Israeli tanks are now rolling into Gaza City, the last section of the Strip left standing. One by one, buildings are detonated into rubble. Families are expelled at gunpoint. Gaza’s government media office has reported that Israeli forces have deployed more than 80 explosive robots inside residential structures in recent days, part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy.

This destruction comes in the midst of a famine carefully engineered by siege. Hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children have already starved to death. 

The crisis is no accident of war. It is not chaos but method. Gaza’s famine is engineered, its destruction mapped out long before the latest assault began. What is unfolding is genocide — planned in Washington and Tel Aviv.

A blueprint for ethnic cleansing

With the fall of Gaza City, the entire Strip will be under Israeli occupation. Netanyahu describes this as the “concluding moves”: the mass confinement of Palestinians in sealed camps and their eventual expulsion from their ancestral homeland.

When Donald Trump declared in February that the United States would “take” and “own” Gaza, forcing Palestinians into “other countries,” many dismissed it as unserious posturing. But months later, it is clear his words anticipated the very strategy now unfolding.

A leaked strategy document — developed with input from the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the Boston Consulting Group, and the Tony Blair Foundation — lays out this policy in the antiseptic language of corporate boardrooms. Every Palestinian life is treated as a financial liability. Expelling one person is calculated to “save” $23,000. Those who leave “voluntarily” are offered $5,000 and two years’ rent; those who die, the document implies, represent the greatest economic benefit of all.

This is genocide repackaged as financial optimization. The language of return on investment, public-private partnerships, and capital expenditures obscures the brutal reality: a population being starved, bombed, and shot down so that financiers and politicians can balance their ledgers.

Gaza and imperialism’s new geography

The extermination of Gaza is not only ideological but strategic. The document presents two direct benefits for the United States: “massive financial gains” and the acceleration of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, also known as IMEC.

IMEC, announced by Washington in 2023, is a geopolitical counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It envisions a trade corridor linking India to Europe through the Arabian Peninsula and Israel. Netanyahu himself made the connection clear at the United Nations, holding up a map of a “new Middle East” in which Israel stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, erasing Gaza and the West Bank entirely. He called this corridor “visionary.”

Weeks later, Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza. The timing was no coincidence. The strategy document calls Gaza an “Iranian outpost” threatening the corridor. Its annihilation is described as essential to securing the region for U.S. and Israeli dominance and ensuring access to trillions of dollars in natural resources.

Starvation as a weapon

This is the context for the famine now consuming Gaza. Starvation is not a byproduct of war but a weapon of it. Children with skeletal frames crowd makeshift hospitals. Families scavenge for scraps. Israeli forces open fire on crowds desperate for food aid. This is extermination by hunger, reinforced by bombardment and expulsion.

Public opinion tells a different story. Polls show support for Israel at an all-time low in the United States, including among Jewish Americans. Around the world, opposition to the genocide is overwhelming. Yet Washington and its allies continue to arm and fund the onslaught. The explanation lies not in popular will but in the deeper logic of imperialism.

Zionism and imperialism

U.S. support for Israel cannot be explained simply by the influence of AIPAC or by blackmail scandals surrounding figures like Jeffrey Epstein. It goes back more than a century, to Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, when London endorsed a Zionist homeland in Palestine as a way to fragment Arab unity. After 1948, the United States inherited this role, seizing upon Zionism as a means of dividing and suppressing the Arab world.

The Arab world, stretching across  North Africa (e.g., Egypt, Libya, Algeria), the Nile Valley (Sudan), the Levant (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine), to the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, etc.) is home to over 470 million people, vast oil reserves, and critical trade routes like the Suez Canal. 

Its sheer potential for unity posed a grave threat to imperialist domination. Pan-Arabism, the movement to unite the region, emerged as a natural response. Imperialist powers answered with relentless efforts to suppress it — backing monarchies, waging wars, and installing dictatorships. Zionism became one of their sharpest tools: a settler colony used to divide and weaken the Arab nation.

