JACKSON, Miss.—It began with Rafat Amir Hamdan Abed, 50, male. A name, an age, a gender: the briefest memorial for a man lost in Gaza under a withering assault of artillery. Eileen Mohammed Sami Abu Naja, female, killed at the age of 1. Laith Rizq Ahmed Darwish, male, killed as an infant.
Split four ways across the intersection of State Street and Woodrow Wilson Avenue in Jackson, the prayer vigil began the morning of Oct. 20 and lasted until the early hours of the next day. Protesters gathered, raising signs and placards, waving the flag of Palestine. A steady stream of car horns signalled support: the intersection was rarely silent for long. And always, at every moment, another name: infants, the elderly, men and women. The list at the podium was 60,199 names long. The list is growing every day.
What boomed out over the loudspeakers was the list of Palestinian victims of the Gaza War since 2023. Following the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, in which Hamas militants killed 1,195 Israelis, the State of Israel launched a war on the Gaza Strip that has decimated the territory and killed uncountable thousands. Israel intensified its decades-long total blockade of the Gaza Strip, sparking unprecedented levels of famine among its residents.
Emad Al-Turk, chairman of Mississippi for a Just World, the Palestinian rights organization that organized the vigil, spoke with the Mississippi Free Press as a colleague continued to read from the long list of names.
“It’s a good symbolic connection, obviously. With tens of thousands of children having been murdered, and 50,000 more orphaned,” Al-Turk said, looking to the Children’s Hospital of Mississippi looming behind him.
“(Israel) has destroyed hospitals, destroyed universities, schools, everything in Gaza, for God’s sake, mosques and churches have been destroyed,” he continued. “What military benefit does this bring? These are documented war crimes, crimes against humanity. This is genocide.”
‘Eroding Our Freedom’
Emad Al-Turk, a veteran engineer and former CEO of Waggoner Engineering, founded Mississippi for a Just World to bring a unified voice for Palestinian advocacy to the Magnolia State.
“I came to the U.S. back in 1977 as a refugee from Palestine. I came because of my admiration for the Constitution of the United States—for the Bill of Rights,” he said. “Our democracy, our freedom, our ability to be able to express our opinion. … Over the last 50 years we’ve seen all of this unfortunately being eroded.”
“We are restricted from demonstrating on university campuses, universities have been pressured to where they cannot even teach about the Palestinian cause. All of these issues erode our freedom. And if it’s happening to Palestinian Americans, it is beginning to happen to Americans in general.”
Through the evening of Monday, Oct. 20, protesters came and went. Some were individuals, some with ties to Gaza, others simply felt called to act. Some had political associations: representatives from both the Party for Socialism and Liberation, as well as the Democratic Socialists of America, were present. One man, who declined to identify himself, waved a Palestinian flag and nodded in the direction of the speaker.
“There’s 18 pages of just-born kids on that list. 18 f–king pages,” he said.
There are indeed nearly 1,000 infants on the list of the victims. Almost 9,000 more are under the age of 10. The list sprawls on, ending with four centenarians and every age in between.
“ There’s several hundred thousand Palestinians who were murdered during the genocide that Israel has committed in the last two years. What we’re calling out now are the names of 67,000 (victims) documented by the Ministry of Health,” Al-Turk explained.
Independent Experts Say Gaza Death Toll Is Undercounted
The Israeli government and supporters of its war on Gaza have regularly accused the Gaza Ministry of Health of inflating numbers of the dead. But numerous independent analyses have confirmed the accuracy of the ministry’s reporting. Some independent researchers have even found that the ministry’s accounting of the dead in Gaza undercounts the death toll due to a lack of verification.
A London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine study found that, in 2024, with the Gaza Ministry of Health reporting just under 38,000 deaths, official reports undercounted total deaths by over 24,000 fatalities.
“We estimated 64,260 deaths … due to traumatic injury during the study period, suggesting the Palestinian MoH under-reported mortality by 41%,” the study found. “Our findings show an exceptionally high mortality rate in the Gaza Strip during the period studied. These results underscore the urgent need for interventions to prevent further loss of life and illuminate important patterns in the conduct of the war.”
All estimates, including those made by Israeli government and military sources, acknowledge that a majority of deaths are civilians, including tens of thousands of women and children. Credible reports limited to identified deaths alone estimate 75%-90% of all identified traumatic deaths in Gaza are civilians, not Hamas.
In Gaza, the scale of the destruction is hard to fathom. Estimates from April of this year suggest that upwards of 90% of all residential buildings in Gaza—nearly 450,000 homes—have been partially or completely destroyed since the beginning of the war.
Estimates for the total tonnage of bombs dropped on the minuscule Gaza Strip, a territory comparable in size to the City of Jackson, vary. But even the lowest estimates acknowledge that the scale of the bombing is equivalent to six times the destructive force of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.
