The Israeli government has the starvation of Palestinians down to a science: By their estimate, according to decades-old documentation, the Palestinian people only require 2,279 calories per person per day, which would be provided through 1.836 kilograms of food. But as famine in Gaza rages on, between March and June 2025 the Israeli government only allowed a quarter of their own recommended amount of food into Gaza, according to the nation’s own internal data. The famine is further exacerbated by the fact that the Israeli government has banned fishing, and the attacks on Palestine have eliminated the possibility of farming. Food distributions led by the U.S. and Israeli-backed group Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) are often chaotic and deadly—distribution sites stay open for as little as eight minutes and, according to U.N. agencies, the food distribution system is a “death trap.” Between May and June 2025, over 400 Palestinians were murdered by Israeli gunfire or shelling since GHF began its work in late May. In late September 2025, over 300 Palestinians were killed by Israeli armed forces while waiting for food aid. This manmade famine is overwhelmingly due to the ongoing militaristic assaults on Gaza perpetrated by Israel, which experts have deemed a genocide. Though Palestinians are now completely reliant on aid, activists that have been detained by the Israeli governement for making the journey across international waters to bring aid to Gaza were reportedly subjected to torture and humiliation. One of the coalitions that sought to bring food aid into Gaza was the Global Sumud Flotilla. The coalition was composed of people from over 45 countries and contained 42 vessels. Between October 1 and 3, all 42 vessels were intercepted by the Israeli government and all 462 members were detained. On one of those vessels was New Orleanian Zue Jernstedt, an Army veteran and member of About Face: Veterans Against the War. In a conversation with Jernstedt, we discussed what made her join the flotilla, her five-day imprisonment by Israel, New Orleans’ role in the genocide, and more.
I saw that you are a veteran. What made you join the Army, if you don’t mind me asking?
I don’t mind at all. It’s something I talk about a lot. I was economically not in a [good] place. I was in an abusive situation where the military really was my only option out. I didn’t join under any pretense of patriotism. It was simply survival.
Would you say that your time within the Army shaped your anti-imperialist views? I know when some people join the Army, they do have this patriotic idealism about America. Did you ever have a moment where you realized maybe that’s not all the Army was about?
Yeah, absolutely. During my deployment to Afghanistan, Amazon was a newer thing, and I ordered some books about Afghanistan, so I was reading about them while I was there, and putting some pieces together. And then I got put in a female embedment team where I was going and collecting information from women and was invited into their homes… sitting there drinking tea with them and their children. I realized that I was a lot more like them than I was the people that sent me there and that we were all just people trying to make it and get our families fed. So that made me really think about why we were in Afghanistan. Why were we causing harm by destabilizing the region, you know? My father was a firefighter who served in 9/11, so I did have some of that, “Oh yeah, they did something to us.” And then I got sent to Afghanistan and I was like, “No, this has nothing to do with what happened.”
There’s been quite a few ways in which people have shown their solidarity with the Palestinians—protests, going to municipal meetings, and such. What in particular made you join the flotilla?
[I went] to the City Hall meetings to talk about Palestine. I go to the board meetings to talk about our sister port, Port Ashdod. I do all that stuff, and I’ve been in solidarity with Palestinians in the States for a long time. What got me to join the flotilla was last year I went to the West Bank, with the International Solidarity Movement [ISM], and I did protective presence for three months with farmers and shepherds. Staring occupation in the face, you know? Getting lasers put on my chest from illegal settlers, getting harmed by them. And while I was there I met one of the [ISM] people I trained with [who] was this wonderful Palestinian American woman who—we did keep in touch—let me know about the flotilla, and let me know that there was a veterans’ boat, so I signed on.
The vessel that y’all were on, this wasn’t a very big boat at all, was it?
No. I’ve never been on a boat before, so I was also very ignorant about boats. It’s a personal craft. It’s not any kind of thing for business. It’s not even a racing thing, it’s just the boat I was on, the Ohwayla, which was a 14-meter sailboat that was usually chartered out by families so you could go around the island of Minorca and barbecue and just relax. It was a beautiful, beautiful boat, but it was for day sailing and relaxing and a little vacation, not for sailing across the Mediterranean. Usually there would only be five or six people on this boat. We have 14 on this boat—so 14-meter boat, 14 people, that’s 1 meter per person.
