A group of Mennonites from Harrisonburg visited Palestine last month to learn about life under Israeli occupation and the war in Gaza. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Mennonite Action is a North American movement that started in 2023 to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the occupation of Palestine. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7 of that year, Israel's invasion of Gaza has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, more than half of whom are women and children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
Ten members of the Harrisonburg chapter recently spent 12 days traveling through the West Bank and Israel. They recorded audio along their journey, some of which you'll hear in this story.
[sounds of night market – music, merchants, and shoppers]
Tim Seidel, a peacebuilding professor at Eastern Mennonite University who previously lived in Palestine, said they heard a common refrain throughout the trip.
TIM SEIDEL: Come to Palestine and see us and hear our stories and go back home and tell our stories.
The group flew into Jordan and then traveled to Jerusalem.
[bar mitzvah parade passing through Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem]
Five miles away, through an Israeli checkpoint, and across the West Bank border, the group toured Bethlehem University. Katie Corbit recounted their tour guide saying –
KATIE CORBIT: That 70 students from Gaza were enrolled at the beginning of the school year, and only two logged in, and those two did not complete the semester, and they have no idea what has happened to them.
All universities and most schools have been destroyed in Gaza, as the United Nations and PBS News Hour have reported.
CatiAdele Slater told me about Aida, a refugee camp they visited nearby.
CATIADELE SLATER: Aida was created by the U.N. in 1950, and families came from 27 different villages, and when you talk with the Palestinians in Aida, they'll tell you where their home is. … There have been generations that have grown up in these camps.
Outside of Bethlehem, they visited the Tent of Nations, an educational and ecological family farm. The group learned songs popular with kids who attend a summer camp there.
[singing at Tent of Nations]
DAOUD NASSAR: Things are changing dramatically in the West Bank.
Daoud Nassar is the farm's director.
NASSAR: Our farm, like many other Palestinian farms, is threatened to be confiscated. … When my family bought this piece of land, more than 100 years ago – I mean, we are talking about a one hundred acre farm located on a hilltop – surrounded today by five settlements, which makes it here the only hilltop in this area that is without an Israeli settlement – the land is good for growing grapes, olives, other fruit trees.
The group also visited the Lutheran Christmas Church where the Nassars worship …
[organ music at Lutheran Christmas Church]
… and saw fighter jets and missiles passing overhead throughout their travels.
[jet passing overhead in Hebron]
Another person they met, Budour Hassan, is a researcher with Amnesty International. She co-authored a December 2024 report concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In one excerpt, her team writes that Israel has brought Gaza's population "to the brink of collapse," killing many people [quote] "in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families." Two prominent Israeli rights groups agree.
BUDOUR HASSAN: Palestinian men in general have been so systematically demonized, that even in the stats, we keep saying "it's 60% women and children." Okay, but what about the men? And there has been this absolute loss of ability to identify with all the men who are killed, who are tortured, who are raped in detention, who are dehumanized.
She also spoke about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the U.S.-Israeli operation running the only four aid distribution locations now open.
HASSAN: Israel prevented the entry of food and medical supplies totally for 77 days … when this was slightly, slightly eased, it was transformed into a different form of starvation, in the shape of militarizing aid, of turning the spaces, the zones where people were supposed to receive aid into death traps.
The U.N. has recorded 875 killings near these sites and food convoys, most of them by gunfire. The Associated Press reported this month that two American contractors guarding these sites have reported security staff firing live bullets at Palestinians coming for food. A U.N.-affiliated organization tracking food insecurity reports that "widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths."
The delegation also spoke with Mennonite Central Committee workers, now based in Jordan, who were formerly part of the network of aid providers in Gaza. Tyler Goss recounts –
TYLER GOSS: They were not provided a list of what was allowed and what wasn't. … One of the things they were saying is that the kids in Gaza are really just wanting something sweet … and so they included Nutella in these packages, and the last time they tried to get the packages across, Israel denied it, because there was Nutella.
Now, they say –
CORBIT: They have warehouses full of boxes they can't send.
[sounds of cars, families on the city streets of Madaba, Jordan]
The group returned to Jordan a day and a half early, after Israel launched attacks on Iran. Two flights in a row got canceled before they finally boarded a plane and flew home to tell the stories of those they met.
