Try as they might, Trump aides cannot seem to quell criticism of their recent photo op at Arlington National Cemetery, which allegedly included a physical altercation.

The latest high-profile condemnation comes from Jimmy McCain, the son of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was also a Purple Heart recipient who served in the Navy and spent several years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. The younger McCain, who is currently serving in the Army, told CNN that he thought the incident was a “violation” of the cemetery, a resting place for fallen soldiers—including his own grandfather and great-grandfather. (Sen. McCain is buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery.)

“It just blows me away,” McCain told CNN of the Trump team’s fight at Arlington, adding, “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” about whether to participate in a campaign event.

As I reported last week, two Trump campaign staffers clashed with a cemetery official where Trump had been attending a wreath-laying ceremony to honor soldiers who died in the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. A statement from the Army later confirmed that the staffer had been “abruptly pushed aside” after they tried to enforce cemetery rules that prohibit filming and photographing in a section where recent US casualties are buried, which is forbidden by federal law. (NPR was the first to report news of the incident.) Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, denied the report of a physical altercation, while Trump himself has called the incident a “made-up story.“

The Trump team ultimately got their content, which included a TikTok video suggesting President Biden was responsible for the deaths of the soldiers who died during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, plus various photos posted to X by Trump campaign staffers. McCain, who CNN reports enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was 17 and currently serves as an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment, said that in doing so, Trump had disrespected the sacrifices of the people buried there. “I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently—that it’s not about you there,” he told CNN. “It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”

“Many of these men and women, who served their country, chose to do something greater than themselves,” he added. “They woke up one morning, they signed on the dotted line, they put their right hand up, and they chose to serve their country. And that’s an experience that Donald Trump has not had. And I think that might be something that he thinks about a lot.”

McCain’s remarks are likely a reference to Trump’s infamous record of avoiding military service. Not only did Trump not serve in the military—he famously claimed he had bone spurs, allowing him to avoid serving in Vietnam—he has also openly denigrated those who have: He infamously attacked the elder McCain, saying, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Since the confrontation last Monday, Trump’s team has refused to acknowledge any sort of mistake at the cemetery last week, even opting instead to attack and denigrate Trump’s critics. As I reported, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), defended Trump’s actions and told Harris to “go to hell” for criticizing the visit…though she never did. Over the weekend, the Trump campaign put out a video of some of the families of the fallen soldiers present at the cemetery last week blasting Harris over the Afghanistan withdrawal and for failing to be present at the cemetery, accusing her of “playing politics.”

But some feel differently: As I wrote last week, the family of Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano—a Green Beret who reportedly died by suicide in 2020 after serving eight combat tours—told the New York Times they were upset his gravestone had been included in a picture in which Trump posed grinning with a thumbs up at the gravesite of Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, located next to Marckesano’s.

McCain also told CNN that he changed his voter registration from Independent to Democrat a few weeks back and would be voting for Vice President Kamala Harris this November, adding that he “would get involved in any way I could” to help her win. His mother, Cindy McCain, a registered Republican, endorsed Biden in 2020 but does not appear to have made an endorsement ahead of this year’s election. But don’t expect McCain’s sister, the conservative firebrand and former co-host of The View, Meghan McCain, to join her brother. In a post on X last week responding to someone who called on her to publicly endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, McCain said that was a “fever dream,” adding, “I’m a lifelong, generational conservative.”

But Harris—or the threat of Trump—is converting plenty of other Republicans: As I reported last week, more than 200 former GOP officials—including former McCain staffers—endorsed Harris in an open letter, writing, “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”

Jimmy McCain appears to agree: “For me to be with [my father] towards the end of his life, hearing things [from Trump] like, ‘he was a loser because he was captured’—I don’t think I could ever overlook that,” he told CNN.

Spokespeople for the Trump and Harris campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On June 6, the Rahma Worldwide international medical delegation arrived at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. The humanitarian volunteers noticed something immediately: Some of the medical staff welcoming them—with the best food available, an assortment of cucumbers, hummus, and french fries—appeared remarkably young to be doctors.

Before the delegation could ask any questions, an airstrike hit the neighborhood. The walls of Gaza European Hospital—then one of the only functioning medical centers in the region—shook.

“Within the first 15 minutes that we were here,” Dr. Mohammed Mustafa, an emergency specialist from Australia, recalled, “nine people came in an ambulance, already dead.”