Unlike Arabs, Jews in modern times lacked the shared features of a nation — territory, economy, or language. Hebrew was revived from religious use to serve as a national tongue only under Zionist direction. The State of Israel was made possible only through imperialist sponsorship. For Washington, it provided a dual solution: preventing Jewish Holocaust survivors from reinforcing labor and communist movements in the United States, and positioning them as a garrison force against Arab nationalism.

After the Soviet Red Army defeated the Nazis and freed the concentration camps, socialism was seen as a powerful force of liberation. This idea rapidly spread beyond Europe and was brought by war refugees to the United States and the rest of the world.

Reaction without exit

Today, Israeli society finds itself at a historical dead end. Like Afrikaner colonists in South Africa, settlers have become increasingly reactionary. But unlike Afrikaners, who depended on the exploitation of African labor, Israel seeks to eliminate Palestinian labor altogether. Its settler-colonial logic drives toward expulsion and extermination.

For U.S. imperialism, this logic is convenient. Israel’s crimes can be portrayed as uniquely “Israeli,” allowing Washington to deny its own hand while reaping the benefits. In reality, Israel has fought every war since its founding as a proxy for U.S. power.

The logic of finance capital

What is happening in Gaza today is not an accident. It is capitalism in its imperialist stage stripped bare. As Lenin wrote more than a century ago, finance capital does not strive for freedom but for domination. It transforms famine into a weapon, ethnic cleansing into an investment opportunity, and genocide into a growth strategy.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars has already concluded that Israel is guilty of systematic war crimes and genocide. Yet the responsibility does not rest with Israel alone. The U.S. imperialist state has armed, financed, and excused this crime. At home, the same government slashes social programs, busts unions, suppresses wages, and prepares to crush dissent. 

The horror unfolding in Gaza is not just a crime against a people — it is a warning of what capitalism has in store for the world. If U.S. imperialism is willing to annihilate millions of Palestinians as the prelude to its confrontation with China and Russia, how many billions will it sacrifice in a global war?

The genocide in Gaza is inseparable from the capitalist system that created it. To fight for the survival of the Palestinian people is to fight against the global dictatorship of finance capital itself. The future of humanity depends on nothing less.

Hundreds turned out in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on Aug. 19 to stop the allocation of public funds to support the Canada-Israel Davis Cup slated in that city on Sept. 12 and 13. Mobilized by the Halifax Committee against Imperialist War & Genocide, they demanded that Halifax must not be complicit in genocide by hosting this event. Halifax is the capital and largest municipality of Canada’s Nova Scotia province, with a population of just over half a million people on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people.

Just after 8 p.m., however, without any public debate, without transparency, and without even the decency of discussion, in a 10 to 6 vote, the City Council approved the Special Events Advisory Committee’s $50,000 CAD funding for the Davis Cup tennis match.  A vote not for tennis, but to normalize genocide

Organizers reported that hundreds gathered at 9:30 am on that workday to confront the Halifax City Council, demanding the cancellation of the event to send an unequivocal message: Halifax will not stand on the wrong side of history.  Unwilling to face the public outcry against hosting a sports team of a country admittedly conducting genocide and starvation of Palestinians that was shown in an email campaign, and the chamber overflowing with concerned Canadians, the agenda was juggled to postpone the vote into the night. 

The Halifax Committee argues: 

“The proposed match … is not a neutral sporting event. It is a deliberate political act — a gift of legitimacy, a propaganda stage, and a public relations shield for a state that is committing a genocide in Gaza. At a time when tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, maimed, starved, or displaced; when homes, schools, hospitals, and vital infrastructure have been obliterated; when overwhelming evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity is documented daily — for Halifax to fund and host this event is to be complicit in sports washing those atrocities.

