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veterans for peace
Can We Stage a Jailbreak From the Grim Prisons Created by the Gaza War?
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.
Jun 04, 2025
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.
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Finding Hope for the Future in a Gaza Mother and Doctor
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up.
May 30, 2025
The slaughter goes on, usually in the name of war, which reduces human life to, at best, a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians—dead children—are collateral damage, which means they’re nothing at all.
How can we be more than just spectators as we learn, every day, more stunning details about the hell going on across the planet? How can the human race stand up collectively to the cancer of war? Humanity, in the name of nationalism, has essentially organized itself against itself: We’ve declared one another “the enemy,” which means that only some of us are human. The others are simply in the way.
And nowhere, as we all know, is the news more hellish and shocking than the stories that emerge daily from Gaza, which continues to undergo, in full view on social media... genocide. It looks like this, according to CNN:
Dr. Alaa al-Najjar left her ten children at home on Friday when she went to work in the emergency room at the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza.
Hours later, the bodies of seven children—most of them badly burned—arrived at the hospital, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. They were Dr. Najjar’s own children, killed in an Israeli airstrike on her family’s home... The bodies of two more of her children—a 7-month-old and a 12-year-old who authorities presume to be dead—remain missing.
Only one of her ten children, 11-year-old Adam, survived. Dr. Najjar’s husband Hamdi, himself a doctor, was also badly injured in the strike.
This is the context in which another piece of news emerges, an opposite event, a beam of light which, oh God, I pray represents the dawn of humanity’s future: Veterans For Peace, along with 28 co-sponsoring organizations, has launched a 40-day fast calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war on, and starvation of, Gaza. Some of the participants gather daily in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, aligning themselves—in all their vulnerable humanity—with the organization’s founding purpose.
A letter the fasters wrote to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres concludes: “Uppermost in our minds with this request to meet with you at your earliest convenience is the U.N. founding goal to save ‘succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”
I quote these words not with a sense of “yeah, yeah” abstraction but rather because the writers are people like you and me, stepping out of their daily lives and into a determination to be part of, and help create, a world beyond war—beginning with an Israeli cease-fire and the salvation of Palestine, but hardly stopping there.
To put it another way: The words attempt to link individuals with a global institution. What I hear in these words is the call for a collective, planetary effort to transcend war. This effort must include every single human on this planet, including you and me, and demands our participation and sacrifice, not simply our shrug of hope. I hear a call for the United Nations to reinvent itself as United Humanity. And thus the future emerges.
One of the participants in the fast is my old friend Kathy Kelly. I talked to her on day six of the fast. Participants are limiting themselves to consuming 250 calories a day, she noted, which is about the amount Palestinians have available to them. Several hundred people are participating in the fast in New York, with more people, around 600 in total, throughout and beyond the United States. If you’re interested in joining the effort, visit the websites of either Veterans for Peace or Friends of Sabeel North America.
The fast is very much a public event, Kathy told me. On Memorial Day, for instance, a few days into the fast, they ceremonially honored not just veterans but some of the victims of the current genocide, bringing the al-Najjar family into public grief by reading the names of the children who were killed.
Kathy gave me a list of their names and ages. I feel like they belong here: Yahya: 12 years old; Rakan: 10 years old;; Eve: 9 years old; Jubran: 8 years old; Ruslan: 7 years old; Reval: 5 years old; Sadin: 3 years old; Luqman: 2 years old; Sidra: 6 months old. Adam, age 11, the sole surviving child, was critically injured.
Yeah, this is war. Its details matter. And as an American, I am complicit in the hell this country’s militarism has wreaked throughout my lifetime: the collateral damage, the environmental damage, it has bequeathed Planet Earth, followed by nothing more than an indifferent, strategic shrug.
So I feel compelled to return for a moment to Alaa al-Najjar, the doctor and mom who recently lost 9 of her 10 children, with her husband and last surviving child seriously injured. Her niece told CNN that
Dr. Alaa broke down when she showed the last bottle of breast milk she had expressed for her infant daughter, Sidra, whose body remains missing.
She told me today that her chest aches so much as she was breastfeeding, every day at work, Dr. Alaa pumped milk to provide for Sidra, and today she showed me the last bottle she prepared for her.
Dr. Alaa can barely speak. If you could see her face, you would understand her pain. She is only praying for her son and husband to recover.
And also, this: According to a fellow doctor at the hospital, Alaa al-Najjar has “continued to work despite losing her children, while periodically checking on the condition of her husband and Adam.”
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up. I see hope for the future here. I see humanity’s role model.
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Why Are Veterans and Allies Fasting for Gaza?
Who will stop the genocide in Palestine, if not us? That is the question that the fasters are asking.