Was there any interference or attacks on the boat prior to interacting with the Israeli Navy?
Yes, of course. When we were in our fleet in Tunisia, all our boats were docked. Some were anchored, some were at the dock. Two nights in a row our boats were hit with what we believed to be smoke bombs covered in an accelerant dropped from a drone. That was two nights in a row. Then a few nights after that we had a full drone attack where my boat was the first one hit, but it was 14 strikes where they were using flash bangs, so it was nothing meant to kill, it was meant to scare and then harm our sails so we couldn’t sail anymore. So that was intense. That was four hours of drones flying overhead, and then sometimes dropping explosives, sometimes not. It was a psychological operation where they were trying to scare us to make us not continue. It just made us more steadfast and feel like we needed to go.
I can imagine that being a little nerve-wracking.
A lot of people were very, very scared. Thankfully, I was on the veterans boat. We’d been deployed before. Once we realized that they weren’t using frag grenades or anything, we just had most of our people stay below deck and we just filmed and we were pretty relaxed because we realized they weren’t trying to kill us. They were just trying to scare us and we could handle that.
What exactly was your vessel carrying anyway?
So my boat, the Ohwayla, had baby formula, rice, lentils, instant noodles, biscuits, and then we had saline, gauze pads, and sterile wiping pads. It was a bunch of dry goods and baby formula. We did a video unboxing everything and showing everything, because we knew that was gonna be part of the propaganda. And sure enough, they went on our boats and took all the aid off and then filmed it, like, “Oh there’s no aid on the boat.” But we had already filmed videos showing all the aid.
Were you prepared for a scenario in which there was interception by the Israeli Navy? You anticipated that?
That is one of the first things that they talked about in our little trainings. The boat prior that Greta [Thunberg] was on was intercepted, so it’s well known that that’s a tactic. The boat before Greta—they bombed Conscience. But Greta’s boat they intercepted, so that was very much a part of our training. I never was like, “Oh, we’re definitely getting intercepted.” I was like, “We are definitely making it,” and just operated in that sense. But we trained my boat every day and had drills: training for interception, training for drone attacks, training for man overboard. I do know that my boat was one of the only ones that did that, but it’s because of our military background where we just wanted everyone to feel confident, because if you drill something a bunch, when something really high stress happens your monkey brain takes over. That primal brain will take over, and you’ll just do the thing that you trained to do without having to think about it, and that makes people a lot calmer when situations arise.
So when you say that y’all were training for the possibility of interception, what does that actually look like?
The biggest thing is we were on a humanitarian, non-violent mission. I am not non-violent in my life, but it is a tactic. The biggest thing is to show that you don’t have any weapons. We had cameras on us all the time—our own cameras—to show that we had nothing in our hands so that they couldn’t shoot us and say they thought we had a weapon. We [practiced] where we would put our hands up then from that position we’d also train to take cover if we started to take fire. So we would dive from that position down so that we could avoid fire and that was something that we would practice over and over again.
So, the time comes that y’all are interacting with the Israeli Navy and they board the ship. What happens next?
Well, I just want to point out that they chased us for six and a half hours and that we kept doing circles around them and swooping them. They were trying to spray us with skunk water, we would swoop out of the way. The boat that was chasing us was a U.S.-built boat, a U.S. manufactured boat that they sold to the Israelis. It was a boat of veterans being chased by a U.S. boat that’s owned by the Israelis. Finally, after the third time of swooping them and flipping them off and playing guitar and laughing and calling them names, we made them pretty mad. So then they came up with two Zodiac boats on either side of us, those little rubber speed boats, and they boarded the boat and there’s five of them. Like I said, non-violent missions, so we just had our hands up and didn’t do anything. I didn’t talk to them. They kept telling us to turn the engine off. We didn’t do that. We refused to comply with them, and then they searched us, they patted us down. They destroyed all of our cameras, and then they commandeered the boat at gunpoint. They brought us down below and made us all sit in the main room and kept us there for, I don’t remember how long that journey was to Port Ashdod. I think it was maybe 10 hours that we were just all down below, but we didn’t interact with them. They’re not our friends. We weren’t there to make anything easier for them. They were having a hard time with the boat and we just let them have a hard time with the boat.