“The State of Israel’s genocide and war crimes against the Palestinian people are so blatant, flagrant, heinous and undeniable that even its most fervent supporters can no longer bear them and remain silent. Former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler — long a staunch advocate for Israel — has publicly called for an end to the war and starvation in Gaza, even denouncing the Israeli government’s rhetoric as ‘a moral abomination.’ If people of Cotler’s ilk cannot ignore the scale of Israel’s brutality, how can the City of Halifax turn a blind eye and instead reward it with public funds and civic celebration?!

“This is not about tennis. This is about whether our city will stand on the side of justice or align itself with the normalization of apartheid, occupation, and genocide. Across Canada and around the world, athletes, human rights defenders, and ordinary citizens have made it clear in their millions and billions: there can be no normal sporting relations with an apartheid state engaged in mass slaughter.”

The Halifax Committee addressed the fig leaf of promoting tourism, charging: “It is a deliberate political act—designed to grant legitimacy, offer a PR platform, and whitewash the crimes of a state currently engaged in a genocidal campaign in Gaza. This is sportswashing, not sport. And in this case, it is soaked in blood.

“To prioritize potential tourism revenue over basic human rights is to place a dollar value on human life. The Halifax Regional Council has chosen to trade morality for money, as though economic gain could ever justify complicity in atrocity. This is a betrayal—not just of international law, but of the conscience of our community.”

Their statement concluded: “Let it be clear: We see you. We remember. And we resist.”

For more information, contact the Halifax Committee against Imperialist War & Genocide, hcaiwag@gmail.com

Over the weekend of Aug. 16, the owner of Bunny’s Buckets & Bubbles, a Baltimore restaurant in the downtown neighborhood of Fells Point, fired an employee for wearing a Palestine pin. 

Supposedly, a customer left a review about the employee, stating “that they felt uncomfortable and unsafe” and that it “disrupted their dining experience.” The owner doubled down on the complaint when notifying the employee of their termination, saying that the Palestine flag was “anti-gay.” 

This stems from decades-old Zionist propaganda that presents “Israel” as a bastion of democracy and progressivism in West Asia, sometimes referred to as “pinkwashing.” 

Saja, a Palestinian activist, learned about the wrongful termination through a work group chat where the fired worker had requested extra hours. She immediately called a protest. 

“They had relayed to me the situation — that the owner was drinking on the job when he had initially fired the first person, that the dress policy stated that they were not allowed to wear any vulgar or offensive imagery, and that the person who was fired was given an ultimatum: either take off the pin or leave the establishment and not to come back,” said Saja.

On Aug. 17, a crowd consisting mostly of Bunny’s workers gathered in front of the restaurant. Members of the People’s Power Assembly joined to support. 

In between chants like “Don’t support Bunny’s, the owner supports genocide,” and “From Baltimore to Palestine, solidarity is not a crime,” as well as mini marches to Fells Point’s main street, workers spoke out in front of the restaurant about working at Bunny’s. 

“Matt Akman is the owner of Bunny’s, but that’s all he does,” said one worker. “He doesn’t cook, he doesn’t serve. He comes to flex on his friends that he owns a restaurant. Sometimes he comes just to eat and drink for free — and then he leaves sh*tty tips!” 

“The owner has claimed that we make more than he does,” said another worker. “Meanwhile, he’s got the only in-ground pool in Fells Point.” 

Two “private security” guards stood guard at the entrance to Bunny’s for the duration of the protest and at one point threatened to, in their own words, “put the lead organizer in handcuffs” for “standing too close” to Akman’s private property that they were shamelessly covering. 

“They asked me to move across the street and when I respectfully declined, they got more hostile,” said Saja. “They then continued to call me the R word and threatened to put me in jail.” This baseless attempt quickly proved unsuccessful, and the demo carried on.

A lone heckler was drowned out by the overwhelming support of passersby, as well as the loud, passionate chanting from the workers. At the end of the demo, one passerby even offered to lend her services as an employment lawyer. Another identified himself as a former member of Plumbers Local 1 in New York City. He said, “I’m with you guys, and I’m with Palestine.” 