This, the doctors learned, was typical of the day-to-day life in Gaza. It was only later the international doctors would come to find out that many of the staff were not fully credentialed doctors, but student volunteers. Dr. Bing Li, another member of the Rahma delegation—a team of a dozen doctors from different countries, there to provide support to Gaza’s depleted health system—estimated that half of the people working in European Hospital’s emergency department in June were students or trainees from Gaza’s two medical schools.

“The health care system’s on the verge of collapsing,” Salman Dasti, an anesthesiologist who worked in Gazan hospitals both before and during this war, said. “It’s being propped up because of students.”

“In this war, I lost many of my colleagues and friends from school. I lost four members of my family.”

Mustafa found the students’ ability to keep the hospital functioning remarkable. “We were getting patients moving and getting them treated. It was pretty amazing to see,” he recalled, “especially since you can see how broken they are physically, emotionally.”

On the first day, Li recalled meeting one of the volunteers keeping Gaza’s hospitals running. A patient was brought in and losing blood quickly from a blast injury to his leg. Li worked with a volunteer to stabilize the man; the volunteer then pulled Li aside and introduced herself excitedly in English: Her name was Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, and she was 20 years old.

“I had this impression she was this very friendly person, and she asked me if I wanted help with translation and seeing other patients,” Li said. The foreign doctor appreciated the aid. Earlier that day, Li, an emergency specialist from Arizona, had already had a heartbreaking experience. “We evaluated one patient that was maybe three or four years old,” she recalled. “Half his head was basically blown off.” (It ended up being “just one of many similar cases,” Li said; other doctors who have returned from Gaza say the Israeli military regularly targets children.)

As Nermeen showed Li around, another doctor noticed who the American was talking to and pulled her aside. Li was told Nermeen had a friend die earlier that same day in the blast that sent a raft of critically injured patients to the hospital.

“She was keeping this brave face despite learning that she lost somebody,” Li remembers.

Nermeen always wanted to be a doctor. As a young child, she said, she “had doctor’s tools in the form of toys.” As she grew older, she watched medical school graduation videos online, transfixed by the celebrations. She imagined herself as a cardiovascular specialist, or perhaps a pediatrician; she was overjoyed when, in 2021, she was finally able to enroll at her dream school: Al-Azhar University-Gaza. (For this article, I interviewed Nermeen using WhatsApp text messages and voice memos. Her internet and data access in Gaza is not good enough for phone calls of length.)

By October 7, 2023, Nermeen had made it through two and a half years of medical school. (In Gaza, students’ medical training starts immediately after high school, when they begin a six-year program of study.) Her tuition was expensive, and the hourlong bus ride to school from her home in Abasan Al-Kabira, a small city east of Khan Younis, made her carsick. But she was happy to be learning.

Then, the war came. In early November, Israeli warplanes destroyed Nermeen’s campus. By mid-January, Israeli bombardment had reduced every university in Gaza to rubble. Nermeen moved constantly. She evacuated from place to place four times in the first six months of the war. Eighty-four percent of Gaza is now under evacuation order. She watched classmates, professors, and friends die nearly every week. “In this war, I lost many of my colleagues and friends from school,” she told me. “I lost four members of my family.”

In April, Nermeen started volunteering at the hospital. It was the “one positive amid all of this,” she said. A third-year student would not ordinarily be actively treating patients. But her clinical phase began early. “I was learning from the doctors and helping them,” she said.

Many of those working and volunteering at the hospital had shifts lasting 24 hours—and no one I spoke with had received payment from the hospital since October. Anything shorter than a 24-hour shift would mean more trips on treacherous roads, made nearly impassable by millions of pounds of debris and sewage overflows from broken sanitation systems.

On a normal day, Nermeen began her shift early in the morning, connecting to the internet and trying to download lectures and readings from the website of her bombed university, before beginning to see the injured, “standing with doctors, talking to patients.”

As a volunteer, she cleaned wounds, translated for foreign doctors, and made treatment plans. “There were days when…the work was a lot, due to the arrival of large numbers of martyrs, and injured,” she said. “But the thing I loved to do most was stitches in the emergency department.” 

This was made difficult by short supplies. The sutures in Gaza hospitals were labeled “not for use on humans,” Mohammed Mustafa, the ER doctor from Australia, recalled. Still, he helped Nermeen with her suture technique; he noticed that she was particularly careful in caring for patients during the process. Nermeen did her best to stitch in a way that would minimize scarring.  

