And the head of the household went and made fried eggs for everybody. Because no matter what, we were still guests in this house. Right.

And, you know, you see all these moments. And then when you come out of this space, your relationship with everything around you changes. My relationship, especially after Gaza, because it was so extreme, with food, with water, with a hot shower, with my bed, is very different to what it was before.

And that really ends up being sort of a big driver in wanting to do and understanding the value of a small act of kindness. Because I haven’t forgotten the small acts of kindness that have been bestowed upon me. And I know that people don’t forget those small acts of kindness.

And what’s so striking about it is then, you know, you look at the people who have wealth and a lot of them are not generous with it at all. It doesn’t make sense to me. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s true. You mentioned going to Gaza and people greeting you because they hadn’t seen you and asking about your well-being. I know that.

I mean, that was just nuts, you know, because I think that was on my second trip in. And they’re on the smaller scale that other organizations not necessarily have within their area of operations. So they know us.

Plus, the team is constantly going back there because we’re doing all these mental health activities with the kids. And yeah, so I had rotated out and I was coming back in two months later and the women were all like, Adewale, where have you been? We missed you so much. We were so worried about you.

And I’m sitting there going, I mean, but I was out. I was out and you were worried about me. But I mean, do you feel like when you come back to, you know, quote unquote, civilization from those, are you frustrated that there’s such lack of awareness of how these people are treated and that as a tool, because if people were actually embedded in this and actually experienced what these other people were going through, maybe we’d see more compassion flow through.

And the number of times like throughout my journalistic career, but then also now in the humanitarian space where I’ve thought to myself, like, if I could bring everyone into this one moment, into this one tiny little moment, and it’s not even a scary moment, it’s not a moment when a bomb’s going off, then they would understand and things would change. And as a journalist, I tried to focus a lot of my like reporting and my storytelling on that, really trying to bring people into the experience and in the humanitarian space, like on my social media, I still try to do that. And I have a tendency to fault myself.

And so if we have not been able to draw people in, somehow we’re doing something wrong. But there is a lot of, it’s frustration, but it’s also frustration with myself. In the sense that I should be able to figure out a way to break down whatever these barricades are, that are left that aren’t allowing people to see each other as humans.

And there is anger. And that’s kind of like what my own personal sort of mental health journey has been. Throughout the course of my career for a very long time, I translated a lot of, you know, the sad, because it’s extraordinarily sad, and the hurt that you’re seeing other people go through.

And all of those sort of complex tornado emotions, I used to translate everything into anger. And so the work that kind of like I did on myself has helped a lot with that. And I mean, no, I mean, anyone who tells you that it’s easy is either lying to themselves or and you wouldn’t want it to be easy.

You wouldn’t want to go into a space like the ones that I’ve been in and come out and be fine. I mean, I want to talk a little bit tactically about access to basic services. And one of the things we focus on in Breaking Banks podcast is financial inclusion and access to finances.

But when you have, you know, we I mean, we’ve heard stories about doctors and lawyers and professional people from Syria, for example, displaced by the civil war, you know, getting on a boat, you know, with their kids, you know, trying to trying to get to Greece or something. Yeah, I covered that a lot. And, you know, you have these people who would be in their society pretty well off financially, and then suddenly, you know, they’re left without any financial resources.

And for those in Gaza, you know, I imagine that they don’t have ATMs they go to and get cash out. So how do people survive financially in these scenarios? So, I mean, it’s so hard. It’s inexplicably hard.

From a practical perspective, like, where does money actually come from? So up to a certain point, you know, people had some cash. Right now, today, for example, if you’re going to get cash, a lot of it is actually remittances from abroad if you don’t have a salary. Right.

And then who actually has a salary right now in Gaza? You know, some of the journalists do if they’re contracted by a network, the humanitarian community, just like my staff has a salary. Some of the doctors, the medics and that kind of a thing that there isn’t really, you know, industry isn’t there. But then people have people overseas.

And so it ends up going through sort of this de facto black market system. The Hawala. The Hawala, exactly.

Except they take 40 percent. 40 percent. Yes.

So basically, it’s one example. If you have someone who’s managed to get out of Gaza, right, and let’s say they’re getting cash assistance outside, which is maybe, you know, $200 a month, and they’re sending half of that to their family members in Gaza, they’re sending them $100. But that family member is only getting 60.

And remember, we’re talking about Gaza, where at certain points in time, when fresh vegetables was available, $60 would get you maybe two kilos of fresh vegetables. You know, a tent, if you’re going to end up, you know, buying one because it’s available on the commercial market for whatever reason, that’s $1,000. And so the amounts of money that, you know, we’re talking about people trying to survive on are absolutely, absurdly low.

Hmm. That’s insane. And, yeah, like this is where you understand that these are the limits of our current system in terms of our ability to absorb shocks to the system.

And, you know, some people have wanted to sort of set up a sort of virtual money wallet thing. But for that, what do you need? Power. Power.

