Tears come easily. Today I watched and listened to a hundred Jewish Israelis outside the U.S. embassy affirm that “grief has no borders,” as they collectively mourned those murdered in Gaza. Some people, like Khalil Abu Yahia were known and loved by the Jewish solidarity activists. And from the breaking in their voices as they spoke, I knew that the others who they didn’t know, who apartheid walls, checkpoints, and a prison ghetto kept them from knowing, were loved too.
Grief knows no borders and ceasefire banners at vigil in Jerusalem. Photo Credit: ISM
Khalil had the vision to see beyond the current colonial realities. As Khalil went from place to place in Gaza with his family, trying to find somewhere safe, experiencing explosion after explosion, missile attack after missile attack, he did not despair. With roofs collapsing around him, he wrote, “I am sure that the hearts of my beloved friends will always be a shelter that can never be destroyed.”
In Jerusalem I saw Israeli activists turn themselves into shelter for Khalil and other Palestinians. Everybody held a name and picture of somebody from Gaza who was killed. These pictures and with them, white roses, were placed at the United States embassy. Closing out the memorial, a speaker said: “May the memory of the righteous be a blessing.”
Out front of the US Embassy in Jerusalem, people place down pictures and names of people killed in Gaza, together with white roses. Photo Credit: ISM
I walked from the embassy to the Lion’s Gate of the Old City. I was seeking to return a prayer rug I found last Friday after Israeli police and military beat and dispersed people assembling to pray. I couldn’t find the prayer rug’s person. What I did find was occupation police on horses charging into people praying. Many people ran to not be trampled. But some people, already on their knees, stayed on their knees. I remember one of these men especially. I couldn’t tell if he was intently focused on finishing his prayers or bracing for his prayerful body to be crushed, or both, but the horses stopped just short. Occupation police not on horses, swept in to continue pushing and beating the worshippers.
To be in Palestine at this moment necessitates consciousness of incalculable inhumanity and atrocity. The worshippers outside the gates to Al Aqsa and the Israeli activists who refuse complicity with their government, have something in common. Their courage, strength, will, commitment, perseverance, and vision is, and always will be, stronger than that of the oppressors.
Sophie Scholl of the White Rose Society, before being executed by the Nazi government that she was taught to obey but then learned to resist no matter the consequences, tells whoever will listen, “Stand up for what you believe in even if you are standing alone.” Rachel Corrie, the I.S.M. activist murdered by Israel for refusing to step aside and allow a home demolition, is similarly remembered to have said, “Let me stand alone.”
I am grateful in this moment for not having to stand alone for what I believe in and seeing more white roses.
It is nearing Christmas time in Bethlehem. And there is room at the inn this time.
A family from Gaza had to go to a far away hospital for their child’s illness. Then October 7th occurred, and then the genocide.
Nativity scene in Bethlehem
This Gazan family found refuge in a hostel in Bethlehem. They have been here for months already and will continue to be until it is safe for them to return. I spent one night in the same hostel. And the mother knocked on the bedroom door I was in. When it opened, I saw that she had made an extra plate of home-cooked food.
I couldn’t do anything but cry for the next hour, thinking to myself how the family most likely has no home to go back to, perhaps no neighborhood, perhaps no city, and in all likelihood have lost dozens of members of their extended family, and they still have the thoughtfulness, compassion, and grace to offer a stranger a meal.
It is not the first time a Palestinian has shown me similar care and generosity. Everywhere in Palestine I have been given tea, coffee, food, sweets, gifts of all types, embraces of friendship, and overflowing kindness.
In Masafer Yatta, the Jordan Valley, and other areas in Palestine, shepherding families and other villagers face threats of their whole communities being wiped out by murderous settlers who tell them they have 24 hours to leave or be killed. Still, these same families will spend the little money they have to supply their international and Israeli solidarity guests with tea, coffee, snacks, homemade bread and more.
Food shared by Palestinian villagers in Wadi Tiran.
