Yousef Aljamal’s family is lucky that their house is still standing.
“With 35 relatives, it is overcrowded,” said Aljamal, the Gaza coordinator of the Palestine Activism Program of the Palestinian-led American Friends Service Committee, which has offices in Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
So far, Israeli air strikes have left more than 42 million tons of rubble throughout the Gaza Strip, according to the UN. Most of the rubble is destroyed houses, Bloomberg Reports.
Aljamal lives in Gaza, but his words were echoed by his colleague Sayrah Namaste, program director for the American Friends Service Committee in New Mexico, during a rally Sunday at Tiguex Park in Albuquerque. She shared his and others’ messages from Gaza because she doesn’t want people to see Palestinians as numbers.
One of the hardest moments of the last ten months, Aljamal said, was the death of his father.
He couldn’t bury him.
Israel has killed so many Palestinians, Aljamal said, that families have had to bury them in mass graves or dig up the graves of other family members to place new graves in them.
“Even the dead in Gaza are denied the respect and dignity of a proper burial,” said Aljamal. “No one should have to live like this.”
The rally, followed by a march through downtown Albuquerque, took place on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, coinciding with other demonstrations in 85 cities in 34 U.S. states. The demonstrators demanded that the United States impose an arms embargo on Israel.
“We want a permanent ceasefire and not another bomb, not another dollar to finance genocide,” said Palestinian-American organizer Samia Assed. “No more of our tax dollars should be used to support the heartbreaking genocide in Gaza.”
Justin Rogers, an organizer of the Vote Uncommitted NM campaign, said activists from the Palestinian-led Not Another Bomb campaign were circulating a petition across the country calling on Harris to call for a ceasefire and an arms embargo.
Eight of the 45 DNC delegates from New Mexico signed the petition, Rogers said.
“The bomb that blew up our office came from my country”
In October, the Israeli military bombed the office of the American Friends Service Committee in Gaza and destroyed it.
“Most likely, the bomb that blew up our office came from my country,” Namaste said.
Serena Awad, 22, a Gaza resident and Gaza program officer for the American Friends Service Committee. Namaste also shared her words in Albuquerque on Sunday.
“Sometimes it’s easier to be dead than to live every day in a place where nowhere is safe and you don’t know if your family survived another night of bombing,” Awad said.
Awad said she and another colleague had recently become infected with hepatitis.
“If you look around Gaza, everything is yellow,” said Awad.
Hepatitis outbreak in the Gaza Strip was caused by the bombing of the Gaza Strip’s sewage systems by the Israeli military.
Awad said she and the others had distributed more than 2,600 essential packages of baby formula and diapers to 2,000 children in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip in recent weeks.
“The hunger in Gaza is increasing. Many newborns cannot be breastfed because their mothers do not receive the minimum amount of nutrients they need to produce milk. They then have to rely on baby formula,” said Awad.
These challenges are exacerbated by constant displacement, Awad said. She has already been displaced eight times, Namaste said.
“As in many other places in Gaza, Palestinians seeking shelter there have had to leave their homes or tents several times in a single month,” Awad said. “The relentless cycle of displacement makes life incredibly difficult, especially for women who have just given birth and have young children. Each time they have to dismantle their temporary shelter and rebuild it in another place, adding to our physical and emotional burden.”
“We demand to be heard and we will vote accordingly”
In March, an overwhelming majority of New Mexico Democratic Party members voted voted for a permanent ceasefire in the Israeli war against Gaza, an end to the blockade of humanitarian aid, a suspension of US military aid to Israel and the release of hostages on both sides.
Samia Assed, a Palestinian-American organizer in Albuquerque, told the crowd on Sunday that it was their responsibility to take their demands to the party and make sure Kamala Harris hears the call for an arms embargo.
“We are here to shake up the party,” Assed said. “It is our party and we demand to be heard. And we will vote according to its stance.”
Assed said Harris should “respect the Leahy Act,” the federal law Blocking prevent the United States from providing assistance to foreign security forces that have committed human rights abuses such as torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings or rape.
“We don’t want more weapons abroad,” Assed said. “There is no accountability for what is happening abroad. We continue to fund, but there is no transparency and no accountability. We are finished.”
Jillian Grandenetti, an Arab-American student at the University of New Mexico who attended the Duck Pond camp earlier this year asked how anyone could claim to be neutral during the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians.
“As a UNM student, I have continued to speak out very clearly about my tuition money being used to fund a genocide,” Grandenetti said. “And not just a genocide, but the genocide of my people. I am Lebanese and I have seen the atrocities committed with weapons funded with my tuition. It is a feeling of despair like I have never experienced before.”
Grandenetti raised a question that she believes everyone should ask.
“If I don’t fight fascism, who will?” she asked. “I say this in the hope that if the time ever comes when you need someone to stand up for you, hopefully there will be someone there to do it.”
Aljamal said Palestinians in Gaza urgently need help from the Americans and the international community to stop the genocide.
“Every day we wake up with the news of death and go to sleep with it,” he said. “The noise of bombs and drones is the soundtrack of our lives. Gaza residents spend every waking hour with one question in their minds: When will this nightmare end?”
