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palestine
'We Refuse to Remain Silent': 1,000 North African Volunteers Make Their Way to Gaza to Break Israeli Siege
"A tsunami of humanity is rising for Gaza."
Jun 11, 2025
As Israeli forces unlawfully boarded the Madleen, a boat carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, and detained the volunteers on the vessel on Monday, approximately 1,000 pro-Palestinian advocates from across Northwest Africa were boarding a convoy of buses and cars in Tunisia—planning to travel for days to the Rafah crossing, where they aim to break Israel's blockade that's starving people across the war-torn enclave.
The Sumud Convoy, whose name means "steadfastness" or "resilience" in Arabic, is carrying aid and being led by the Coordination of Joint Action for Palestine in Tunisia, and has ties to the Global March for Gaza, which includes rights advocates from about 50 countries across the world who were en route to Cairo on Wednesday.
"This is a civil and popular initiative in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza," Wael Naouar, a member of the organizing team, toldThe New Arab. "We refuse to remain silent."
The convoy crossed into Libya on Tuesday and has been resting after a full day of travel as organizers wait for permission to cross the eastern part of the divided country.
In Tripoli in the western region, the volunteers have been welcomed by hundreds of locals, and fuel station owners have reportedly said they will provide free gas to all cars, buses, and trucks that join the convoy.
"This visit brings us joy," architect Alaa Abdel Razzaq toldAgence France-Presse.
Along with the current delay in receiving approval from eastern Libyan authorities to cross the region, the convoy and the Global March for Gaza could face resistance from the Egyptian government as organizers plan to march for three days from El Arish in the Sinai Peninsula to the Rafah crossing.
Egypt classifies the area between El Arish and Rafah as a military zone and has not released a statement on whether it will allow the march.
If the volunteers make it to the Rafah crossing, they will have to contend with the Israel Defense Forces. In addition to abducting international activists including Swedish climate leader Greta Thunberg and Palestinian-French member of European Parliament Rima Hassan this week, Israeli forces killed 10 activists carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza on a Turkish flotilla in 2010.
Ghaya Ben Mbarek, an independent journalist from Tunis, toldAl Jazeera that people in the convoy "are feeling courage and anger" as they head toward the Gaza border.
"The message people here want to send to the world is that even if you stop us by sea, or air, then we will come, by the thousands, by land," Ben Mbarek told Al Jazeera. "We will literally cross deserts... to stop people from dying from hunger."
Fadi Quran of the U.S.-based advocacy group Avaaz said the journey of the convoy—which has been growing as more people have joined since leaving Tunisia—is "one of the most beautiful things humanity has to offer in 2025."
"A tsunami of humanity is rising for Gaza," said Quran. "Amplify it."
The Sumud Convoy is supported by the Tunisian General Labor Union, the National Bar Association, the Tunisian League for Human Rights, and the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, while groups including the Palestinian Youth Movement and CodePink are affiliated with the Global March for Gaza.
Advocates from countries including the Netherlands, Canada, and Ireland plan to arrive in Cairo on Thursday, when they hope to begin the three-day march to Rafah.
Canadian Sen. Yuen Pau Woo wrote to the Egyptian government on Tuesday, asking for support for the march.
"I believe that Egypt's support for this humanitarian action would send a powerful message to the international community," said Woo.
Kellie McConnell, a member of Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine, also expressed hope that the international action will force governments around the world, including those that have backed Israel's bombardment and blockade of Gaza, to "pay attention and do everything in their power" to end the attacks that have killed more than 55,000 Palestinians.
"We can turn the tables in this genocide," said McConnell. "We can stop the absolutely appalling brutalization and desperate treatment of people in Palestine."
If the advocates are blocked at the border like the Madleen was intercepted on Monday, one activist in the Sumud Convoy toldThe New Arab, "even that will send a message."
"People over power," they said. "If they stop dozens, thousands will rise."
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When the Starved Become the Starvers: A Jewish Voice on Gaza
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it—because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors.
Jun 11, 2025
The photographs are unbearable. Hollow-eyed children staring into cameras, their faces etched with a hunger that reaches beyond the physical. Families huddled in makeshift shelters, their possessions reduced to what they could carry. These images from Gaza pierce through my screen and lodge themselves in a place where other images have lived for decades—the inherited memories of my grandparents' stories, passed down like sacred wounds.
All four of my grandparents fled the Nazi machinery of death. They carried with them fragments of lives destroyed: a photograph here, a recipe there, stories that began with abundance and ended with ash. They spoke of hunger as a weapon, of siege as strategy, of how systematically cutting off food, medicine, and hope could break a people's spirit before breaking their bodies.
I grew up believing that "Never Again" meant exactly that—never again would any people, anywhere, face the deliberate infliction of starvation and suffering. I believed that we, as Jews, would be the first to recognize the early warning signs, the first to cry out when others faced the machinery of dehumanization.
Today, I am ashamed.
"Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
Not ashamed to be Jewish—that identity remains precious to me, woven as it is with traditions of justice, compassion, and repair of the world. But ashamed that a state claiming to represent Jewish values has chosen hunger as a weapon of war. Ashamed that siege has become a strategy. Ashamed that the descendants of those who cried out, "Let my people go" have become deaf to similar cries in Arabic.
This is not what my grandparents envisioned when they dreamed of a Jewish homeland. They dreamed of safety, yes, but not safety built on others' suffering. They dreamed of dignity, but not dignity that required stripping it from their neighbors. They imagined a place where Jewish children could grow up free from fear, but they never imagined that freedom would come at the cost of Palestinian children growing up with empty stomachs.