Conditions were hard. There were no beds, only rigid metal frames. Rooms were cramped and hot. Even the chairs in the hospital were occupied by patients, leaving little room for their caregivers to rest. The complex smelled of rot, and flies landed in patients’ wounds just as Nermeen finished disinfecting them. Even the suture needle was less sharp than it should be. 

“It would take you maybe three, four attempts to pierce the skin with the suture,” Mustafa said. “And you can imagine trying to do that with very limited anesthetic, [on] children as well.” 

Beyond the shortage of goods, there was also a shortage of personnel. Students did their best to fill in. One 22-year-old student who spoke to Mother Jones, Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, was in his third year of dental school before the war. He was initially told he’d be working as a porter, then a translator. He spent four months volunteering at European Hospital, unable to see his family in Deir al-Balah after the Israeli army took over the area between the hospital and his family’s tent.

“I slept in the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross at the hospital for four months,” he said. ‘There was a broken bed that does not move from its place,” which was not used except for emergencies. When it was unoccupied by patients—and when he wasn’t being called to translate for a surgeon in the middle of the night—he got that bed.

As he spent more time in the hospital, he learned “there was a severe shortage of dentists specializing in maxillofacial surgery,” so he quickly found himself assisting with those surgeries, too. “It is difficult to talk to patients with burns or fractures,” he said, “some of whom lost a loved one with the same injury minutes before.”

Sometimes, the patients the students cared for were people they recognized. On the mid-June day when Nermeen met Bing Li, she wasn’t supposed to be at work. She was at her family’s tent, taking a rest day, when she felt a bomb detonate nearby. “We saw the smoke of the bombing, and a large number of ambulances,” she recalled. Without internet access, Nermeen worried her own relatives might be among the dead.

Nermeen decided to go to the hospital on her day off. “I put on the uniform and walked to the road.” A man with a car offered her a ride when he saw her medical uniform. His family lived in the area that had just been bombed, Nermeen remembered, and he was headed to the hospital, too. Once there, she opened her phone to scroll through the names of the dead. “My friend’s name was among the names of the martyrs of this massacre.” She rushed to the emergency room in hopes that the news was wrong. “But it was true.”

Most of her friend’s family had been killed. She found her friend’s younger sister, Samar, waiting alone, with wounds all over her body. Nermeen monitored her vital signs, stitched up a deep gash in her left foot, and patched up two wounds on her leg.

Samar was later transferred to a different department, where her head wounds were treated. “She remained in care for several days,” Nermeen remembered. Then, Samar was discharged, but “she was still in a state of shock, and would not speak.” At the end of July, Nermeen received word that Samar had been killed, too: “She joined the rest of her family.”

Gaza’s medical system has been painfully constricted for decades. This is partially due to the longstanding Israeli policy of blocking “dual-use items” at the border—medical devices that could, allegedly, be used as weapons. Those items have included crutches, hearing aid batteries, thermometers, and incubators. This means the doctors of Gaza must make do.

Dasti, the anaesthesiologist from San Francisco, visited Gaza multiple times as part of a medical mission group with the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund before 2023. “I was fairly impressed with the robustness of the health care system,” he said. “I mean, it still lacked resources, but I was pretty impressed with the training that the physicians there had.”

There were 36 fully functioning hospitals in Gaza prior to the war. By mid-August, according to the World Health Organization, only 16 of those 36 hospitals were even partially operational. These 16 hospitals have treated patients far beyond their capacity. Staff is low: The UN Human Rights Office reported that more than 500 medical workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. And an NBC News investigation recently suggested Israel has targeted doctors for kidnapping and taken them to torture camps. Hanan Balkhy, Eastern Mediterranean regional director for the World Health Organization, said that as of early August, WHO has been able to verify more than 500 attacks on medical personnel in Gaza.

This leaves a staggering hole for those in need of care. The WHO estimates that nearly 93,000 people in Gaza are injured. Among those 16 remaining hospitals, there are fewer than 1,500 hospital beds—about one for every 60 injured people. And those numbers don’t account for those who would ordinarily require hospital beds even in peacetime: diabetic patients requiring dialysis, cancer patients, and pregnant women needing somewhere to give birth.

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“The remaining students are now basically frontline doctors, because of just the lack of personnel,” Dasti said. Students spent their days at European Hospital “functioning as essentially an attending physician, while not getting paid and working long arduous hours with little sleep.” 