You need phones. And so, you know, you think Gaza, right? Yeah, net. So how are people charging their cell phones? So what some people have done as sort of a small business is they were able to save their solar panels.

Gaza used to have a lot of solar panels because even before electricity was cut. And so some people set up charging stations where it’s one solar panel and then a whole charging station. And then they charge people to charge their phones.

But then you need the connectivity. Yeah. You know, the internet system is not exactly… The first thing they’re going to do to stop coordinated attacks is take out telecommunications.

Exactly. And so, you know, your normal, you know, 3G, 4G, whatever it is, doesn’t work there. And so what some people would do when they were trying to get those videos out is they would crawl very close to the Israeli border or as close as they could to try to get that signal.

Or, for example, why does the press congregate at the hospitals? Because they can get onto the hospital Wi-Fi, right? And then there’s a couple of random, you know, internet cafes. But I mean, it’s not… It’s a cafe in the rubble that have cropped up with people that are still able to get their systems on. But then there’s also problems with the fiber lines.

And so at one point, the line that was in the north had been hit by the Israelis. And the international NGO community was only actually just in the last few days able to get permission to go up and fix that line. And that’s why Gaza City has had very poor internet connectivity.

So there’s all these factors that come into play when you’re trying to look for solutions for the population. It’s insane. All right.

Well, you know, today I did a session on, you know, technology disruption. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much.

And, you know, we are at the moment seeing, you know, we’ve seen in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, increased use of drone warfare in particular. And it seems like it’s going to be getting easier and easier for remote operation and autonomous operation in war zones. So, you know, given the problem that you’ve talked about with people being connected with what’s going on or disconnected, rather, from what’s going on, and, you know, thinking of it as another problem, the potential for this autonomous warfare just to come into these places and do untold damage seems to be… I mean, it’s already come into play in Gaza.

PLOS 962 is this amazing outlet. Sorry, PLOS 972 is this amazing outlet. And they looked into this, and actually a couple of other organizations have looked into it, including Israeli publications.

And basically the Israelis have been using artificial intelligence technology. One is called Lavender and the other is called Where’s Daddy? And Where’s Daddy actually tracks the target to their home. Oh, man.

Whereas, you know, I have, throughout the course of my, you know, journalism career, spent a lot of time in U.S. military ops rooms. And, you know, generally you attempt to take out your target when you’re going to cause the least amount of civilian… Collateral damage. Collateral damage.

I hate that word. Collateral damage. But yeah, so Lavender and Where’s Daddy.

All right. Well, on the flip side, though, do you think there is a use for AI in mitigating some of these issues, dealing with some of these humanitarian crises better? I mean, it’s hard to see how it could play into a context where you don’t have connectivity. You know, if you look, you know, Gaza is one thing, but if you look at a conflict like Sudan, where, you know, there is even less connectivity, actually, for these populations that are being displaced because of the remote and vastness of it than there was for the population in Gaza, then how does AI work in those circumstances? You know, or is AI something that we can tap into for solutions when you’re not connected? And when the experience is so unique that, in theory, whatever needs to get plugged into AI, you can’t actually plug into AI.

I mean, I’m sitting here racking my brain right now, being like, okay, so let’s say I plugged into AI. You know, I have vegetables in southern Gaza. I have hygiene kits in northern Gaza.

I have a soap crisis. I want to move stuff from the south to the north and vice versa, but Israel controls in its room corridor and can’t get me across that. I don’t see how AI solves that problem.

Yeah, yeah, that’s fair. In terms of the work that you do, you do a lot of reporting from these zones and raise awareness of this, but how do we get more consensus mechanisms? How do we get more people involved? I mean, I guess if you knew how to solve this problem, you would, but given the incredible, how we are seeing viral campaigns on social media and these sorts of things going, surely we should be able to mobilize some of this stuff to build consensus, but we seem to be getting more and more divided politically and, you know, in terms of opinions. So I guess, you know, do you have some insights on how we can get more people together on these issues? Look, people have different opinions about how to do this, and I’m very much of the thinking, and my journalism is kind of centered on this, of, you know, I don’t need to hit you on the head with a frying pan, but I need to try to gently draw you in and show you.

And I think this is especially important right now because things are so polarizing. I think we need to, as individuals, emotionally mature, but also collectively as, you know, societies and nations. And, you know, this might seem a bit off topic, but if we look at some of our sort of gut reactions to, and it could be on either side of any spectrum of this, but you will have a gut reaction to something that goes against your perception and or your believed truth.

And that gut reaction will cause you to close up. If we become more aware of what we’re closing up to and deliberately force ourselves to open up to it, then we can start to get closer together. And again, understanding someone’s context does not mean agreeing with their actions.

But if we refuse to understand a context, then we can’t alter actions and or reactions. And a lot of this goes into, you know, epigenetics, which is the study of intergenerational traumas and how we’re basically not born blank slates. You know, we’re born carrying all of this historical trauma that doesn’t change our DNA, but it changes how our DNA interacts with each other and then interacts with the world.

