To those who resist,

Yesterday, a Jordanian man driving an aid truck into Gaza shot at multiple Zionist soldiers, killing two. His name was Abdel-Muttalib Al-Qaisi. He had a wife and three kids. He would have expected to be martyred, and he was.

Al-Qaisi, who previously worked in freight transport, reportedly became an aid truck driver three months ago. So it is likely that he saw the worst of it, the hideous settlers blocking the roads, the soldiers stopping and ransacking the trucks, the mercenaries shooting children at the aid sites. Certainly he knew the aid was not enough.

Despite an international outcry resulting in the slow amelioration of siege conditions, the death toll from starvation in Gaza has risen to 436 martyrs, of whom 147 are children. In the months of July and August alone, approximately 28,00 children under the age of five were treated for acute malnutrition, with 5,000 cases classified as severe — the physical effects of which are incalculable, including permanent brain damage.

This past week, the Israeli Occupation Forces began a ground assault, driving tanks into the heart of Gaza City. Nowhere in Gaza is safe from Israeli bombs. Not al-Mawasi or other designated “humanitarian zones,” not aid sites, not tents, not hospitals, not schools. Ninety per cent of Palestinians in Gaza have faced displacement since October 8, 2023, and at least 31% have been displaced more than once. 

Abdul-Mutaib made no mistake – every small defeat for the Zionist entity marks the durability of the movement for a liberated Palestine, reminding us that “resist” is not only a watchword but a commitment to sacrifice and risk.

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The Devil’s “Aid”

The so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” is really another front in the U.S.-Israeli war on Gaza, deploying mercenaries who have already murdered over 2,500 Palestinians seeking food at the company’s so-called “Secure Distribution Sites.”

The GHF attempts to obfuscate its founding, funding, and ties, but research reveals the larger story: It is a death-machine and land-grab scheme forged by U.S. government officials, military contractors, defense tech investors, real estate developers, and evangelical PR strategists to seize control of and permanently resettle the Gaza Strip. 

While recently implemented, the conspiracy to integrate humanitarian “aid” into Israel’s military strategy was conceived in December 2023 by a secretive group of Israeli business elite and IOF reservists, who dubbed themselves the “Mikveh Israel Forum” after the school where they convened — “the first modern Jewish settlement in Palestine.”

Netanyahu’s military secretary Roman Gofman and his team developed the conspiracy further, hatching a plan to hire a private company to both screen Palestinians as they returned north under ceasefire, and assume responsibility for aid distribution in Gaza.

Feigning impartiality, the Israeli conspirators turned to Dr. Michael G. Vickers, a senior U.S. intelligence official credited with arming and later “dismantling” Al-Qa’ida, to repackage their food distribution plot as American. To oversee “security,” Vickers chose Phil Reilly — an ex-CIA paramilitary officer who helped lead “Operation Jawbreaker,” the first U.S. campaign in its “Global War on Terrorism.” Like Reilly and Vickers, many officials involved in this humanitarian nightmare got their start slaughtering so-called “hostile Muslims” in Afghanistan.

Orbis Operations and Boston Consulting Group, where Reilly and Vickers both worked at that time, were brought on to prepare a “feasibility study” to supplant established international aid systems in Gaza with an “aid operation” controlled by imperial interests — resulting in the formation of the GHF and its security contractor, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), founded by Reilly.

To operate the GHF, SRS brought on another shady U.S. private military provider: UG Solutions — whose founder, former Green Beret Jameson Govoni, once described himself as a “degenerate” who joined the army “to inflict pain on the people who inflicted pain on us.” After monitoring Palestinians at a “vehicle inspection” checkpoint in the Netzarim Corridor in January together, SRS and UG Solutions now manage the GHF’s “security guards” — a mob of U.S. army vets-turned-mercenaries, peppered with members of an anti-Islamic U.S. biker gang.

Jointly functioning as GHF’s armed wing, the mercenary firms recently launched a “reservation system” for food distribution in Gaza, in which individuals must be photographed, entered into a database, and issued an ID and “unique number” in order to collect food. Under the guise of aid distribution, the Israeli conspirators have used the GHF as a surveillance dragnet.

Click here to read more about the American actors behind the GHF.  

Do politics the right way…

…and stop reading this trash.

The New York Times continues to run cover for the U.S. and Israel’s war crimes. In its pages, famine is not deliberately engineered but is “spreading” of its own accord. Hunger itself is given more agency than Israel: “Famine Stalks Gaza” and “Starvation Haunts Gaza’s Hospitals,” while children die due to “aid snarls.” Palestinians murdered by Israeli forces and U.S. army veterans at so-called “aid sites” are simply “dying.” The paper even went so far as to issue a sadistic correction explaining that a starved Palestinian child whose picture they’d published had “preexisting health problems.” An interview with the child’s mother revealed that he had in fact developed health issues “caused by nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy due to the Israeli war.”

In July, the Times editorial board published a piece titled “Gaza’s Hunger is a Moral Crisis,” a piece decidedly set on saying nothing of Israel or the paper’s role in the crisis. “How the situation has come to this is a matter of intense dispute,” they write. Later, they describe the aid massacres at GHF sites as “frantic melees.” 