Balkhy, of WHO, said the students are exhibiting “more resilience than anyone should need to have.” Nermeen and her classmates dream of continuing their education—perhaps leaving and studying elsewhere if the borders reopen—but, as Balkhy said, it is “a race against time and circumstance.”

Conditions in Gaza, meanwhile, are only worsening. WHO confirmed the first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years on August 22: “Health workers have been digging graves for patients they know they are not able to save because they don’t have the resources needed.”

Forty-five international doctors who spent time in Gaza published a letter on July 25 addressed to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Bing Li and Salman Dasti were among the signatories. They detailed the injuries they’d seen—preteens deliberately shot in the head, healthy babies dying of preventable diseases—and noted their “acute awareness” that Gaza’s medical professionals have been targeted. The doctors begged the president for an arms embargo, and for “unfettered aid delivery” of antibiotics, painkillers, and sutures.

On August 1, 300 days into the destruction of Gaza, Nermeen turned 21 in a white tent, as temperatures soared above 90 degrees. As she sent me WhatsApp voice notes, warplanes buzzed overhead and her siblings chattered in the background.

She had been away from the hospital for a month. It was evacuated on July 1. Patients left, or were carried out by hand, over a chaotic 24 hours. “There’s really no roads because they’ve all been destroyed,” Dasti remembered. Taking a patient a couple of miles to the nearest hospital took at least an hour. Even in the United States, under the best of conditions, it is hard to move a patient from the ICU down the hall to the operating room safely. “I think some of them died on the way,” Dasti said.

Hasan, the dental student, evacuated too. He has spent the past two months sharing an 8-by-20-foot tent with four families in Deir al-Balah refugee camp, not far from the site of the Al-Tabin School bombing, in which the Israel Defense Forces used US-made bombs to hit a school building and kill nearly 100 people. He spends time making videos about his work in the hospital, which the international doctors he met have been sharing at conferences back home.

Hasan has been trying to return to European Hospital to see if he could help if it reopens—and perhaps find a path to continuing his studies. (World Health Organization officials told Mother Jones that they are partnering with the Gaza Ministry of Health to restore emergency services at the hospital, though the timeline has been postponed amid heavy bombing.) On WhatsApp, Hasan showed me a map outlining the route he planned to take, with red danger zones highlighted. When he tried to make the journey, “the people on the road told me to go back [because] the army is on the road.” He turned around and returned to Deir al-Balah.

When we messaged last week, Hasan said he had heard a system of buses organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross might be able to bring him back to Khan Younis. But a day after we spoke, Israeli forces once again ordered the evacuation of large portions of Khan Younis—and bombed portions of Deir al-Balah, where Hasan now lives. But he hasn’t given up. “I will try again,” he said.

Nermeen faces similar obstacles. “I am impatiently waiting for the hospital to reopen, because I miss helping and learning new things,” she said. While she heard that administrative work on reopening the hospital began in mid-August, she doesn’t know when it will reopen fully. And returning to the hospital might be dangerous: “Sudden bombing could occur on the road.” So, instead, she has returned to her studies, when the intermittent-at-best internet allows, and when the “terrifying” noises of artillery shells pause long enough to let her focus. One day, Nermeen announced proudly that she’d managed to turn in her endocrinology exam online, to a virtual classroom run by professors from a university that, physically, no longer exists.

“All of this losing makes my heart broken,” Nermeen said. “I hope I can be strong, because my dreams wait [for] me, and many people…I want to help them.” 

Early on the morning of July 31, a group of about 70 people arrived at the anodyne office of the cargo company Atlas Air, in White Plains, New York. 

They were members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)—an activist group that focuses on equity issues in New York City—there to stage a fake “press conference” to highlight the Department of Defense’s contracts with Atlas Air.

A man in a gray pinstripe suit played the CEO of the company, which is the single largest operator of 747 freighter jets in the world. “Atlas Air is so proud to do its part to support the US military,” the actor enthused. “I am especially proud that, through our DoD contracts, Atlas Air has made multiple deliveries to Israel in the last 10 months.” He added with gusto: “As the bombs keep raining on Gaza, the dividends keep raining on our shareholders!” 

Those behind him, dressed as pilots complete with sewn-on epaulets, cheered as he held up a graph with a line going up—“more bombs equals higher profits!”

In the following hours, JFREJ launched a spoof website for Atlas, and sent out press releases claiming Atlas “is proud to have been responsible for transporting millions of dollars worth of material to the Israeli military as it bombs Gaza” to trade outlets like AirlineGeeks, Cargo Connect, Transport and Logistics Middle East, and American Military News. 