For the duration of the protest, several Bunny’s workers walked off the job and joined. When the crowd learned that Bunny’s would be shutting down early for the evening, they cheered on this small but well-deserved victory against the racist, Zionist owner. 

The following day, local news reported that Bunny’s fired six more workers for their participation in the protest. 

“This issue is bigger than whether or not people are allowed to wear Palestine pins,” said Saja. “Palestinians deserve a right to exist and if the existence of another human being makes you feel unsafe then you should think about how messed up that sounds. The fired workers were brave enough to speak up about the challenges they were facing. Children are starving and dying. A whole population is going through a genocide.” 

Saja organized a GoFundMe for the fired workers.

‘March for Humanity’ hears Chris Smalls and Mahmoud Khalil

Aug. 16 — People came from up and down the East Coast to New York City today to protest the deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Behind the Zionist apartheid regime carrying out the genocide are its U.S. paymasters.

Protesters gathered in front of the famous New York Public Library on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The crowd was so large that it spilled into the street. People carried hundreds of colorful banners, signs and Palestinian flags.

Among the speakers was the courageous activist and scholar Mahmoud Khalil, who was illegally seized by ICE agents and spent 104 days in a Louisiana prison. Khalil’s “crime,” according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was that his activism to save Palestinian lives allegedly harmed U.S. foreign policy. 

To Rubio, First Amendment guarantees of free speech don’t exist for immigrants or any other opponents of Trump. Yet this fascist was confirmed as Secretary of State by a 99-0 vote in the U.S. Senate, including every Democratic member. 

Mahmoud Khalil movingly described the assassination of the Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, along with six other people, in Gaza. Over 240 journalists have been murdered in Gaza by Zionist war criminals in an attempt to suppress the truth.

Chris Smalls, the founder of the Amazon Labor Union, was welcomed by the thousands assembled. Smalls was a crew member of the Handala, a ship attempting to bring life-saving supplies to Gaza that was seized last month in international waters by the Zionist entity’s navy.

The labor leader was the only Black member of the crew and the only one beaten by Zionist thugs. It’s shameful that the AFL-CIO leadership didn’t condemn this racist attack.

Stop starving Gaza!

Miriam Osman spoke from the Palestinian Youth Movement and Layan Fuleihan spoke from The People’s Forum. Both organizations helped to organize the protest.

Bint Au Musa, from PAL-AWDA, the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, read a letter from a doctor in Gaza. Eugene Puryear spoke from the Party for Socialism and Liberation. 

The ANSWER Coalition’s national coordinator, Brian Becker, revealed that Marco Rubio is cancelling visas for Palestinians, including children in Gaza seeking cancer treatment in the U.S. 

People moved out to march through the streets. Chants bounced off Manhattan skyscrapers as many people on the sidewalks showed their support. The hour-long march ended in Central Park, where a short rally was held.

Palestine will win!

New Orleans, Aug. 9 – This evening, around 200 people marched for Palestine downtown, at one point taking over Canal Street, the central vein of business and tourism.

Many were gathered for the popular Red Dress Run charity event. Most responses from the crowd were supportive, a handful of Zionist hecklers notwithstanding.

The march was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement New Orleans and a dozen other organizations, including Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization. In the opening rally, a PYM organizer said:

“The Palestinian flag has become the flag of humanity itself, the banner of all those who refuse to accept genocide as normal. That’s you!

“On Thursday, [U.S. representative for Louisiana] Troy Carter was so terrified of Palestinian voices that he shut down an entire federal building with 16 state police cars, for five hours. A 28-story building fortress, all to avoid hearing three simple words: Stop funding genocide!

“But we are here to say what they don’t want to hear. Troy Carter, John Kennedy, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise – all these people you see in pictures right here next to us – you are guilty!

“Guilty of sending $20 billion of OUR money and weapons while Palestinians eat grass to live. You closed your office to us, but you cannot close your ears to Gaza’s screams. You cannot close your ears to history’s judgement – God’s judgement. And you cannot close the gates of justice that we’re bringing down right now!”