In Gaza, I have heard there are thousands of open doors to the Palestinian homes that are still standing. Gaza families keep their doors open for when (not if) their neighbors’ homes are bombed and their neighbors are made homeless with nowhere else to go. And in the United States, where I am from, we lock not only the doors to our homes but our churches too. I pray that one day, Americans in peace and prosperity will have as much generosity and compassion to those made homeless as the Palestinian people of Gaza have even while experiencing starvation and genocide.
There is a poet in Gaza, Refaat Alareer, who was targeted and killed by a missile strike. He had written a poem about what he would like to occur in the event of his death. He asks us to make kites (white ones, with long tails) so that a child in Gaza can see them flying and think about how an angel is bringing back love.
Refaat Alareer’s Twitter (X)
If there is one thing right now that I wish the world could see through my eyes, it is the strength to love that I witness Palestinians still have even when they are experiencing a genocide. This humanity amid inhumanity breaks the shell enclosing my understanding and teaches me what holy is.
Mahmoud Darwish, the famed Palestinian poet, reminds us to think and say, “if only I were a candle in the dark”.
Mahmoud Darwish quote from Palestine Advocacy Project
Being in Palestine at this time, I see much darkness, but also many candles.
I can still see even after all the unspeakable crimes against humanity waged against the Palestinian people, how if settler colonialists would simply come as guests and friends, come as a brother returning home, instead of a conquerer laying waste to the land and its people, how there would be a table spread before them by Palestinians with so many wonderful things and an empty seat and a full plate waiting with voices reiterating again and again: ahlan wa sahlan, ahlan wa sahlan.
Palestinian people have been denied their right to return to their homes and land for over 75 years. They still have the keys. But these examples of boundless humanity in the worst situations teach me about a different kind of return. Palestinians offer me, other internationals, and their Israeli oppressors when they turn from their oppression, the right to return to their, to our, humanity.
Striking Palestinians across the occupied West Bank have been joined by millions in countries across the world for the Global Strike for Gaza, which was announced by a coalition of major Palestinian factions. The cadence of the strike declarations accelerated rapidly throughout the day in demand of an immediate ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
The global strike action was coordinated in response to the dashing of efforts toward an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Comfortably seated with his arm stretched high, US Ambassador Alternate Representative of the US for Special Political Affairs in the United Nations Robert A. Wood lit a fire of rage and condemnation across every continent following his signaling that the United States would use its veto power to kill a UN resolution, supported almost thoroughly through the UN security council, to block an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
Entire nations shut down. A strike was born.
Sign on shop in Jordan announcing closure due to strike. Photo Credit: (MEE/Mohammad Ersan)
Across the territory, shops fell silent. Schools remained closed. Government offices shut down. Masses gathered in Ramallah’s Al-Manara Square for what was, by many accounts, the largest crowd gathered in protest in the area in some time. Palestinian children made art work and protestors carried a banner naming Gaza’s martyrs while large protests occurred simultaneously in al Khalil. Shops in occupied East Jerusalem remained shuttered through the day as the global strike action flashed across the planet with several countries joining in nationwide efforts to deal economic blows to the heart of the powers who profit from the continuation of occupation force’s genocide in Gaza.
Silence in the streets of Nablus. Photo Credit: [Zain Jaafar/AFP]Lebanon:
Secretary-general of Lebanon’s Council of Ministers, Mahmoud Mekkiya delivered the announcement to the nation; all governments and national institutions would be shuttered in solidarity with the global call out. In reports out of major Lebanese cities, “workers downed tools” and the call for global strike was supported in calls for nationwide solidarity by the ministers of education and culture and several heads of finance. People across Lebanon engaged in the strike in solidarity with Gaza as well as southern Lebanese villages which have also been impacted in occupation forces bombardment.
Streets were bare across Jordan as a stunning show of solidarity surged through “the transportation sector, aviation, trade, banks, ports, as well as schools and universities.” Thousands gathered in the streets of Amman and across Jordan in massive protests. Handmade signs announcing solidarity strikes were placed across hundreds of shops as the nation grinded to a halt in a powerful cry to end the continued atrocities being committed in Gaza.
