Alya Omair wishes she could be with her family.
But Omair, a recent Community College of Denver graduate who is Palestinian, can only watch the news and hear about her family from afar as her people in Gaza endure constant “devastating” airstrikes from Israel’s military.
The Israeli government declared war following Saturday’s unprecedented attack by the armed Palestinian group Hamas, whose militants stormed through a border fence and massacred hundreds of Israelis in their homes, on the streets and at a music festival. Israel has retaliated by hammering the small, densely populated Gaza Strip with air attacks.
The war has already claimed at least 2,300 lives on both sides.
“I want to do anything we can to stop it,” Omair said Wednesday during a “Palestinian Solidarity” rally that drew about 100 people to the Auraria Campus in Denver. “But there’s not much we can do. They’re going to wipe out a whole people.”
Omair, at the rally with fellow Palestinian-American and Community College of Denver student Ahmed Jabai, said they attended to give their people a voice. The conflict has become a polarizing issue for many people around the world, but Omair and Jabai said Palestinians have been viewed as the worst.
“We get real-life people over there telling us what’s happening (in Gaza), then we’ll go and turn on the news and it’s a completely different story,” Jabai said. “We’re the animals; we’re barbaric.”
But for Palestinian people like Abdullah Elagha, family members not involved in the fighting and as young as 1 have been killed in the attacks. Just Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed 10 members of his family.
“Their ages varied from 61 to 52, all the way down to a 15-year-old, a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old,” Elagha said. “In one airstrike, an entire family’s bloodline was erased.”
Rallying in front of the campus’s Golda Meir house, named after Israel’s fourth prime minister, the group also chanted calls for Palestinians to be free from occupation and able to self-govern.
Since 1948, Israeli occupation and, later, blockade of Gaza has had crushing control over Palestinians, Linda Badwan of the Colorado Palestine Coalition said at the rally.
“No one is happy about any type of killing on any side,” Badwan said before explaining her mission for joining the rally. “We’re not cheering any of that. What we’re doing is to clarify that the systemic oppression and systemic way of keeping Palestinians from having their own statehood, from having their right to self-determination, from being able to live their free and safe life like their Israeli counterparts, that is what we’re chanting for.”
A lot of the support Palestinians have received has been cast as anti-Semitic or, after Hamas’ attack, in support of terrorism, but Badwan said people can be pro-Palestinian and against atrocities committed against innocent people.
“You can be pro-Palestine and pro-humanity, and wanting things for a free people, and also want peace for both sides and have that civility for the other side,” she said. “Both things can be true. In supporting Palestine, it doesn’t mean you are promoting anything other than what we are trying to get for our people, which is a peaceful, humane way to live, where our children can have a future to look forward to.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