And none of these figures include the dire famine in Gaza, engineered by the ongoing Israeli blockade. An official accounting of hospital-verified famine deaths is a mere 459. But the World Peace Foundation estimates at least 10,000 deaths directly attributable to “starvation and health crisis/social disruption” to be credible.
Even those estimates may be conservative. In October 2024, based on analysis of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification and the length of time since 2023 through which Gaza has suffered famine-level conditions, a collection of nearly 100 U.S. physicians wrote a letter to President Joe Biden warning that an estimated 62,413 Gazans were already dead from famine.
Israeli leadership has openly touted its use of famine as a weapon of war.
“We are imposing a complete siege on (Gaza),” said Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Oct. 9, 2023. “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel—everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said U.S. Republicans “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”
Elsewhere, Ben-Gvir went further. “As long as our hostages are dying in the tunnels, there is no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza,” he wrote on April 16, 2025.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself stated on October 18, 2023, that all humanitarian aid was to be blocked, “in the form of food and medicines … as long as our hostages are not returned.”
The scale of destruction and the stated intent by key figures across the Israeli government has led numerous institutions to define Israel’s actions in the Gaza War as genocide, including the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, as well as dozens of countries.
The Right to Call Out Injustice
As the sun set in Jackson on Oct. 20, the loose collection of protesters swelled, gathering on the side of the road to light candles and to pray for victims of the war. It was a small gathering, numbering in the dozens. Al-Turk and Candace Abdul-Tawwab, executive director for MSJW, stood at the mic as Al-Turk prayed.
“O Allah, we ask you to cure the sick. O Allah, we ask you to heal the wounded. O Allah, we ask you to pour upon them tranquility,” he prayed. “We ask you to comfort them, to keep them strong. Ya Allah, as they are cut off from water, food, shelter, electricity and all basic necessities, pour upon them your divine miracles that may help them.
Abdul-Tawwab spoke to the Mississippi Free Press after the prayer ended, visibly exhausted from an unbroken stretch of speaking and protesting. Scattered social media postings have falsely painted MSJW’s Gaza vigil as a Hamas rally, caricaturing an event devoted entirely to mourning the deceased.
“The notion that there’s this targeting of Hamas, of militants, or combatants—that’s not believable. That is an excuse, an absolute excuse to slaughter a nation of people,” she said.
U.S. support of Israel comes in the form of massive subsidies, including almost $23 billion in the first year of the Gaza War alone—critical aid without which Israel would have been unable to prosecute its blistering assaults on the territory. The Israeli Defense Ministry acknowledged this year that it has received 90,000 tons of arms, in the form of artillery and tank ammo, rockets and other explosives, as well as firearms, from the U.S. since the beginning of the war.
Historically, Israel is the largest recipient of economic and military aid from the U.S. by a staggering amount: just under a third of a trillion dollars, adjusted for inflation, since 1946.
“ Israel and the United States government are partners in this work,” Abdul-Tawwab continued. “As an American citizen, if you believe in the values of the Pledge of Allegiance—with liberty and justice for all—if you see a nation of people who are denied that right to pursue liberty and justice, that’s an infringement on your own rights.”
Censorship and suppression of those who oppose Israel’s indiscriminate destruction in Gaza is a threat Americans should act upon, Abdul-Tawwab said.
“The language that is in the Bill of Rights, the language of the Pledge of Allegiance: take that to heart and hold people accountable who are trying to dismantle that and take away your right to resist—your right to call out an injustice when you see it.”
In the weeks just before the vigil, the first hopeful signs of an end to the Gaza War emerged, with a ceasefire agreement implemented on Oct. 9, signalling a process of freeing Israeli and Palestinian hostages and putting an end to open hostilities for the time being. But the protesters at the vigil expressed a grim pessimism toward the likelihood that the ceasefire will last.
“ I pray that the ceasefire holds because you know, the people in Gaza need to stop the killing and the injury that happens every day. But I’m not hopeful,” Al-Turk said. “I don’t trust the State of Israel.”
Since the signing of President Donald Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan earlier this month, Israel has faced accusations of violating the terms of the ceasefire dozens of times, continuing to bomb and shoot Palestinian civilians. Presently, Israeli strikes have killed over 236 Palestinians during the supposed ceasefire, even killing over 100 individuals alone in a single day as retaliation for the death of one Israeli soldier.
Israel, for its part, has accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire by failing to provide all the bodies of the hostages, as well as an attack on the IDF on Oct. 19.
Towards the end of the prayer gathering in Jackson, a young woman stood at the head of the crowd to recite the poem “Rooz ō Shab,” by Rumi, the Sufi poet. In the poem, the words day and night weave together, recited in a mantra of longing and love—here, for those forever parted from their loved ones in Gaza.
“I am in the essence of you, impatient for you, day and night,” she recited in Persian. “My head lies at your feet, and I shall never remove my head, day and night.”
The vigil, too, continued through day and night. At last count, the speakers had finished going through hundreds of pages of victims’ names. Over a thousand pages still remained.