Photo Credit: English News.cn (Photo by Mohammad Abu Ghosh/Xinhua)
In observation of the strike, the country saw abandoned streets throughout the day, with images circulating across social media of empty streets and gated shops in the typically bustling city of Istanbul.
Photo Credit: Palestine Online @OnlinePalEng
While many countries held full nationwide shutdowns in honor of the strike call, others which did not, saw massive protests in major cities across the world. Entire communities vocally joined the strike in solidarity. #StrikeForGaza was trending across social media, businesses announced individual shutdowns, millions across the world did not report to work or school and millions more refused all financial transactions for the day, no physical purchases, no shopping, no online orders. Boycott actions are a powerful tool to cost companies standing on the side of genocide, occupation and apartheid millions of dollars in profit. Momentum continues to build for an end to the bombardment which has now claimed nearly 20,000 lives. Thousands of the missing lie among the rubble.
One day prior to the global strike, the world marked the 75th anniversary of International Human Rights Day as the bombs continued to fall on Gaza.
10 December 2023 | International Solidarity Movement | Gaza Strip
“We are nearing the point of no return.”
These were the words spoken by nephrologist Dr. Ben Thomson during yesterday’s press conference on ‘urgent healthcare catastrophe in Gaza’ and the public health disaster advancing into its 63rd day in the besieged and bombarded Gaza Strip. With those introductory words, Dr. Thomson announced the breadth of the situation: “Of the 35 hospitals in Gaza, 26 are non functional. 9 remain only partially functional but are operating at more than double their capacity with critical shortages and are providing shelter to thousands of internally displaced people.” Civilians in the north are now cut off from access to emergency medical transport due to the targeted destruction of 100 Red Crescent ambulances, the bombing of ambulance convoys and the strangling cutoff of fuel. At least 364 attacks on healthcare services have been recorded in the occupied Palestinian territory since 7 October 2023.
With tens of thousands of Palestinians wounded and thousands more missing and presumed buried alive in the topsoil of rubble that now marks Gaza’s landscape, many who may be crying out for rescue are left to die. Infrastructure in Gaza hasn’t failed. It has been purposefully destroyed. From ambulances to medical schools, to the region’s only mental health hospital, to the arrests and unknown whereabouts of dozens of doctors and senior medical staff, the targets were executed with precision by occupation forces whose actions are, as noted in the conference, at the “raised risk of atrocity crimes” and in violation of various humanitarian laws and war crimes. Included in the missing medical staff is Al Shifa Hospital Director, Dr Muhammad Abu Salmiya, who was abducted on November 23rd while facilitating the forced evacuation of the hospital. Various rights agencies have expressed concern for the well-being of the doctor who had, until his abduction by occupation forces, been regularly updating the world on the situation in and around the hospital; on the injured, on the dead.
Al Shifa Hospital Director Dr Muhammad Abu Salmiya’s whereabouts remain unknown. Photo Credit: AFP Archive
Gaza’s Health Ministry noted on Saturday, December 9th, that 17,487 Palestinians have been massacred, with over 70 percent of the dead being women and children. But that death toll rises by the minute and with thousands missing and the occupation forces targeting and criminalizing the most basic of civic processes occurring across Gaza’s five districts, maintaining count of the deaths has become impossible. And what the occupation army hasn’t destroyed with bombs and guns, it works to achieve through circulating false narratives echoed by world media which doubt reports from Gaza’s health and public officials which are updating the world on the ongoing genocide of the over 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
On December 8th, shocking images out of the Beit Lahia neighbourhood in northern Gaza depicted the scene of the stripping and abduction of displaced Palestinian civilians from a raided UN school, which included a student, a local shop-owner and a well known journalist. As the world reacted with rightful rage to the horrific acts of the occupation army, an Israeli Occupation Forces spokesperson dismissed inquiries by linking civilians with Hamas, a continued tactic reflecting their view that all Palestinian bodies are inherently ‘terrorist’.
Photo Credit: NBC News / Palestinians in Northern Gaza are stripped and abducted by occupation forces.