The action is part of a broader push. Protest groups are turning toward a new strategy: beyond focusing on the government, they are targeting the companies that profit off Israel’s war in Gaza. 

“We’ve called out, we’ve called in, I mean, we’ve done all that work to reach the decision-makers,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of JFREJ. “We’ve talked about our Jewish community’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, and we’ve taken action to protest the US government’s culpability, but we haven’t heard enough about the war profiteers—the private companies profiting off of these atrocities.” 

As first reported by Haaretz, records show that more than 30 chartered cargo flights were operated by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to Nevatim Airbase in Beersheba between October 31, 2023, and March 31, 2024. At least three of those were cargo flights on planes owned by Atlas and leased by the USTRANSCOM, according to a Mother Jones analysis of publicly available flight data. The 747-400 heavy cargo planes flew to the Israeli air base from Cyprus and Germany. An Atlas Air representative said, “I have no information,” when asked if the company supplies weapons to fuel Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

Without private cargo airlines and private companies, the United States Department of Defense would not be able to send Israel weapons at the rate it currently does. The DoD has sent more than 100 shipments to its ally over the past 10 months, containing weapons such as 2,000 pound bombs, Hellfire missiles, and 500-pound bombs. 

Bradley Martin, a researcher at RAND and a former Navy captain, said the airplanes likely carried supplies or weapon parts for the Israel Defense Forces. But it is unlikely that Atlas Air would transport the bombs that get the most publicity. “Preferably, sensitive munitions are not going not going to be moved by commercial air,” he said. “They put them on a military flight because it takes special handling.” 

Still, private companies, Martin said, play a key role. “The amount of material that’s required to sustain the force fighting this war is huge,” he said. “The military needs a [shipping] provider more than a provider needs the military.” 

A report by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, titled “How to Ensure Israel has the Weapons it Needs,” points out why the US government needs these contracts: “According to one senior Pentagon official, the quantity of weapons sent [to Israel] was so significant that the Department of Defense sometimes [has] struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver the systems.” 

Though relatively unknown, Atlas Air is the third-largest cargo airline in the United States by fleet size. The company received an “indefinite delivery contract” from the military in April 2023 for $20 million. It also received nearly $19 million from New York state in subsidies and property tax abatements, plus more than $600 million in federal loans and guarantees.

JFREJ is not the only activist group setting their sights on Defense Department contractors. Last month, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched a campaign  targeting the Danish shipping multinational Maersk, which sends weapons components as a subcontractor to manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and also contracts directly with USTRANSCOM. A PYM representative said she’s seen enthusiasm for the campaign: “I think people really are hungry to have a set target and something that they can fuel their energy into.”  

Maersk, she said, has a robust shipping portfolio outside of military shipments—after all, it’s the second-largest container shipping company in the world. “Economically, they can still sustain themselves if they don’t maintain these contracts,” the PYM organizer added.

Martin said that companies like Maersk and Atlas could “absolutely” remain economically viable without military contracts: They could “survive, and thrive,” he said. That, however, is not true the other way around. The governments need private aid to help with massive war efforts.

Janet Abou-Elias, co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, said that the military has strong economic reasons to rely on companies like Atlas. “Outsourcing certain functions to private contractors can be more economical than maintaining large in-house capabilities.” Martin, of RAND, said that this trend goes back to the end of the Cold War. “It really started happening about 1990,” he explained. “DOD cut back on commitments, cut back on infrastructure—and for transportation [it] has started to look more and more to commercial types of sources.” 

Maersk and Atlas aren’t the only companies catching heat: Protesters in the US and Australia have demonstrated outside ports by the Israeli shipping company ZIM, which has been sued by a group of Belgian NGOs for violating Belgian arms transport law. Last month, protesters brought the St. Louis Missouri pride parade to a standstill because it was sponsored by the airliner Boeing, which was the top manufacturer of missiles delivered to Israel in 2023, according to an analysis of arms transfer data conducted by NPR station KUOW. This past spring, students at protest encampments across the country demanded that their universities sever ties with Boeing. At least one university, Portland State, agreed to temporarily stop accepting Boeing money. 

Atlas has contracted with the DoD, among other government entities, for decades. In the earliest years of the 21st century, Atlas Air’s name was listed among the airlines leasing planes for transit to and from CIA black sites; their aircrafts have flown to and from Guantanamo Bay as recently as 2022.  

