Can We Stage a Jailbreak From the Grim Prisons Created by the Gaza War?

Here at the United Nations in New York City, the Security Council is expected to vote on a resolution calling on all parties to respect an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

The slaughter in Gaza entraps and attacks the helpless, turning shelters into mass graves, erasing entire families, weaponizing nutrition and famine. The spiraling violence shrieks for our attention, screams for effective protection. Who will save innocent people from snipers, aerial attacks, tank-fired missiles, poisoned water, and starvation? The U.S. and many allies instead work to insulate Israel from accountability.

“Overcoming this cocoon of protection,” said international human rights lawyer and former U.N. official Craig Mokhiber, “requires solidarity between movements, unions, religious communities, and like-minded states working to isolate the Israeli regime and to impose economic, trade, travel, diplomatic, cultural, and other consequences to compel change.”

Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel’s starvation, siege, and bombing.

In NYC, on day 14 of a Veterans For Peace and Allies Fast for Gaza, a former U.S. Marine who helped initiate the fast, Phil Tottenham, urges us to care about Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman whose witness on behalf of Palestinians apparently led to her unjust imprisonment.

The current administration has slated her for deportation purely on the grounds that she criticized the government of a foreign country. Far from her home in New Jersey, she is trapped in a Texan county jail. Her plight makes me think of another prisoner, Ron Feiner, an IDF soldier who chose to face prison rather than continue attacking people in Gaza. “I’m horrified by the never-ending war in Gaza,” said Feiner, “by the abandonment of the hostages, by the continued killing of innocent people, and by the complete lack of political vision.” He is now on day nine of what could be a quite dangerous 20-day sentence in an Israeli military prison.

The director of Gaza’s now-demolished Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, is suffering a longer and much more perious sentence at Israel’s grim Ofer Prison, where his work to heal the sick has seen him designated an “enemy combatant,” and where multiple protracted beating sessions—torture sessions really—have possibly cost him an eye

I think of pediatrician Dr. Alla al-Najjar, whose valuable work at the Nasser medical complex has cost her the lives of all but one of her 10 children, as well as her husband, also an M.D. They were taken from her in a targeted strike on her home while she was at the hospital complex attempting to save other Gazan children. Now she continues her work, trying mightily to save 11-year-old Adam, her only surviving child.

We must also note the appalling conditions of ordinary Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charge. “They are subjected to a systematic campaign of abuse, starvation, and deliberate medical neglect,” said a recent Addameer report, which goes on to describe “widespread arrest campaigns across cities, villages, and refugee camps, which have led to a massive increase in the number of prisoners and detainees.” Prisoners survive on minimal rations, and many endure brutal and life-threatening treatment.

Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel’s starvation, siege, and bombing.

None of this has been inflicted for the purposes of freeing the remaining hostages captured by Hamas and by the other armed groups who flooded into Israel on one day of rebellion, 20 months ago. The cease-fire agreed upon last November would, had Israel and the U.S. honored it, have provided for the release of all the hostages. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist collaborators would have lost their excuse for ethnically cleansing Gaza, and after that the West Bank.

In 1972, an iconic photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, “running naked, screaming in agony, her body burned by napalm dropped by the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army,” became a catalyst which helped end the war in Vietnam. Now, 50 years later, images of burning children in Gaza are relentless.

Recently, a video of 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil, her tiny body surrounded by flames, went viral. She and her family were sleeping in a school where forcibly displaced Palestinians had moved into classrooms and the courtyard. She survived Israel’s aerial attack, but her mother and five siblings did not. Her father remains in critical condition.

Life becomes limited when we accept that it must be a nightmare for the weak, when we confess that we are more addicted to comfort than we are to compassion—when the service of our appetites causes us to ignore the starving and those deliberately consigned to flames. We who fast might not succeed in our attempted “jailbreak” from this grim prison where we must watch the inmates die off one by one in the next ward over. But in whatever way you can, we urge you to join the attempt.