The UN school housing the displaced was just one of numerous facilities across the terrorized Strip sheltering the over 1.7 million displaced through the relentless bombardment. According to the latest numbers on the ground, occupation forces have decimated Gaza’s residential infrastructure including 300,000 housing units, representing over half of the homes in Gaza as noted in the following graphic.
Reported by Al Jazeera. Sourced from OCHA Government Media Office in Gaza 04/12/2023
Occupation forces are demanding the mass-displaced squeeze into an area consisting of sand dunes, void of a shred of humanitarian infrastructure, in the southwest region of Al-Mawasi. News from this ‘safe zone’ reveals the horrors of the area, insufficient food, insufficient shelter and a non-reliable water source, equivalent to the occupation army offering Palestinians a slower death which will be introduced through starvation, thirst and infectious disease. Current conditions across Gaza are devoid of sanitation measures as infectious disease begins to take hold in heavily crowded conditions with the bodies of murdered civilians lying in the streets. As reported by the World Food Programme, the situation is dire across the Gaza Strip at large with widespread food and water insecurity including “extremely alarming” consumption gaps experienced by soaring proportions of the population across the Northern and Southern governorates.
Al Mawasi. Photo credit: Sky News
Tens of thousands of cases of diarrheal disease have been reported across Gaza with Palestinian children comprising over half of that statistic. Days ago, OCHA released a statement announcing a Hepatitis outbreak in UNRWA shelters which are operating at several times their capacity. As the days pass, illness and deaths from infectious disease are feared to dramatically increase. This signals a multi-system failure of the most basic tenets of humanitarian response to civilians and children caught in conflict: the provision of food, clean water, and medication and protection from hostilities.
In tandem with the dropping of bombs come heart-breaking reports of children crushed in the rubble, entire families gone and, just days ago, the murder of a beloved Palestinian professor. In an instant, explosive flash, We Are Not Numbers co-founder, poet and academic Refaat Alareer’s life was violently ended in an occupation air strike which killed numerous members of his family, including four of his nieces. In the chaos of occupation forces’ bombardment and unpausing of the ‘temporary ceasefire,’ Alareer was vocal against the hostilities and senseless slaughter of civilians.
Palestinian Poet Refaat Alareer. Photo Source: Middle East Eye
Lying among the tangled wreckage across the Gaza strip are the remains of 104 Mosques and numerous Churches which have been targeted by occupation airstrikes, even as a flow of IOF-taken video of their opening of a Synagogue inside of a stolen building in Gaza circulates through social media, one of the many instances of racial incitement and antagonism that have been pouring out of the embattled enclave. The sight of the breathtaking, medieval Great Omari Mosque in Gaza had become an iconic one, and which now also tragically lies among the wreckage with its surviving minaret standing before it. And the majestic Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church, built around 1150, was notably the oldest Church still in use in Gaza and one which was sheltering displaced Palestinian Muslims and Christians during the bombardment, 16 of whose lives were ended within its destroyed walls.
The lives of 63 journalists have thus far been stolen through this conflict. 133 UN aid workers. Over 250 health workers. The numbers increase by the day. And with Israeli authorities vowing to continue this horrific aggression for two more months, the reports will continue to flash before the eyes of the world who are witnessing the living nightmare that Gaza’s population is trapped within. Among the casualties and death and destruction, justice too, lies buried in the rubble.
8 December 2023 | International Solidarity Movement | Occupied East Jerusalem
Marking the first night of Hanukkah, on December 7, around 150 ultra-nationalist, Kahane terrorist linked extremist settlers demanding “full Jewish control” of Al Aqsa Mosque shouted racist abuse and waved banners of violent incitement against Al Aqsa Mosque. The violent-extremist group was granted authorization to march through the Muslim Quarter, but was stopped before it could start when Israeli police confronted the mob for violating the terms of its protest permit and inciting violence. Signs calling for the bulldozer-demolition of Al Aqsa, one of the holiest structures in Islam, were reportedly confiscated.
Clashes between Israeli police and far-right activists at a march through Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday night. Credit: Olivier Fitoussi.