It is also owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. (Per National Defense Magazine, private equity–owned companies accounted for 47 percent of defense transactions in 2022.) Apollo’s CEO, Marc Rowan, was so vehemently against antiwar campus protesters that he pushed for the removal of the University of Pennsylvania’s president for allowing a festival of Palestinian literature on her campus, which he described as “hate-filled.” He has railed against antiwar protesters, declaring them “anti-American” and “violent.” 

“I think those executives going into their office jobs daily can pretend to sort of turn a blind eye to what’s happening in Gaza,” said Sasson of JFREJ. “We will not stand for them making money, millions of dollars off of this genocide.” 

Early on the morning of July 31, a group of about 70 people arrived at the anodyne office of the cargo company Atlas Air, in White Plains, New York. 

They were members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)—an activist group that focuses on equity issues in New York City—there to stage a fake “press conference” to highlight the Department of Defense’s contracts with Atlas Air.

A man in a gray pinstripe suit played the CEO of the company, which is the single largest operator of 747 freighter jets in the world. “Atlas Air is so proud to do its part to support the US military,” the actor enthused. “I am especially proud that, through our DoD contracts, Atlas Air has made multiple deliveries to Israel in the last 10 months.” He added with gusto: “As the bombs keep raining on Gaza, the dividends keep raining on our shareholders!” 

Those behind him, dressed as pilots complete with sewn-on epaulets, cheered as he held up a graph with a line going up—“more bombs equals higher profits!”

In the following hours, JFREJ launched a spoof website for Atlas, and sent out press releases claiming Atlas “is proud to have been responsible for transporting millions of dollars worth of material to the Israeli military as it bombs Gaza” to trade outlets like AirlineGeeks, Cargo Connect, Transport and Logistics Middle East, and American Military News. 

The action is part of a broader push. Protest groups are turning toward a new strategy: beyond focusing on the government, they are targeting the companies that profit off Israel’s war in Gaza. 

“We’ve called out, we’ve called in, I mean, we’ve done all that work to reach the decision-makers,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of JFREJ. “We’ve talked about our Jewish community’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, and we’ve taken action to protest the US government’s culpability, but we haven’t heard enough about the war profiteers—the private companies profiting off of these atrocities.” 

As first reported by Haaretz, records show that more than 30 chartered cargo flights were operated by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to Nevatim Airbase in Beersheba between October 31, 2023, and March 31, 2024. At least three of those were cargo flights on planes owned by Atlas and leased by the USTRANSCOM, according to a Mother Jones analysis of publicly available flight data. The 747-400 heavy cargo planes flew to the Israeli air base from Cyprus and Germany. An Atlas Air representative said, “I have no information,” when asked if the company supplies weapons to fuel Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

Without private cargo airlines and private companies, the United States Department of Defense would not be able to send Israel weapons at the rate it currently does. The DoD has sent more than 100 shipments to its ally over the past 10 months, containing weapons such as 2,000 pound bombs, Hellfire missiles, and 500-pound bombs. 

Bradley Martin, a researcher at RAND and a former Navy captain, said the airplanes likely carried supplies or weapon parts for the Israel Defense Forces. But it is unlikely that Atlas Air would transport the bombs that get the most publicity. “Preferably, sensitive munitions are not going not going to be moved by commercial air,” he said. “They put them on a military flight because it takes special handling.” 

Still, private companies, Martin said, play a key role. “The amount of material that’s required to sustain the force fighting this war is huge,” he said. “The military needs a [shipping] provider more than a provider needs the military.” 

A report by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, titled “How to Ensure Israel has the Weapons it Needs,” points out why the US government needs these contracts: “According to one senior Pentagon official, the quantity of weapons sent [to Israel] was so significant that the Department of Defense sometimes [has] struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver the systems.” 

Though relatively unknown, Atlas Air is the third-largest cargo airline in the United States by fleet size. The company received an “indefinite delivery contract” from the military in April 2023 for $20 million. It also received nearly $19 million from New York state in subsidies and property tax abatements, plus more than $600 million in federal loans and guarantees.

JFREJ is not the only activist group setting their sights on Defense Department contractors. Last month, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched a campaign  targeting the Danish shipping multinational Maersk, which sends weapons components as a subcontractor to manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and also contracts directly with USTRANSCOM. A PYM representative said she’s seen enthusiasm for the campaign: “I think people really are hungry to have a set target and something that they can fuel their energy into.”  