The Israel my grandparents hoped for was meant to be a light unto the nations—a place where the lessons of Jewish suffering would translate into Jewish compassion. Instead, we see policies that mirror the very tactics once used against us. We see justifications that echo the language of those who once justified our persecution. We see the slow strangulation of a people that feels horrifyingly familiar to anyone who has studied the ghettos of Warsaw or the camps of Europe.
I know the counterarguments. I know about security concerns, about terrorism, about the complexity of this conflict. I know that Israelis have suffered, that Jewish children have died, that fear runs deep on all sides. But none of this justifies using starvation as a weapon. None of this justifies trapping 2 million people in what amounts to an open-air prison. None of this honors the memory of those who died precisely because the world stood by while their humanity was systematically denied.
The Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—demands that we speak truth even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable. It demands that we hold our own people accountable to the highest moral standards, not because we hate them, but because we love them too much to watch them betray their own values.
Being Jewish taught me that moral authority comes not from power, but from how that power is used. It taught me that we have a special obligation to protect the vulnerable precisely because we were once vulnerable ourselves. It taught me that "Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it. They haunt me because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors. They haunt me because I see in Israeli policies the same cold calculation that once sought to break Jewish spirits through systematic deprivation.
This is not Jewish. This is not what our ancestors dreamed when they prayed, "Next year in Jerusalem." This is not what it means to be a people chosen for the hard work of justice.
We can do better. We must do better. The children of Gaza deserve better. The memory of those who perished in the Holocaust demands better. The future of Judaism itself depends on better.
The photographs will keep coming. The question is whether we will keep our eyes open long enough to see ourselves reflected in them, and whether we will have the courage to look away from the mirror and toward the work of repair.
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Israeli Attacks Kill Dozens at Aid Sites as Gaza Death Toll Surpasses 55,000
One Palestinian man said he and his brother, who was killed, had no choice but to try to access aid at privatized distribution points, even though they knew it was dangerous to approach them.
Jun 11, 2025
With chaos and violence persisting "by design" at aid sites set up by a U.S.- and Israeli-backed organization in Gaza, the death toll at the distribution points rose Wednesday, as did the overall number of deaths in the enclave since Israel began bombarding the civilian population 20 months ago.
At least 120 Palestinians were killed in the last 24 hours across the enclave, bringing the death toll in Gaza to 55,104. Gaza's Health Ministry added that at least 474 people have been injured over the past day.
The latest deaths include at least 57 people who were seeking humanitarian aid, which Israel is allowing to be accessed only at distribution points set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—staffed by U.S. security contractors and guarded by Israeli forces. More than 363 people were also injured at aid sites by Israeli forces since Wednesday morning.
In total, 224 people have been killed at GHF's distribution centers since they began operating over the objections of the United Nations, aid groups that have long worked in Gaza, and an executive who had been leading the initiative but resigned late last month, saying GHF's aid plan violated the "humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence."
Issam Wahdan, a Palestinian man whose brother was killed when he tried to retrieve aid near the Netzarim Corridor this week, toldAl Jazeera that he and his brother had attempted to obtain one of GHF's food boxes several times, "but we never got lucky."
"So, my brother and I decided to go early to the distribution center," Wahdan told Al Jazeera. "When we arrived, we were surprised to see quadcopters shooting at us. We didn't know what to do, we had never experienced this before. The quadcopter threw a bomb at us. There were many wounded and martyred people, including my brother, who was wounded yesterday and died today. One of our best friends was martyred on the spot."
Wahdan suggested he and his brother saw the GHF distribution hubs as dangerous, but had to try to retrieve aid to feed their families.
"We need humanitarian aid so we have to go to the center. My brother was married and had two boys and one daughter. His youngest is 18 months old," he said. "His children are hungry and that forced him to go there to get some aid. When your children are hungry, you need to do anything to provide them with food."
Israel has acknowledged firing "warning shots" to control large crowds of starving Palestinians at GHF sites, and have claimed that the Israel Defense Forces have shot only at "suspects" who approached the troops. Israel and its allies have also repeatedly claimed the IDF has been targeting Hamas in Gaza, even amid mounting evidence that they have deliberately killed civilians.
Palestinians have been forced to walk an average of 9.3 miles to retrieve boxes that Chris Newton, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, said contain an amount of sustenance that is "closer to the ration given in a starvation experiment run in the 1940s in the U.S. than it is to Israel's own previous 2008 red line for the minimum calories needed to avoid malnutrition in Gaza."
"The violence, the chaos, and the complete inadequacy of the types and volume of aid being given out are not so much mistakes of the system, but really by design," Newton told Al Jazeera. "This is not the system you would design if your goal was to end mass starvation in the Gaza Strip."
The GHF sites were established more than 80 days after Israel imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid in March, just before it broke a temporary cease-fire. In May, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification released a report warning that the siege had placed the entirety of the Gaza Strip in "Phase 4," with the population suffering from "very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality."
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Wednesday posted on social media the story of a 5-year-old boy named Osama, who was "once a healthy child in Gaza."
"He now weighs only 5 kilograms, dangerously below the healthy weight for his age. Osama is being treated at Nasser Hospital but his full recovery depends on sufficient nutrition and follow-up care—both of which are at risk," said UNICEF. "The recovery of children like Osama is possible only with a long-lasting cease-fire and aid at scale being allowed into Gaza."
Gaza's Government Media Office said Wednesday that Israel is "deliberately creating chaos in the Gaza Strip by perpetuating a policy of starvation and deliberately targeting and killing starving people seeking food."
"This has been achieved," said the office, "through direct, often intentional, and sometimes random, killings by quadcopters, helicopters, or tanks, targeting young men, elderly people, and children who rushed to obtain whatever food aid was available to feed their children and families."
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