OK, now you all are detained. They take you to a prison.
This part is very important: I’ve been going to board meetings month after month telling Port of New Orleans that we should not partner with Israel’s Port Ashdod. It was a choice that they made, and six months ago I was crying, telling Port of New Orleans the story of holding children who were dying from shrapnel wounds and how bad warfare is for children, and that we shouldn’t partner with [the Israelis]. Six months later I’m zip-tied with my arms behind my back for over five hours, while Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir calls me a terrorist in Port Ashdod. That is where we were processed, that is where they held us for the first, I don’t know, eight hours. And then after, we were brutalized, stripped, humiliated, then we were put on prison buses and we were taken to Ktzi‘ot, which is a famous terrorist prison, filled with who they think are terrorists there. They separated the men and women. We were between 10 to 14 to a cell, which was a five-man cell, but to be honest, compared to American prison cells, it had a door on the bathroom—the Americans were shocked there was a separate bathroom. But they didn’t allow me to have a mattress. I had to sleep on the floor the first night. They threw away all my VA medications. They were refusing medical attention to anyone, even people who were having medical emergencies. Yeah, it was just pretty, pretty rough. But it’s nothing compared to what Palestinians go through at that same camp.
I’m sure at this point in prison, y’all attempt to reach out to the U.S. State Department, or maybe the proper word is embassy—
So we were hostages. We weren’t given prisoners’ rights and they told us we weren’t prisoners. So we weren’t allowed outside of our cells. We weren’t given any of the rights that prisoners are given, so consulates started to come visit their people. Obviously countries knew about this. This was worldwide news, and we had our people contacting our consulate. Our consulate took three days to come and see us. Other consulates had already chartered whole planes to fly to Israel and fly their people back—before our consulate even came to see us. When our consulate came to see us, they said they couldn’t do anything for us, even getting water for us. One of our girls had a migraine so bad she had an aura in her eye where she couldn’t see out of her eye, and they couldn’t even get her an aspirin. They were like, “No, can’t do it.” Other consulates, they’ve been giving their people chocolate, cigarettes, sandwiches, and our consulate completely was just like, “We can’t do anything, we can note down what’s happened. We’re working on it.” They were more concerned with, “Don’t believe what you see on the news that says we’re not helping you.” To which we were like, “What? What news? We don’t know what time it is or what day it is. We’re hostages.” So the U.S. consulate completely dropped the ball. They did not advocate for us. They did not help us. They did not make sure that the veterans got their medications that were, you know, given to them from the veterans hospital. It was the first time I actually felt scared.
How many days were y’all in prison for?
Five. So what we believe happened is October 7th came around and it would have looked really bad for them if hundreds of foreign nationals were held hostage on October 7th. It wouldn’t go into their PR image of grieving these hostages, while having their own hostages. The majority of us got out on the 7th, with I think like seven people remaining that got out within the next week.
Do you think there’s a possibility you would have been in prison longer if it wasn’t for that?
Possibly… Thousand Madleens and the Freedom Flotilla came after us and I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but the treatment of the people after us was much more heinous. They were violent towards us, but they were very careful not to leave marks, and it was more psychological. They took a Jewish American woman and put her in shackles and beat her, and threatened her with rape. Last week when we were leaving, she was just getting there. This is what they were doing to her. So I’m not sure if we would have stayed longer, but things did escalate for American citizens who were taken hostage by Israel.