Maersk, she said, has a robust shipping portfolio outside of military shipments—after all, it’s the second-largest container shipping company in the world. “Economically, they can still sustain themselves if they don’t maintain these contracts,” the PYM organizer added.

Martin said that companies like Maersk and Atlas could “absolutely” remain economically viable without military contracts: They could “survive, and thrive,” he said. That, however, is not true the other way around. The governments need private aid to help with massive war efforts.

Janet Abou-Elias, co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, said that the military has strong economic reasons to rely on companies like Atlas. “Outsourcing certain functions to private contractors can be more economical than maintaining large in-house capabilities.” Martin, of RAND, said that this trend goes back to the end of the Cold War. “It really started happening about 1990,” he explained. “DOD cut back on commitments, cut back on infrastructure—and for transportation [it] has started to look more and more to commercial types of sources.” 

Maersk and Atlas aren’t the only companies catching heat: Protesters in the US and Australia have demonstrated outside ports by the Israeli shipping company ZIM, which has been sued by a group of Belgian NGOs for violating Belgian arms transport law. Last month, protesters brought the St. Louis Missouri pride parade to a standstill because it was sponsored by the airliner Boeing, which was the top manufacturer of missiles delivered to Israel in 2023, according to an analysis of arms transfer data conducted by NPR station KUOW. This past spring, students at protest encampments across the country demanded that their universities sever ties with Boeing. At least one university, Portland State, agreed to temporarily stop accepting Boeing money. 

Atlas has contracted with the DoD, among other government entities, for decades. In the earliest years of the 21st century, Atlas Air’s name was listed among the airlines leasing planes for transit to and from CIA black sites; their aircrafts have flown to and from Guantanamo Bay as recently as 2022.  

It is also owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. (Per National Defense Magazine, private equity–owned companies accounted for 47 percent of defense transactions in 2022.) Apollo’s CEO, Marc Rowan, was so vehemently against antiwar campus protesters that he pushed for the removal of the University of Pennsylvania’s president for allowing a festival of Palestinian literature on her campus, which he described as “hate-filled.” He has railed against antiwar protesters, declaring them “anti-American” and “violent.” 

“I think those executives going into their office jobs daily can pretend to sort of turn a blind eye to what’s happening in Gaza,” said Sasson of JFREJ. “We will not stand for them making money, millions of dollars off of this genocide.” 

As the Democratic National Convention kicked off its virtual roll-call vote this morning, the Uncommitted movement—an organization that successfully pushed thousands of primary voters to choose no one instead of casting a ballot for President Joe Biden because of US backing of Israel during its war on Gaza—called on the party to let a member of their delegation speak. 

The movement would like a five-minute speaking slot for a humanitarian aid worker who has recently returned from Gaza. Abbas Alawieh, an Uncommitted organizer, said at this morning’s press conference that the delegates from his group communicated this request to the DNC via email “maybe a month ago.” They have not yet received a response. 

Nationwide, as previously reported in Mother Jones, the Uncommitted movement earned over 700,000 votes—and 30 delegates to the convention. As we wrote:

The movement’s impact was notable, especially in swing states: 13 percent of voters in Michigan, just under 19 percent in Minnesota, and just below 15 percent in North Carolina voted “uncommitted.” In Illinois, a state without an “uncommitted” option on the ballot, voters wrote in “Gaza.”

The 30 Uncommitted delegates selected Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who spent time in Gaza’s hospitals, as their preferred speaker. 

“I am not a politician,” Haj-Hassan said. “I’m not even an activist—my life prior to this year has been spent primarily doing clinical work.” But the “complete destruction of human life” she saw in Gaza—and the awareness that the destruction is made possible thanks to US funds and US weapons—has made Haj-Hassan determined to speak. 

“People are being killed in a thousand and one ways—every hour, in the emergency department…we would receive mass casualties. We received children, maimed, killed, beheaded, shot…many of these child deaths were deliberate killings,” she said. When Haj-Hassan was able to save a child, she was haunted by the fact that they’d be in danger again the moment they left her care: “I know under the current military strategy that that child has a very small probability of surviving, once he’s discharged from the hospital.”

Speakers who are not politicians are often given airtime at party national conventions. At the 2016 DNC, a fifth-grade teacher, a tech entrepreneur, a 9/11 survivor, and actress Meryl Streep were all among the speakers. 