The Times’s continued insistence on covering up Israel’s crimes is why people of conscience are refusing to engage with the imperial rag. “I have no interest in lending my voice to an institution that has helped justify and enable the destruction of my homeland and my people,” wrote Jehad Abusalim in an email to the editor who asked him to contribute to the Opinion section. Jenan Matari, asked to sit for a portrait and interview, replied: “I have no comments for The New York Times.”

Read more about The New York Times’s complicity in the starvation of Gaza. 

Keep the flame alive

The Disorientation Edition of The New York Work Crimes, published in collaboration with National Students for Justice in Palestine, is out now. In our editor’s note, we explain that the Zionist war on education is as old as the entity itself. After the Nakba, the Israeli regime began centralizing curricula under its nascent Ministry of Education with the goal of “raising youth on the values of Israeli culture and love of the [Jewish] nation.” In subsequent decades, schools in Gaza became the targets of bombing raids while those in the West Bank were marked for demolition as new Israeli settlements closed in. Over the course of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the occupation has bombed every university in the strip, razing campuses, libraries, and archives to the ground. 

Efforts to destroy knowledge and education have gone into overdrive on Western college campuses, too. The seething persistence of the enemy’s attacks on education signals the threat that Palestinian knowledge production and student protest pose to the Zionist project. But by studying their history and passing it to successive generations, Palestinians have kept the flame of resistance alive, and so can we.

Upcoming New York War Crimes Community Readings:

• NYC: Wednesday, September 27, 6 – 8 PM, Mushtari Hardware

• Oakland: Monday, September 29, 6 – 8PM, Eastside Arts Alliance

Want to distribute the paper and/or plan a community reading in your city? Write to nywc@wawog.com.

Transform history

Last month, WAWOG helped convene the People’s Conference for Palestine, which brought together over 4,000 organizers in an effort to sharpen our analysis and strengthen our commitment to Palestinian liberation. In his keynote address, Dr. Hatem Bazian spoke to the student movement:

“Imagine and dream of a different new world, and go out and actualize it. Go out, dream and think and research and work for a new world, a different world, a just world, an inclusive world, and go out and make it. Students transformed history. The time is today to transform history.”

Dr. Bazian’s speech can be read in full at newyorkwarcrimes.com.

Join the cultural front near you

Philadelphia: Tonight, our Philly chapter is joining Philadelphia Parents for Palestine for “Zionism is Racism: 50 Years Since UN Resolution 3379,” a panel discussion with scholar-activists Noura Erakat, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Emmaia Gelman. Tickets still available. Doors at 6 PM. Can’t come, but want to get involved locally? Email philly@wawog.com.

Toronto: On Thursday, September 25, as part of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, our Toronto chapter is honored to co-present screenings of Familiar Phantoms, directed by Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind, and Diary of the Sky, by Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Email toronto@wawog.com to let us know you’ll be there.

Study and struggle with us

WAWOG’s fifth New York City town hall and fundraiser for Gaza will be held Saturday, September 27 at the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. This town hall is organized in collaboration with PAL-Awda NY/NJ, Palestine Solidarity Working Group, and New York Students for Justice in Palestine.

We will gather for a full day of political education, discussion, and readings from the latest issue of The New York War Crimes. Our programming will focus on open-forum conversations surrounding prisoner solidarity, the future of campus organizing, and tactics for pushing tech and weapons manufacturers out of our city.

Free registration via this link. Cash or Venmo donations will be accepted at the door. Proceeds will go to Ele Elna Elak, an organization founded by Bisan Owda that provides food and clean water to displaced children in Gaza, and to martyred journalist Hossam Shabat’s charity for families in the north.

Save the Date: WAWOG Philly’s next town hall will take place on Tuesday, October 21st from 6–8 PM at Calvary Center, Philadelphia.

Never abandon our prisoners

Free Tarek Bazrouk! On May 7, the 20-year-old Palestinian student was abducted from his New York City home into federal custody. and charged with a “hate crime” for defending his community against Zionist violence. Tarek has been denied bail and threatened with years in prison. Sign the petition demanding his release today.

Protest the UN General Assembly

• FLOOD THE UN!
  Tuesday, September 23 at 1 PM
  UN Headquarters, New York City

• ARREST NETANYAHU!
  Friday, September 26 at 9 AM
  Times Square, New York City

We leave you with the last words of Mariam Abu Daqqa, who was murdered by Israel at Nasser Hospital along with four other journalists on August 25:

Ghaith, you are the heart and soul of your mother.

I ask that you pray for me and not weep, so that I may rest in peace.

Make me proud by working hard, succeeding in your studies, and becoming a capable, accomplished young man. Strive to build a future for yourself, to become a respected businessman.

My dearest, never forget me. Everything I did was to see you happy, comfortable, and fulfilled.

And when the time comes, when you marry and have a daughter, please name her Mariam, after me.

You are my love, my strength, my pride, and my joy. Always carry yourself with dignity, and let your actions honor my memory.

Most importantly, Ghaith: never neglect your prayers. Your prayers are your strength.

With all my love,

Your mother, Mariam.