And I think a lot of it requires a responsibility on our part to try to understand our own emotional reactions and be more cognizant of how we’re expressing them. Otherwise, yeah, we’re gonna just go off on these hysterical crazy trains and just rip ourselves apart. Yeah, yeah.

You know, it’s interesting. You talked about, you know, these very human reactions, people being compassionate towards you and so forth. So you’ve been in some pretty crazy places.

And I mean, I just, I look at that and say, you must have incredible internal fortitude and strength to cope with this. The late, great Marie Colvin, extraordinary journalist, one of my idols, you know, she and like her era of, you know, female frontline correspondents broke the glass ceiling for my generation. She was killed in Syria.

But she says, courage is not being afraid to be afraid. Yeah. And so, you know, I’m not fearless.

Yeah. But I do have courage. Yeah.

Having said that, do you observe that, you know, these people are in extraordinarily stressful situations, but they’re just normal people? They are. And let me look, there’s a big difference between, you know, whether it’s journalism or humanitarian, like we go in and out and we’re doing it by choice. They don’t have a choice.

They don’t have the ability to leave. And especially when we’re talking about like Gaza specifically, you know, all these other areas that I’ve been in, you know, even the seizures that were happening in certain areas of Syria or, you know, ISIS in Iraq. There was always an escape route, albeit one that could be like practically suicidal, but it was always there.

It was always that option. And then as front lines advanced, then there was that moment where if you’d survived up until that point, you would pop out. Yeah.

And that’s it. You could breathe and it was over. But Gaza doesn’t have any of that.

And, you know, when you actually go there though and spend time there and realize that in the middle of this crazy, people are still holding on to laughter because laughter is resistance. People are still holding on to their dignity because holding on to your dignity is resistance. Then that’s when you really understand what it means to be a kind and compassionate human.

I mean, I often ask myself, you know, as we all should, you know, if I had children, if my kid was starving and my neighbors got a bag of flour, would I go and steal that from them? Yeah. Would that level of social disintegration happen around us? And I keep remembering, you know, the Americans during COVID and the toilet paper run. Oh yeah.

And- Aussies too, by the way. Did you? And I think about, you know, the people in Gaza, but also in a lot of these other areas that I’ve been to and how, no, they didn’t disintegrate like that. What’s, you know, what’s a little, I just remember this.

I did a book called The Rise of Techno-Socialism and I spoke about COVID impact on communities. And food wastage went up by 40% in the United States because people were hoarding food and they couldn’t use it. It’s just insane.

It’s just insane. I mean, there’s, you know, there’s kids in Gaza, right? And I’m talking like the height of the starvation. And so we at one point managed to like find enough supplies to do a hot meal, we were calling them hot meals then, but literally it was just rice because there was nothing that you could buy to actually put on the rice.

And so, you know, our truck drives up and the kids are starving. And you would think like anywhere else in the world, a starving child, when they see food, what do they do? They run, they grab, they shove it in their own mouth. These kids went and helped our team unload the truck and pile the food and then took their share and help them actually with the distribution.

Because even a child in a place like that understands that you can’t just look out for the individual, you’ve got to look out for the whole. Incredible. So listen, I’m respectful of your time.

I really appreciate it. For people listening to the cast or watching this on YouTube, how can we help Inara? What can we do to help you and the work that you’re doing in these places? I mean, look, obviously, you know, donate, donate, donate, right? And there is this notion out there somehow because there’s this Trump, you know, ceasefire deal or that it’s over, or there’s this impression that, you know, well, nothing’s really getting in properly, that we are spending the money that gets donated to us. All organizations are.

But frankly, like even if it’s not Inara, like whatever you have that you can give, no matter how hopeless or helpless you might feel, donations do make a difference. And if you can’t donate, I mean, look, there’s small scale fundraisers that can be organized, getting, you know, children actively involved, but then also talking about it, you know, creating spaces where people can talk about it, just making sure that we keep the conversation going. Because right now, my personal big fear is in the way that we accepted Gaza’s pre-October 7th situation as the status quo.

And Gaza was a prison back then. And nothing was going in and out without Israel’s approval. And the living conditions were extraordinarily difficult.

And we all lamented the fate of Gaza. And it was like, oh, you know, the poor thing and the poor Palestinians there, blah, blah, blah. We can’t let this, what we’re seeing right now, today’s reality, become that new accepted normal status quo.

And the only way to prevent that from happening is to make sure that the spotlight stays on the situation there. And not just on Gaza, but, you know, on the West Bank too. Yeah.

Awa Damon, thanks for joining us on The Futurists and Breaking Banks. I applaud the work you do. I think it’s incredible to see someone dedicated to putting themselves in dangerous situations to help others.

And we’re very grateful for the work you do. No, I’m grateful. I appreciate it.

You know what I mean? Here’s something else that people can do, right? Like, this is a new space for me. It’s a new audience. And, you know, you never know.

There’s so much that we can do that we don’t even know we can do. All right. Well, you hit it there.

So thanks, guys. Get on and help us out.