Still, the Uncommitted movement has not received much engagement from Harris or her campaign yet. The vice president is scheduled to be in Michigan, the birthplace of Uncommitted, this coming Wednesday. 

“If next Wednesday works for her, we’ll clear our schedules,” Alawieh said. “We need to be able to speak with the Vice President directly, make sure that she hears us and takes the opportunity to turn a new page.” And if Haj-Hassan isn’t given a speaker slot, organizer Layla Elabed said, they’ll find a way for her story to be heard regardless.

“We’ll find a way for her to speak, one way or another, in the tradition of Fannie Lou Hamer, who made moral witness to human suffering at the 1964 DNC,” Elabed said. 

In early March, President Joe Biden announced that the United States would build a floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea to bring humanitarian aid to Gazans. At the time, the administration heralded it as enabling “a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.”  But last Thursday, Pentagon officials announced that the pier—which was estimated to cost $320 million—would be shut down; despite grand plans, since its installation in May, it has only been operational for about 20 days, according to the Guardian.

The pier represents the counter-productive, unintuitive, and costly way experts say the Biden administration has attempted to get aid to Gaza—a blockaded enclave whose population is “100 percent food insecure” and where many people are experiencing a famine. 

The United States has not been able to convince Israel, an ally heavily funded by the US, to cede control of the land crossings into Gaza that most food aid moves through. The pier was designed to circumvent that. But groups like Amnesty International and the World Health Organization said the project fell short compared to land crossings in delivering sorely-needed food and medical aid. 

In the weeks that the pier existed, it delivered about 8,500 tons of aid into Gaza—the equivalent of somewhere between 300 and 425 trucks full of food. That is less food aid than the territory used to receive in a single day before the war. 

The pier was more of “a way for the Biden Administration to try to look busy,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), than an actual solution.

“I don’t ever want to diminish efforts to get more humanitarian aid to people who desperately need it,” Duss continued. “But there were other things the administration should have been doing to facilitate the delivery of aid that they…continue to refuse to do. [The pier] is essentially a physical symbol of this administration’s ineffectiveness around this war.”

In early May, the Israeli army closed Rafah Crossing, Gaza’s main connection to the outside world, shutting out aid trucks and locking in would-be evacuees. As the IDF bulldozed and occupied the crossing into Egypt, food deliveries into Gaza dropped by two-thirds.

That means right now “more than 34 WHO trucks are waiting in Al Arish and another 40 trucks in Ismailiya in Egypt to cross via Rafah as soon as the border opens,” Dr. Hanan Balkhy, World Health Organization Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, told Mother Jones. 

In building the pier, US leaders tried to accomplish two opposing goals at the same time: bypass their own ally’s policies that have caused starvation while avoiding any direct confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. 

Dave Harden, the former USAID mission director to the West Bank and Gaza and a former senior Obama adviser, told Mother Jones “the pier was never going to meaningfully solve the humanitarian crisis. The only way to solve the humanitarian crisis is more crossings.” 

“[The pier] went through an interagency process, everybody agreed upon it,” Harden said. “It cost $300 million, and it was an absolute failure. So who bears that responsibility?”

The pier was initially connected on May 17th. After a several-week weather-related delay, it was then shut down multiple times due to weather. (The US military had constructed a JLOTS pier, which can only function in pristine conditions.) Each shutdown forced aid delivery to stop for multiple days. And the problems didn’t end there: at one point at the end of May, satellite imagery showed that large portions of the pier had broken off entirely.

The pier’s months of shutdowns and breakdowns made food aid delivery haphazard at best. And, as Duss explained, the deliveries that do make it into Gaza are difficult to distribute due to the sheer scale of infrastructure demolition, as well as the ongoing bombings. Smaller amounts of food aid are still being delivered through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, but news reports say that aid is piling up on the Gaza side of the border without making it to those who need it. 

“The problem wasn’t just that people weren’t getting enough aid…it’s that the amount of actual physical destruction in Gaza, which is enormous, just makes it nearly impossible to deliver that aid,” Duss said. “This is done with the complete support of the United States.”

This means the US has enacted legislation to give at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel since October 2023 and, on top of that, also given millions in (all too often ineffective) aid to account for Israel’s damage using American weapons. 

“The focus should be on opening and maintaining the Rafah border crossing to allow massive, unrestricted flows of aid at the scale that is currently needed,” said WHO’s Hanan Balkhy. “The people of Gaza who have nothing to do with this conflict must not be the ones who pay the price for it.”