On March 26, the Swarthmore chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) hosted “Connections Across Borders: From Swarthmore to Palestine,” a group discussion with Palestinian mutual aid workers Iyad Hmidat and Heba Alsaidi. Hmidat and Alsaidi, a married couple who currently live and work in Gaza, spoke with Professor Bashir Abu-Manneh and students over Zoom. The conversation provided a comprehensive look at the couple’s experience in Gaza, allowing the audience to learn about various aspects of daily life in the region in an era of violence and political unrest.
After opening remarks from Abu-Manneh, Hmidat and Alsaidi introduced themselves to the audience, touching on both their careers and their personal trajectories.
Both noted that they “had the privilege” of coming into the United States as exchange students before launching their respective careers back in Gaza. Upon returning, Alsaidi first worked as a freelance translator. She subsequently joined Move One, a logistics company with a Gaza-based branch that worked on critical aid, where she now works as the operation manager for aid distribution logistics.
Hmidat co-founded Yaffa Solutions, a start-up company that equips young IT students and professionals in the region with practical experiences. It aims to “flip the pyramid” by directly supplying jobs to early-career workers, instead of facilitating hires with American and European clients who are “paying them low salaries.” The company was doing well, and was “going to get all the investments [at] the beginning of 2024,” before the Hamas attacks and subsequent Israeli siege on Gaza in October 2023 sent “everything … crashing down”.
“We can literally spend hours speaking about how life has changed in a night, in a morning,” Hmidat said. Since October 2023, Alsaidi added, all past trauma had to be placed “on the side.”
Hmidat shared a personal story illustrating the severity of their condition. In January 2024, he said, his grandfather had passed away from arrhythmia, because a shortage of anesthesia had prevented his local hospital from performing the pacer-implant surgery he’d needed to survive. “This, to me and to everyone, should be a preventable death,” Hmidat said. “[This] is not something that human rights should allow. But one thing that we learned as Gazans is that unless you have the power, [human rights] don’t really exist.”
The conversation proceeded with Abu-Manneh asking questions posed by JVP. The first question concerned changes, if any, that had occurred in the conditions in Gaza following the U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel that took effect in October 2025. As of March 31, 2026, the ceasefire is nominally transitioning into its second phase, despite continuing deaths.
Hmidat and Alsaidi shared that while “there’s not that fear of complete destruction” anymore, “You do wake up worried if you’re going to find water tomorrow [or] food for you to buy,” because the prices for basic goods have “at least tripled if not quadrupled.”
“[If] you have money, that’s great, you can survive,” said Hmidat. “If you don’t, it’s gonna be a long day for you.”
Aside from financial predicament, fear of death still lingers in the streets of Gaza. The first stage of the ceasefire agreement in October established a “yellow line” behind which all Israeli military personnel were expected to withdraw. Nevertheless, Alsaidi shared that “if you are close enough to the yellow line, you might actually get shot.” As a result, widespread fear of death never ended, but only “reduced” to a point “just enough for it not to be noticed by the media or anyone from the outside, [with] just us, residents, locals, knowing the threat.”
Hmidat told the audience that the border of Gaza had been pushed back by Israeli armed forces since the beginning of the siege, “shrinking slowly and slowly and slowly, into the sea.” Since the ceasefire, the yellow line shifted away from the coastline for about “two to three kilometers,” he said. “The yellow line is the new Gaza border under the ceasefire.”
The next question called attention to the Israeli government’s plan to ban 37 mutual aid NGOs in Gaza and the West Bank, as announced on December 30, 2025. The decision has not yet been placed into effect as of March 2026. Regarding the ban, Hmidat explained that “not a single one of [the banned NGOs] is American, not a single one of them is based in the United Arab Emirates, which is considered within the U.S.-Israel alliance.”
The next question inquired on whether there is anything that outsiders “consistently misinterpret” about Gaza.
“Gaza is such a beautiful [place] — not just Gaza City itself, but all of Gaza Strip,” Alsaidi said, joking that the city is a “cozier Cairo.” She rejected the notion that Gazans were always “living in misery.” To her, their “lives before October 7 were amazing.”
She also addressed the impact of Hamas’s governance in the region. “People have always thought that we’ve been living in misery since Hamas took control of Gaza Strip and the politics in 2006,” she said, “and it’s not completely right.” She affirmed that she and Hmidat “disagree with everything Hamas does work politically, … [but] the resistance part of it, we absolutely agree with, because we have the right to live as well.”