Permission was granted on the eve of the event, against every indication that march organizers would not be following the tepid ‘restrictions’ placed on the march including an attendance cap and disallowance of the route reaching the holy site. Extremist, settler-colonial citizen forces are granted the right to murder and showered with arms by their government with which to do so. But under pressure through public outcry against the provocative event, occupation police dispersed the demonstration.
Far right march organizers had circulated a declaration through social media linking the events in Gaza with continued zionist incitement to wrest control of Al Aqsa from the Islamic Endowment waqf. Extremist settlers, instead, want to place it under the control of the same occupying force which is committing daily atrocities against occupied and besieged Palestinians, atrocities which have shocked the world.
The Haram Al-Sharif and the Al Aqsa Mosque, was the first place Muslims prayed toward and remains a sacred site of great importance in Islam. It has long been a flashpoint for far right extremist settler and occupation forces’ violence and antagonization of Palestinians through continuous incursions; its majesty the backdrop of the repeated and arbitrary denial of access to Muslims.
Across a timeline littered with incursions into the area, May saw hundreds of settlers marking “Flag Day” by rampaging through occupied East Jerusalem where soldier and settler alike hurled racial insults and assaulted Palestinians in the area. And in early October, far-right extremists repeatedly stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque compound coinciding with the Jewish Sukkot seven day pilgrimage festival. Incited by Jewish ultra-nationalist groups, extremist settlers continued an antagonistic campaign of repeated trampling of the courtyard at the holy site even as faithful Palestinians were being violently denied entry, an arbitrary age-restriction which is ongoing.
Al Aqsa Compound stormed by extremist settlers on October 5, 2023. photo credit: The New Arab.
Al-Aqsa’s administrative workers, including Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, one of Al Aqsa’s main Imams, have endured repeated targeting. Sheikh Sabri has faced terrorist death threats by settler vigilantes, a raid of his home to announce an arbitrary travel ban against him, and an outrageous eviction and notice of impending demolition of his home just days ago. This home demolition is especially egregious because it involves the collective punishment of 100 Palestinians who also live in separate homes inside the threatened structure.
People of all faiths, including Palestinian Muslims, have an inalienable right, echoed in OCHA’s International Standardsarticle 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of freedom from religious-based discrimination. Palestinians regularly attempt to reach Al Aqsa Mosque for Friday prayers, but are blocked by Israeli barricades, police, and military who attack the worshippers while they are praying week after week. Human rights defenders holding a non-violent presence to document the restriction, assault, and harassment of Palestinian Muslims at their holy site, have had their phones and passports confiscated and have been forced from the site by occupation soldiers. Despite these provocations, and the recent jailing and forced deportation of a Belgian human rights defender while documenting an illegal home demolition, international human rights defenders continue to document and intervene in human rights violations.
The violent, extremist settler march was an incitement to further violence and marginalization of indigenous Palestinians and the obscene violation of a holy site meant to be a welcoming sanctuary to those whispering prayers within its walls. The organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, blueprints the odds between the Jewish faith and this supremacist Zionist ideology; “Zionist interpretations of history taught us that Jewish people are alone, that to remedy the harms of antisemitism we must think of ourselves as always under attack and that we cannot trust others. It teaches us fear, and that the best response to fear is a bigger gun, a taller wall, a more humiliating checkpoint.” Their statements and demonstrations are part of a growing worldwide Jewish resistance to occupation, apartheid and the systematic dehumanization which maintains them. “Rather than accept the inevitability of occupation and dispossession, we choose a different path. We learn from the anti-Zionist Jews who came before us, and know that as long as Zionism has existed, so has Jewish dissent to it.”
Many Palestinian families remember the stories of their great grandparents who recall how Palestinian Arab and Jewish neighbors babysat for each other and were not only at peace, but close friends, prior to the imposition of settler-colonialism. Palestine, “the land of barakah” (the land of blessings, peace, salvation, liberation, and spiritual presence) and site of the stories that have shaped so many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim lives is experiencing a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. The Al Aqsa Mosque, the soul of Jerusalem, is at the epicenter of the fate of this land and its people, with reverberations around the world; a crossroads between liberatory survival and genocidal desolation, of human rights and the restriction thereof, justice and justice denied.
