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cease-fire
'Fuck ICE and Free Palestine': Hannah Einbinder's Emmy Moment
"I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel," said the award-winning actress.
Sep 15, 2025
Hanna Einbinder took home the Emmy for best supporting actress in a comedy on Sunday night. She ended her acceptance speech with a deeply serious message, denouncing President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown across the US and calling for the liberation of the Palestinian people, both in the Occupied West Bank and those suffering daily under Israel's genocidal attack in Gaza.
Einbinder, who plays the character of Ava Daniels in the hit shows Hacks, accepted the award in typical fashion, but before leaving the microphone, "I just want to say: Go Birds, fuck ICE, and free Palestine."
The birds refer to the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles, and ICE is the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since Trump took office in January, ICE has been conducting increasing numbers of high-profile raids and community sweeps in communities across the country.
"Go birds, fuck ICE and free Palestine."
Hannah Einbinder turned her Emmy win for best supporting actress in a comedy into a platform for activism, wearing a red Artists4Ceasefire pin and joining fellow actors on the red carpet calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
In a… pic.twitter.com/PotaFIvpS1
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 15, 2025
Einbinder, who is Jewish and wore a red Artists4Ceasefire button on her dress throughout the glitzy award show, was asked about her comments regarding Palestine backstage.
"I thought it was important to talk about Palestine,” Einbinder explained, “because it’s an issue that’s very dear to my heart. I have friends in Gaza who are working as frontline workers, as doctors, right now in the north of Gaza, to provide care for pregnant women and for school children to create schools in the refugee camps. And it’s an issue that’s really close to my heart for many reasons.”
"I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel," she added, "because our religion and our culture are such an important and long-standing institution that is really separate to this sort of ethno-nationalist state.”
This is not the first time Einbinder has spoken out on behalf of Gaza and Palestinian rights. Earlier this year, accepting an award from the Human Rights Campaign, she said, "As a queer person, as a Jewish person, and as an American, I am horrified by the Israeli government's massacre of well over 65,000 Palestinians in Gaza."
While accepting an award from the Human Rights Campaign, actor Hannah Einbinder used her speech to strongly condemn the genocide in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/oRWXpTuUO3
— AJ+ (@ajplus) March 30, 2025
"I am ashamed and infuriated," she continued, "that this mass murder is funded by our American tax dollars. It should not be controversial to say that we should all be against murdering civilians. I know that calling for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages begs for the safety, security, and preservation of life of both Palestinians and Israelis."
"I know that my call for a liberated Palestine," Einbinder said, comes from a desire for mutual safety of all people living in the region and I know that my condemnation of Israel's bombardment of Gaza is not despite what I learned in Hebrew school, but because of it."
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Starvation by Design: The Hidden Violence of Gaza’s Air-Dropped Aid
Now, even the delivery of aid has been weaponized, turned into a disorganized spectacle that fractures communities and deepens suffering.
Jul 29, 2025
In Gaza, food is not scarce because of drought or crop failure. It is scarce by design. And when you begin to see hunger as something engineered, not accidental, you begin to understand that starvation is not just a humanitarian failure. It is a form of violence.
Over the past several days, the Israeli military has resumed air-dropping humanitarian aid into Gaza. Videos of these operations have been released to the media, showing pallets of flour and canned goods drifting down on parachutes into the rubble of shattered neighborhoods. Seven pallets one day. Twenty-five tons another. These drops may sound like acts of compassion. But let’s look closer.
Gaza’s population, more than 2 million people, is now facing a full-blown famine in some regions. Experts estimate that Gaza requires around 64,000 cubic tons of food per month to meet basic nutritional needs. That comes to about 2,133 cubic tons of food per day. A single large truck typically carries about 3.3 cubic tons. So Gaza needs approximately 640 fully loaded food trucks crossing into the territory every single day to stabilize the situation.
Instead, what is arriving is a trickle of airdropped food, estimated at about 10 cubic tons per day. That is the equivalent of just three trucks’ worth of aid, less than one half of 1% of the daily requirement (0.05%).
If the daily need is 640 trucks and only three truck-equivalents are arriving, the deficit is not subtle. It is catastrophic.
This is not humanitarian relief. This is the illusion of relief. And worse, it is dangerous.
When pallets are dropped without warning, without organization, and without protection, they trigger desperation, violence, and trauma among people who are already on the edge of physical and emotional collapse. Civilians must run, fight, and risk injury or death just to get a single bag of flour. These scenes are not orderly distributions. They are chaotic scrambles that pit the starving against one another.
This is not relief. This is engineered chaos. This is what starvation warfare looks like in the modern age.
As an emergency physician who worked at Nasser Hospital in June, I saw the bodies that starvation produces. Children with visible ribs, swollen abdomens, and vacant eyes. Mothers who had not eaten in days, trying to nurse. Infants with no fat, no immunity, no chance. The human body in starvation mode turns on itself. Organs begin to fail. Cognition deteriorates. Children hallucinate. People become afraid of their own families. And still, they wait for aid that never comes.
When that aid finally does appear, drifting down from a plane without warning or order, it is not a lifeline. It is a provocation. It reinforces the trauma. It turns hunger into a contest. It is humiliation disguised as generosity.