The U.S.-proxy Israel continues almost daily violations of the ceasefire in Lebanon. It is rare that a sun sets without Zionist forces carrying out a deadly air strike or artillery barrage against the Lebanese countryside. 

Even so, the Lebanese government voted on Aug. 7 to approve the United States’ proposal to disarm Hezbollah. The Shia Islamist political party and militia have been a steadfast ally of Iran and the people of Palestine since its founding in 1982. The events of Oct. 7 and the subsequent escalation against Gaza saw Hezbollah intervene militarily in support of a Palestine under siege. 

Hezbollah has consistently done what the government of Lebanon has refused to do: stand in solidarity with Palestine and defend its people against U.S.-Zionist attack. Without Hezbollah, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) would likely have free rein over the entirety of Lebanon, making the country completely subservient to U.S. imperialist interests. 

The disarmament of Hezbollah would benefit neither the people of Lebanon nor Palestine. It would only benefit the continued U.S. and Zionist campaign to break the Axis of Resistance and isolate Iran. 

The ability of Hezbollah to defend itself is not simply a matter of military strategy, but one of self-determination. To this effect, Hezbollah PM Mohammad Raad posed the vital question: “To say surrender your weapons is to say surrender your honor. … Who will guarantee sovereignty if the weapons are surrendered?”

The U.S. and its satellite, Israel, certainly won’t guarantee Lebanese sovereignty. In fact, they will ensure the opposite. The U.S. wants Lebanon to be another Libya or Syria – entirely open for the plunder of its economic and natural resources by a small parasitic group of Western billionaires. 

All revolutionaries worldwide must stand in solidarity with Hezbollah as they defend Lebanon, and the entire Muslim world, against imperialist onslaught. 

Eighty-two years ago this year, a group of starving Jewish communists and socialists took up arms against Nazi German troops and tanks inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Facing starvation and deportation to the infamous Treblinka extermination camp, our Jewish ancestors and comrades made a stand. As a community, we should know better than anyone that the only option in the face of fascism and genocide is the resistance of the people. 

Jewish fighters picked up any weapons they could find: handguns, bolt-action rifles, shovels, knives, and even furniture pieces and made war on the Nazi occupiers. Completely outgunned and outnumbered, lacking food and water, the Jewish anti-fascist fighters held on against overwhelming Nazi forces for an entire month. 

Socialist activist and Jewish Combat Organization Commander Marek Edelman stated that the resistance found inspiration in not allowing “the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths.” This is the exact same brutal calculus taking place in the hearts and minds of the resistance fighters and all Palestinians inside Gaza as these words are written. In this modern holocaust, the Palestinians are clearly playing the role that the brave Jewish revolutionaries did in 1943 in Poland. 

It should be noted that Marek Edelman, Mordechai Anielewicz, and many other leaders in the Jewish resistance were explicit anti-Zionists. One of Edelman’s last public statements before his death in 2002 was in support of Palestine. Edelman specifically warned that “Jewish self-defence” was being weaponized to rationalize the oppression of the Palestinian people. 

Even with this history, in this same modern holocaust, the Jewish community finds itself playing the role of the Nazi SS. This dynamic can further be seen in the U.S.-Zionist imposed artificial famine in Gaza. In 2025, the United Nations estimates that tens of thousands of children are suffering from malnutrition. In the last two weeks alone, at least sixteen children under the age of 5 have died of starvation. Again, the Palestinians play the role of Jews in our Warsaw Ghetto metaphor. 

In 1942, a year before the uprising, a group of Jewish doctors performed a study of starvation inside the Ghetto. The public health and nutrition situation in the Ghetto at the time was stunningly similar to the present-day Gaza. Food could only be obtained through soup kitchens that were themselves the targets of the Nazi occupiers. Vaccines, antibiotics, and other crucial medications were all withheld from the Ghetto prisoners by the Nazis. 

