These Veterans Starved Themselves to Protest the War in Gaza

At the time, that included intense headaches, nausea, weakness, body aches, brain fog, and the inability to regulate their body temperature. All of the strikers, Bohrer said, relied on wheelchairs for any trips farther than the bathroom.

Activists have been going hungry in an effort to end the genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023. As early as November of that year, hunger strikers protested for five days in front of the White House to demand a permanent ceasefire. That December, a coalition of writers and artists announced a weekly sunrise-to-sunset fast. In spring 2024, dozens of students at universities across the US and abroad launched hunger strikes as part of the broader encampment movement. Even Pope Francis, before his death, called for a day of fasting for peace in Gaza.

Exact approaches to fasting have varied, from Ramadan-style daytime fasts to calorie restrictions to single-day fasts. JVP Chicago’s indefinite strike was announced in the broader context of a rolling “Stop Starving Gaza” fast organized by other JVP chapters across the country, in which members take turns going without food.

In electing to protest through restricting or refusing food, activists are continuing a long tradition of political hunger strikes. Palestinians imprisoned in Israel have engaged in hunger strikes since at least 1968, with thousands starving themselves to demand better conditions and an end to arbitrary detention and the occupation. 

Though fasting has a much longer and more religious history than hunger strikes, said historian Nayan Shah, the two strategies have a lot in common. “Both protest fasting and hunger striking use time as leverage,” Shah said. “How far can I go? How far can I endure? How much will I have to suffer for you to act?” In publicizing the obvious and visceral destruction of their own bodies, he said, protesters draw attention to the bodies of Palestinians who are enduring similarly preventable suffering.

As the genocide has ground on, however, the media’s attention has drifted—an existential problem for fasters and hunger strikers, whose success depends in many ways on their ability to garner public sympathy for their cause. Despite their 40-day commitment, Ferner said, the Veterans for Peace group has struggled to win the attention of major news organizations. 

It has found some high-profile allies, though, including Myles, who decided to join the final two weeks of the Veterans for Peace fast after visiting the activists at their United Nations outpost. Myles has mostly stuck to the 250-calorie limit, subsisting on bits of egg and a lot of lettuce. “In some ways, I can’t help thinking that it’s just this handful of old people across from the UN,” Myles admitted. “Who’s gonna pay attention to that?”

But they’d been at a loss about what to do—as an activist, as a poet, as a person—and the fast seemed like a simple, feasible gesture. “I’m really moved by exactly what it is,” Myles said. “It’s just beautiful to do the right thing and to do it consistently, and to make it known.”

Shah sometimes gets questions about whether fasting and hunger striking have the same urgent power they once did. But he said seeing people do something so extreme to shake up the status quo still draws attention. “The question is whether they can get people to listen and make change,” he said. 

For Bohrer, the JVP Chicago hunger striker, the most powerful sensation—more powerful than weakness and illness—was the awareness of how much easier they have it than any person in Gaza. “I am not caring for children,” they said. “I am not walking for miles a day to try to access food or clean water. I am not recovering from a surgery I have undergone without anesthesia. I am not at risk of developing cholera.”

Bohrer referred to pikuach nefesh, the Jewish idea that for the sake of saving a human life, all other responsibilities are suspended. “I feel a deep, intense, overwhelming conviction to that principle,” they said. “I won’t speak for the other hunger strikers, but there is nothing that I would not do to stop this genocide.”

On the Fourth of July, Bohrer, a fellow hunger striker, and six other JVP activists were arrested by representatives of the Department of Homeland Security and expelled from Senator Tammy Duckworth’s Chicago office after requesting an in-person meeting. Afterward, the remaining hunger strikers decided to stop their fast.

Before that happened, though, Alaa, a Palestinian mother living in Gaza, wrote them a letter. “To link your body with the body of a mother like me, who doesn’t know if she’ll be able to feed her children tomorrow, is a declaration that our lives still matter,” she said. “From the heart of this catastrophe, I say: we see you, we feel you, and your actions reach us even when the borders remain closed.”