We need to call this what it is. Starvation is a tactic. Blocking aid convoys, bulldozing bakeries, cutting off water and fuel, these are not accidents of war. They are deliberate tools of domination. And now, even the delivery of aid has been weaponized, turned into a disorganized spectacle that fractures communities and deepens suffering.
If the daily need is 640 trucks and only three truck-equivalents are arriving, the deficit is not subtle. It is catastrophic. And the chaos created by these paltry, random airdrops only increases the suffering of the population. This is not how you feed people. This is how you dehumanize them.
We must stop pretending that symbolic gestures are adequate. Gaza needs organized, large-scale, protected land convoys. It needs infrastructure and stability. It needs a cease-fire and a corridor for mass aid delivery. It needs the world to stop watching and start acting.
This is not just a humanitarian crisis.
It is a crime against humanity, unfolding in real time, with full visibility and full impunity
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'A Cruel and Transparent Farce': Israeli Attacks Kill 62 in Gaza Amid 'Tactical Pause'
"There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones," one advocate said.
Jul 27, 2025
The Israeli military began instituting tactical pauses in its assault on certain sections of Gaza on Sunday, as part of a plan to allow what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as "minimal humanitarian supplies" to enter the besieged enclave.
Several humanitarian organizations and political leaders described the Israeli approach as vastly insufficient at best and a dangerous distraction at worst, as Palestinians in Gaza continue to die of starvation that experts say has been deliberately imposed on them by the U.S.-backed Israeli military.
"Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won't undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza," Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Sunday. "What's needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent cease-fire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture."
Israel announced a plan to institute a daily 10-hour "tactical pause" in fighting from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm local time in the populated Gaza localities of Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Muwasi, as The Associated Press explained.
"These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
However, on Sunday—the first day of the supposed pause—Israeli attacks killed a total of 62 people, Al Jazeera reported, including 34 who were seeking humanitarian relief. Another six people died of hunger, bringing the total death toll from starvation and malnutrition to 133, including 87 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
"The Israeli government's so-called 'tactical pauses' are a cruel and transparent farce," said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement on Sunday. "There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones. These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, meanwhile, called the pause "essential, but long overdue."
"This announcement alone cannot alleviate the needs of those desperately suffering in Gaza," Lammy said, as The Guardian reported. "We need a cease-fire that can end the war, for hostages to be released, and aid to enter Gaza by land unhindered."
The United Nations' World Food Program posted on social media that it welcomed the news of the pause, as well as the creation of more humanitarian corridors for aid, and that it had enough food supplies either in or en route to the area to feed the entire population of Gaza for nearly three months.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will."
Since the border crossings opened on May 27 following nearly three months of total siege, WFP has only been able to bring in 22,000 tons of food aid, about a third of the over 62,000 tons of food aid needed to feed the population of Gaza each month.
While it welcomed the pause, WFP did add that "an agreed cease-fire is the only way for humanitarian assistance to reach the entire civilian population in Gaza with critical food supplies in a consistent, predictable, orderly, and safe manner—wherever they are across the Gaza Strip."
Joe English, emergency communications specialist for UNICEF, emphasized that the limited pauses proposed by Israel were not the ideal conditions for treating serious malnutrition.
"This is a short turnaround in terms of the notice that we have, and so we cannot work miracles," English told CNN.
English explained that, while UNICEF can treat malnutrition, children who are malnourished require a course of treatments over an extended period of time in order to fully recover, something only truly possible with a cease-fire, which would allow the U.N. to reestablish the 400 aid distribution points it had set up across Gaza before the last cease-fire ended in March.
"We have to be able to reach people and also to reach people where they are," he said. "We can't be expecting people to continue to traverse many miles, often on foot, through militarized areas, to get access to aid."
In addition to bringing in food aid through trucks, Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates all began air-dropping aid over the weekend. However, this method has been widely criticized by humanitarian experts as ineffective and even dangerous.
"The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
"Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient, and can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction and screensmoke," U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini wrote on social media on Saturday.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will. Lift the siege, open the gates, and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need," Lazzarini wrote.
Palestinians in Gaza also complained about the air drops.
"From 6:00 am until now we didn't eat or drink. We didn't get aid from the trucks. After that, they said that planes will airdrop aid, so we waited for that as well," Massad Ghaban told Reuters. "The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
In a reminder of what is at stake in effectively delivering aid to Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Sunday that "malnutrition is on a dangerous trajectory in the Gaza Strip, marked by a spike in deaths in July."
WHO continued:
Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July—including 24 children under 5, a child over 5, and 38 adults. Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting. The crisis remains entirely preventable. Deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.
WHO said that the search for lifesaving aid was itself deadly: "Families are being forced to risk their lives for a handful of food, often under dangerous and chaotic conditions. Since 27 May, more than 1,060 people have been killed and 7,200 injured while trying to access food."
Israeli solders have reported that they had been ordered to fire on Palestinian civilians seeking aid.
In the face of Israel's atrocities, CAIR's Mitchell called for decisive action: "No more statements. Our government, Western nations, and Arab Muslim nations must act immediately to end the genocide, allow unfettered humanitarian aid into Gaza, secure the release of all captives and political prisoners, and hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes. Every moment of inaction contributes to the unimaginable suffering of everyone in Gaza."
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