Photo courtesy Zue Jernstedt: Members of the Global Sumud Flotilla (left to right: Zuleyka Morales Rivera, Jessica Clotfelter, Phillip Tottenham, and Zue Jernstedt) aboard the Ohwayla in October, holding a flag that, according to the Instagram caption, was “flown aboard Free Gaza that broke the siege in 2008 for a return trip.”
Veterans in our country are held, at least by a certain segment, in a high level of reverence. Do you think it’s important for veterans to take part in calling out the ongoing genocide and famine? Do you think that veterans can play a special role in doing so?
It’s very important for veterans to be the people who are calling this kind of stuff out. We are people that participated in empire. We know the mechanism of it. Most of us deployed during the “War on Terror” and know that it was wrong, so we can offer insight that other people don’t have. And, yeah, we have that special privilege in society, so it makes sense for us to be people that are standing up against it because we are subject matter experts on things like this because we already participated in it and we know that it’s incorrect.
What happened to the aid material on the boat?
We don’t know what happened to our boats yet, or the aid on them. I mean, we know it didn’t get to Gaza. They pirated our boats, they stole our boats, which we also made a video about because they said they were going to turn them into police boats. But like I said, our boats were not really seaworthy boats. They were really old, falling-apart sailboats. So we have no idea what they’re going to do with them because there’s not much you can do with them.
I’m not sure the exact number, but over 150 countries at this point are starting to recognize Palestine as a state. What is the significance of that for a layman?
The denial of Palestine as a state has allowed Israel to carry out its war crimes, and with people recognizing it, and it eventually getting approved by the U.N., it will have full protection. But because it hasn’t been recognized as a state by most countries, it didn’t have full protections and it allowed Israel to commit not only a genocide but an occupation for over 77 years.
I know that recently there was a ceasefire. Do you have any optimism that it’ll stick this time?
Israel has already violated the ceasefire and bombed people. Yeah, I don’t trust the ceasefire. It’s not a ceasefire. They’re stopping because they’ve destroyed Gaza. You can watch videos of people going “home.” There’s nothing to go home to. It’s just piles and piles of rubble. There was nothing left for them to destroy at that point. It’s a land grab. They’ve pulled out just to a certain point where they’re maintaining control of all the fertile lands. There’s already construction companies that are bidding to rebuild Gaza. This isn’t for the people of Palestine. They’ve destroyed everything and now it’s time for a rebuild with corporations coming in and stealing land from the Palestinians.
There are still people within the States who are hesitant to call what’s happening to the Palestinians a genocide. If you could speak to those people, what would you say?
I would say simply look at the statistics of civilians that have been killed and read the Geneva Convention and learn the Geneva Convention. That is how I knew what was going on was wrong because I know the Geneva Convention. If you’re worried, it fits the definition. So read the definition, look at the statistics, and you don’t have to be worried about calling something what it is.
What role has New Orleans played in the genocide?
So New Orleans is the fifth largest exporter and importer of Israeli goods to the United States. We are sister ports with Port Ashdod, which is where they took American citizen passengers. And we ship weapons through there which the port has systematically been denying, but we have the proof from the records. All the records are open for what is going in and out and we can see them, and for months I was tracking the boats leaving the port and we had boats going right to Israel. So yeah, we’re the fifth largest importer and exporter of goods. That is a big, big issue that I think more New Orleanians need to be aware of. Because I know people in New Orleans don’t want to be complicit in this genocide, sending weapons to kill children. Our own people need help. We don’t need to be sending all this aid to Israel, sending them weapons when we need education and food programs in New Orleans.
For people who want to get involved but don’t know how, do you have any advice for where they can start?
Locally there’s NOSHIP [New Orleans Stop Helping Israel’s Ports] which is going to the port board meetings. There are the Freedom Forums, there’s Palestinian Youth Movement in New Orleans, which does educational talks, which if you just go to one of those, then you can meet people and find out where you fit in. I know a lot of people think what I did was very intense but you don’t need to do that. There’s so many different roles for people to take. So yeah, go to a Palestinian event, meet people, and figure out where your skills can fall into place.
Top photo by Katie Sikora: Zue Jernstedt at ACAB Zinefest
