Every action, no matter how small it feels, is important

Dear friends,

Today is the second anniversary of October 7, 2023 — the breaking of the siege from within Gaza and the start of Israel’s new phase of genocidal aggression against the Palestinians. We are now entering the third year of this accelerated genocide, facing a horrific reality most of us probably couldn’t have even imagined a few years ago.

Let us take a moment to sit with the numbers that help us capture part of the reality of the situation. It’s been 732 days since October 7, 2023. In that time, Gaza’s Ministry of Health has located and identified (by name and ID number) 67,173 martyrs, including 20,179 children. More than 169,680 people have been identified as wounded. Of course, these numbers are a massive undercount according to just about every knowledgeable source, with the most recent estimate indicating that the total number of martyred Palestinians may have reached 680,000 by April 25, 2025. This includes approximately 380,000 children under the age of five years old and 479,000 children in total.

These numbers are staggering. They are gutwrenching. It is difficult to wrap our minds around the scale of suffering. Most of us who know and love children in our own lives cannot bear the thought of them going without a single meal due to deprivation, being thirsty without immediate access to relief, or not having a safe place to lay their heads for a single night. We have allowed 1.1 million children, trapped in the Gaza Strip by Israel for much longer than the last two years, to endure all of these things and much, much worse.

A few more statistics, because it’s important: according to an announcement by the Palestinian Ministry of Health today, 25 out of 38 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are out of service, with those remaining offering their meager resources as Israel and the United States continue to prevent the delivery of medical supplies. 1,701 medical staff have been murdered by Israeli forces. At least 362 medical staff have been abducted and detained by Israeli forces, held in prisons and torture camps under dire conditions or disappeared entirely. 55% of medicines are completely out of stock, and 65% medical consumables have been depleted. These statistics are near — if not certain — death sentences for people with chronic illnesses.

Today the Government Media Office in Gaza reported that every day, an average of 77 children are deprived of at least one parent as a result of Israel’s strikes. An average of 29 women are widowed every day, and an average of 16 women miscarry every day as a result of the manufactured situation of extreme stress, deprivation, malnutrition, and complete destruction of medical services.

These statistics spell out a clear picture of genocide. The intent and its impact is indisputable for anyone with a tether to this reality we share. In fact, Israel has been carrying out genocide against Palestinians at a lower level of intensity long before 2023, with Palestinians in Gaza often facing some of the worst elements of this genocidal violence. We only need to stretch our memories to the last attack on Gaza in May 2021, during which Israel killed at least 260 people in eleven days.

This is what has brought us to this moment. And this is the reality that people in Gaza, as well as those in solidarity around the world, are fighting to drastically change. From the truly heroic medical staff who have sacrificed their sleep, nutrition, safety, and even their lives to protect their patients, to the courageous members of Gaza’s civil defense teams who continue to rescue the wounded and evacuate martyrs at their own peril, even after being targeted by zionist forces, to the volunteers running soup kitchens and ensuring that people have access to eSIMs to the local and international teams like the Sameer Project who refuse to leave vulnerable people without resources, there is no shortage of inspiration in how we move forward.

In the rest of Palestine, as the violence of zionist colonization has only grown more dire in rural communities and refugee camps especially, people continue to resist. Farmers fight settler militias’ attempts at land grabs in their own courts as well as on the ground, continuing to sow their crops and sell them in the local markets. Prisoners continue to refuse to be cowed into submission by policies of deprivation, neglect, and violence. Palestinian citizens in Israel and residents in Jerusalem risk arrest and state violence to mark their solidarity with Gaza. People everywhere, including the West Bank, continue to escalate the boycott of Israeli products. In Palestine, we still imagine a decolonized future and make our choices in service of this future.

People are still fighting from outside of Palestine, too, through the ongoing process of education and organizing within local communities as well as solidarity with political prisoners, imprisoned for refusing to be made complicit in this US-funded genocide in Palestine or forced to accept the proscription of organizations which disrupt colonial violence. This resistance also continues in the efforts to fundraise for families in Gaza and organizations supporting them, as well as the blocking of boats carrying weapons to support this unfathomable destruction. Italy has shown us what it looks like to truly shut down entire cities for Gaza, and hundreds of activists on the most recent flotilla to Palestine have illustrated perhaps one of the most important features of solidarity — sacrifice, without centering oneself.

The way forward can feel uncertain and even scary, particularly when the stakes are so high. But we cannot give up, as people in Gaza and the rest of Palestine have also refused to give up. Every action, no matter how small it feels, is important.

Until liberation and return,

Lara

Please consider signing this letter to support a young Palestinian man in New York City as he awaits sentencing