Their stated purpose was to track the impact of genocidal policies on a community to help future generations of oppressed people be prepared. To this day, it remains the most extensive study of starvation conducted. The 28 Jewish doctors who conducted it were themselves starving. All of these doctors but one died from malnutrition or were executed by the Nazis – but not until they completed and ensured the security of their work. This was certainly as much an act of resistance as the armed uprising in 1943. 

The same can be said for the Palestinian families who persist through artillery shells and bullets to seek out food at aid stations. Every step they take to try to feed their families is an act of human defiance against an inhumane U.S. regime. 

Yet, even with these parallels, the Jewish community globally remains completely fooled on the issue of Zionism. We need to listen to our revolutionary ancestors. We need to listen to our humanity. The legacy of Judaism should not be one of enforcing imperialist greed. It should be one of resistance.

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist. 

The Peoples Power Assembly gathered in front of Amazon Warehouses at Holabird and Broening Highway. Called as a noise demonstration, activists beat on drums and played the bugle to garner attention from workers during shift change at the two warehouses.  

The action was called to support Chris Smalls, an Amazon labor leader who participated in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla aboard the Handala, which set sail to deliver food to starving Palestinians. Smalls was detained and arrested by the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces), along with 21 other activists, but was singled out as the only Black member of the Flotilla and choked, kicked and assaulted while in Israeli custody.

The group also demanded that Amazon shut down “Project Nimbus” and all other contracts and investments with the apartheid government of Israel. The Israeli military uses Amazon’s “Project Nimbus” to automate the software it uses to operate their weapons systems that target and kill Palestinians. “Instead of investing in genocide, pay workers a $30 minimum wage, full time benefits and make safety a priority,” organizers proclaimed.

Los Angeles, Aug. 3 – Mass was held on Sunday at Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in Placita Olvera, the historic center of the city. After the service, our group received much attention at the table next to our encampment. We have been participating in a hunger strike against the U.S.-Zionist Holocaust in Gaza.

After Mass, we did not get any of the negative attention that sometimes comes with political work. In fact, it was a beautiful day of solidarity. After seeing the sign – “Stop Starving Gaza – End the Occupation: Money for Jobs / Housing Not Genocide & ICE Raids” – many from the predominantly Mexican and other Latin American communities took our flyer, expressing anger at the truth of the Palestinian people.

Many unhoused people have been camping outside this church. They are very multi-national, like the wider working class: Asian, Black, Latin American, Caribbean, and white. All share the heat of the day and cold of the night – many without tents or blankets. However, sleeping and tents outside of the church are only allowed during the day.

The politicians have met the massive growth of unhoused people in Los Angeles with indifference. They spend millions to direct police and sheriffs’ departments to terrorize our neighbors, our children, our Black and Brown communities.

They are hiring militias to silence the people in solidarity with Palestine, who demand an end to the complicity with the genocide in Gaza. But not only that. They are trying to suppress the people who demand an end to the genocidal policies of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, with the complicity of the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department. 

A plaque at the church commemorates the history, stating that approximately 693 early residents of Los Angeles were buried in the cemetery. Those remains from 1781 included Mexican, African, Indigenous, Mestizo, and Spanish residents – many of whom were forcibly integrated into the mission system in conditions of forced labor. When the city of L.A. grew, those graves were built over. Los Angeles also has a history of multinational oppression.

Our Lady Queen of Angels graciously allowed the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice to create the 3-day Hunger Strike encampment on church property. They have a history of involvement in the immigration struggle, being involved in the hunger strike that helped to build the 2006 “Great American Boycott” (or “Day Without an Immigrant”) that defeated the racist, anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill. 

Right now, there are 20 people on the 3-Day Hunger Strike, with four fasting at the church. Although we should do little work while fasting, the response makes outreach a joy. The volunteers are incredible, and many people want to sign up for the Harriet Tubman Center. The support of people here keeps us going.