She also described her deep attachment to the city. “It’s not just the nationality that keeps bringing me back, it’s the people, the weather, just … the vibes of it.”
“The people here are just so passionate about everything they do. They never get bored. A walk on the beach of Gaza is never boring, even if you do it a thousand times a day.”
Hmidat then shared his belief that the dispute over the land in the region neither began in 1948 with the first Arab-Israeli war, nor three thousand years earlier, when “Jewish people in fact lived here,” rejecting the two commonly used time stamps attributed to the the origin of the conflict. He went on to clarify that he and Alsaidi “don’t deny Jewish heritage or Jewish connections to the land,” emphasizing that the conflict is not about different religious beliefs and “is not Jews against Muslims.”
According to Hmidat’s perspective, the dispute actually started when Zionism, a political movement for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Southern Levant, became prevalent in Britain during the 19th century. To Hmidat, Zionism represents “the idea that Jewish people are the only ones that have rights to this land.”
In keeping with his view of the region’s history, Hmidat refuted the notion that the recent eruption of violence began on October 7, 2023. “October 7 was not the start of something, it was just the accumulation of something.”
The last question Abu-Manneh asked on behalf of JVP before an open Q&A session concerned actions that students, particularly college students in the United States, could undertake to support the human rights of Palestinians.
“Be free, stand for your own rights.” Hmidat answered without hesitation. He and Alsaidi expressed their gratitude for student protests and efforts to raise awareness of the issue, as well as the growing pro-Palestinain sentiment among the American public. Hmidat recalled that when he came to the United States for his exchange program, he was “excited … for the First Amendment,” despite later being sent to his dean for saying “I live under occupation.”
“I think that is what makes America great, and if you care about America’s image outside, you should honor that, honor the First Amendment.”
A student then asked about signs of Israeli occupation that Hmidat and Alsaidi witness in their daily lives. Hmidat recalled a memory from his childhood, in which his father was forcibly undressed by Israeli officers at a checkpoint apparently “just for the sake of it.” A more recent example occurred in September 2023, when Hmidat was driving from Gaza to the West Bank but had to travel around a mountain due to traffic restriction, turning a fifteen-minute drive into a journey of three hours. “Road trips here are as stressful as hell, and they’re more stressful in the West Bank,” Hmidat told the audience.
Alsaidi recounted learning that her father had been taken by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to a detention center while the IDF‘s total road blockade prevented her from returning home. Her family did not “know anything about [her father’s] whereabouts.” When he finally returned after two months, “he had lost about 50 kilos.”
Lastly, another student asked what Hmidat and Alsaidi had experienced with regard to “the aid situation” in Gaza. Israeli bombardment since October 2023 has created a massive surge in the need for humanitarian assistance in the region. International organizations such as the World Food Programme (WFP) cooperated with organizations like Move One to contribute various necessities such as food and medicine, despite intermittent resistance from the Israeli government.
Hmidat responded to the reports from some American news and intelligence outlets that “when aid comes, Hamas steals it.” He rejected these claims, citing their experiences in working with NGOs like the WFP and World Central Kitchen and saying that their services “have never been looted by anyone.” The “looting” that he did witness, was only “hungry people risking their life and dying in the process of trying to get one sack of flour.”
Alsaidi reminded the audience that the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), an Israeli Ministry of Defense unit for the IDF, was an institution that also continuously contributes data and information to media publications.
She said she was surprised with their reported numbers. “[On their website] they reported around 109 trucks of humanitarian aid entering [Gaza] in one day, and there were not even 25.”
Alsaidi continued with a vivid description of the desperate attempts by Gazans to secure food in deadly circumstances: people climbing up fast-moving trucks, cutting cargo loose, grabbing sacks of flour, and jumping to the ground while the trucks were still in motion.
She recalled her very first task in her capacity as operation manager for aid distribution logistics with Move One: she was responsible for sending around 25 trucks of vital resources provided by the WFP, only to find half of the loaded cargo expired due to a six-month long border detention.
“When looters tried to loot the cargo,” she continued to expand the scene, “they saw that it was rotten, and they just started throwing it on the ground. So, it was like, when you’re walking down the road, there’s literally bags of flour everywhere. And sometimes, the IDF would take pictures of that through drones, and would say: ‘Yeah, look at Gaza people, they don’t need it.’”