May 29, 2025
Last Thursday, May 22, a coalition named Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza kicked off a 40-day fast outside the United Nations in Manhattan in protest against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Military veterans and allies pledged to fast for 40 days on only 250 calories per day, the amount recently reported as what the residents of Gaza are enduring.
The fasters are demanding:
- Full humanitarian aid to Gaza under U.N. authority, and
- No more U.S. weapons to Israel.
Seven people are fasting from May 22 to June 30 outside the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where they are present from 9:30 am to 3:00 pm, Mondays to Fridays. Many others are fasting around the U.S. and beyond for as many days as they can. The fast is organized by Veterans For Peace along with over 40 cosponsoring organizations.
Remarkably, over 600 people have registered to join the fast. Friends of Sabeel, North America is maintaining the list of fasters.
Who will stop the genocide in Palestine, if not us? That is the question that the fasters and many others are asking. The U.S. government is shamelessly complicit in Israel’s genocide, and to a lesser extent the same is true for the European governments. The silence and inaction of most Middle Eastern countries is resounding. Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, the only countries to come to Palestine’s aid, have been bombed by Israel and the U.S., with the threat of more to come. Syria, another country that stood with Palestine, has been “regime changed” and handed over to former al-Qaeda and ISIS extremists.
On the positive side, some governments are making their voices heard. South Africa and Nicaragua have taken Israel and Germany, respectively, to the International Court of Justice—Israel for its genocide, Germany for providing weapons to Israel. And millions of regular people around the globe have protested loudly and continue to do so.
Here in the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace has provided crucial leadership, pushing back against the phony charges of “antisemitism” that are thrown at the student protesters whose courageous resistance has spoken for so many. University administrators have been all too quick to crack down on the students, violating their right to freedom of speech, but even these universities have come under attack from the repressive, anti-democratic Trump administration.
Peace-loving people are frustrated and angry. Some are worried they will be detained or deported. And many of us are suffering from Moral Injury, concerned about our own complicity. How are we supposed to act as we watch U.S. bombs obliterate Gaza’s hospitals, mosques, churches, and universities? What are we supposed to do when we see Palestinian children being starving to death, systematically and live-streamed?
Because our movement is nonviolent, we do not want to follow the example of the young man who shot and killed two employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. But we understand his frustration and how he was driven to take forceful action. We take courage from the supreme sacrifice of U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy, asking “What would you do?”
Student protesters at several universities around the country have initiated “hunger strikes,” often considered a protest of last resort. Now they have been joined by military veterans.
“Watching hundreds of people maimed, burned, and killed every day just tears at my insides,” said Mike Ferner, former Executive Director of Veterans For Peace and one of the fasters. “Too much like when I nursed hundreds of wounded from our war in Viet Nam,” said the former Navy corpsman. “This madness will only stop when enough Americans demand it stops.”
Rev. Addie Domske, national field organizer for Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), said, “This month I celebrated my third Mother’s Day with a renewed commitment to parent my kid toward a free Palestine. As a mother, I am responsible for feeding my child. I also believe, as a mother, I must be responsive when other children are starving.”
Kathy Kelly, board president of World BEYOND War, also in New York for the fast, said, “Irish Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire, at age 81, recently fasted for 40 days, saying ‘As the children of Gaza are hungry and injured with bombs by official Israeli policy, I have decided that I, too, must go hungry with them, as I in good conscience can do no other.’ Now, Israel intensifies its efforts to eradicate Gaza through bombing, forcible displacement, and siege. We must follow Mairead’s lead, hungering acutely for an end to all weapon shipments to Israel. We must ask, ‘Who are the criminals?’ as war crimes multiply and political leaders fail to stop them.”
Another faster is Joy Metzler: 23, Cocoa, Florida, a 2023 graduate of the Air Force Academy who became a Conscientious Objector and left the Air Force, citing U.S. aggression in the Middle East and the continued ethnic cleansing in all of Palestine. Joy is a now a member of Veterans For Peace and a co-founder of Servicemembers For Cease-fire.
“I am watching as our government unconditionally supports the very violations of international law that the Air Force trained me to recognize,” said Joy Metzler. “I was trained to uphold the values of justice, and that is why I am speaking out and condemning our government’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
I spoke with VFP leader Mike Ferner on Day 7 of his Fast. The NYPD had just told him and the other fasters that they could no longer sit down in front of the U.S. Mission to the U.N. on the little stools they had brought. But Mike Ferner was not complaining.
He said: “We go home every night to a safe bed and we can drink clean water. We are not watching our children starve to death before us. Our sacrifice is a small one. We are taking a stand for humanity and we encourage others to do what they can. Demand full humanitarian relief in Gaza under U.N. authority, and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. This is how we can stop the genocide.”
More information about how you can participate or support the fasters is available at Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza.
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