Chris Smalls, founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, was welcomed by over a hundred supporters at New York City’s JFK airport on Aug. 1 after being kidnapped by the Zionist genocidal regime.

Among those welcoming the hero were members of the New Jersey-based People’s Organization for Progress, including its chairperson, Larry Hamm.

Smalls was one of the crew members of the Handala, which was seized in international waters by Israeli forces as the ship was trying to deliver food to Gaza. This was the second vessel belonging to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition that Zionist war criminals hijacked.

The labor leader and activist was the only Black member of Handala’s crew and the only one who was beaten by his Israeli kidnappers. Zionism is racism.

The same day, in New York City, demonstrations were held against the deliberate U.S.-Israeli starvation of two million people in Gaza. Organizers included the Shut It Down for Palestine Coalition, the Palestinian Youth Movement and PAL-Awda.

In a morning action organized by PAL-Awda, activists chained themselves to the doors of the Egyptian mission to the UN as supporters chanted “Starving children can’t wait, open up the Rafah gate.” It took the NYPD nearly two hours to cut the chains and arrest the protesters.

The action was one of many around the world demanding that Gaza’s Rafah gate on its border with Egypt be opened for food and medical supplies. In a statement, PAL-Awda also called on Egypt to stop buying stolen Palestine gas from the Zionist regime and Chevron and stop buying arms from U.S. corporations that arm the Zionist war machine. 

At noon, Palestinian solidarity activists joined community activists from Texas and Louisiana to protest outside the global headquarters of Citibank in lower Manhattan. The Youth Climate Finance Alliance was an organizer of the action.

The marchers focused on Citi’s financing of fossil fuel projects in the U.S. Gulf South as well as the bank’s direct involvement in Zionist genocide in Gaza. Citi loaned the racist state of “Israel” $2.5 billion to purchase the U.S. F35s now bombing the children of Gaza. That loan is being repaid with U.S. taxpayer money.

Speakers, including elders and children, described the environmental poisoning, lifelong illnesses and premature death Citi-financed fracking projects inflict on their communities. They then marched to the luxury condo of Citicorp CEO “Genocide Jane” Fraser, where other Gulf South activists had chained themselves together, blockading the doors. The NYPD, always eager to serve the bankers, sent its brutal Strategic Response Group to make arrests. But the condo building was shut down for at least two hours. 

The Manhattan condo is one of several residences Fraser owns around the country. She pulled down $34.5 million last year while Citicorp – with $2.5 trillion in assets – is the biggest U.S. bankster in Israel and is vital to its war purchases.

Later that day, protesters led by the Palestinian Youth Movement rallied outside the consulates of Egypt and Jordan before marching from the UN to “Columbus” Circle.

Earlier in the week, on July 29, activists protested outside a conference of states led by imperialist France and the lackey Saudi regime, calling for a “two-state” solution sometime in the distant future. The conference made no demands on the Zionist state or the U.S., but demanded that Palestinian freedom fighters surrender. Gaza needs food and urgent medical assistance – not Bantustans like those in apartheid South Africa. 

Outside the Saudi mission, protesters confronted Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Sarhan bin Said, who was there for the conference. Just three months ago, the Saudi Kingdom hosted Donald Trump and 30 U.S. CEOs, including Genocide Jane Fraser. The Saudi royals pledged nearly $1 trillion in contracts to Citi, Boeing, Palantir, Nvidia, BlackRock, and other U.S. corporations directly involved in the Gaza genocide. 

Also on Aug. 1, Jewish Voice for Peace elders held a sit-in at the office of pro-genocide New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer.

On Saturday, Aug. 2, a demonstration called by Within Our Lifetime marched from City Hall to Grand Central Station. And a Sunday rally for Gaza by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) drew a large crowd to Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.

All the marches were greeted with visible and audible support from pedestrians and drivers as they marched through the streets. Millions are outraged at the starvation in Gaza.

Stop starving Gaza! Palestine will win!