For almost two years, Palestine solidarity activists in Nanaimo have been organizing, protesting and educating people about the genocide — as named by an independent United Nations commission — committed by Israel in Gaza.
Sara Kishawi’s family is from Gaza City and she has been a key organizer for Palestine solidarity activism in Nanaimo, helping organize more than 100 weekly protests as well as the longest university solidarity encampment in Canada at Vancouver Island University. Her activism on campus resulted in her being suspended retroactively, despite having graduated, something she is still fighting in court.
This week, Nanaimo Coun. Hilary Eastmure co-sponsored an emergency resolution at the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) conference to take action against Israel. The resolution calls for the province to endorse a two-way arms embargo between Canada and Israel and asks the province to “direct the BC Cannabis and Liquor Board to remove Israeli wines from BC Liquor Stores.” It also includes a call for the province to support the resettlement of Palestinian newcomers.
“I know that people want their elected representatives to use their voice when there is something as urgent as this happening,” Eastmure told The Discourse. “With the UN declaration saying that this is indeed a genocide happening. I feel like it’s on me to use whatever leverage I have as a city councillor.”
Locally, Kishawi told The Discourse the Palestine solidarity movement in Nanaimo is “as strong as it has been” and that she has seen a “shift in the narrative” in the past couple of months after a famine was declared by the World Health Organization in August.
“There are videos, there’s photos, everything is documented,” Kishawi said. “As these doctors start to come back they’re giving their testimonies on what’s happening there, the narrative is definitely shifting.”
Occupation for half a century
Israel has occupied Palestinian territories for decades with the Six-Day War in 1967 leading to Israel’s direct occupation of Gaza, as well as other Palestinian territories. While Israel withdrew ground troops and settlements in Gaza in 2005, it has maintained tight controls over the borders, utilities and telecommunications, and regularly launched major air campaigns in the territory, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties. Many legal experts, human rights groups and bodies — including the UN and International Criminal Court — say Israel has occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza, since 1967.
This conflict came to the forefront again on Oct. 7, 2023 when Hamas — a militant Palestinian and Islamic group that was formed to resist Israeli occupation in Palestine — launched an attack into Israel that killed 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, and took 250 people hostage.
This has been followed by an unrelenting Israeli siege on Gaza with sweeping military operations that have killed more than 65,000 people and displaced around 90 per cent of Gaza’s population — or 1.9 million people. This has created a humanitarian crisis that has been deemed a genocide by multiple human rights groups and, more recently, an independent United Nations commission. Since Oct. 7, 2023, a total of 1,660 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed.
Prior to these events, the Gaza Strip had already been blockaded by Israel and Egypt for years, restricting the movement of goods and people in and out of the area, as well as essentials for life including water, food, medicine and aid.
According to a World Health Organization Factsheet published on Sept. 11, 2025 a total of 502 “acutely malnourished children with medical complications” have been admitted to hospitals in Gaza since Jan. 1, 2025.
As of Sept. 21, the Gaza Health Ministry puts the number of people who have died from malnutrition at 440, including 147 children. The bulk of these malnutrition-related deaths have taken place in 2025. Since May, 2,504 people have died trying to access aid supplies in Gaza, and 18,381 people have been injured.
City councillors call on province to take action against Israel
The “Action on Palestine” emergency resolution at the Union of BC Municipalities conference was backed by delegates from over a dozen municipalities but required a three-fifths majority vote to be placed on the conference agenda, which it failed to reach on Thursday morning.
Eastmure said it was “disappointing” that the resolution didn’t have enough support to be debated, “but the fact that it’s really close is a good sign that we’re not a minority, and a lot of people really do want to see the province and the feds step up and do something,” she said.
The BC Liquor Control Board’s Liquor Market Review shows that sales of Israeli wine in the province totaled $55,976 in the first fiscal quarter of 2025, up from the $54,107 in sales for the same quarter in the previous year. Total wine sales for the first quarter of 2025 in B.C. were $250.4 million.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Eastmure said. “It’s about pulling these products and sending a message that we do not support this in B.C. We do not support a genocide that’s being carried out and there will be ramifications for the countries carrying out these actions in the same way that there were ramifications for Russia.”
In 2022, the province pulled Russian spirits from the shelves in solidarity with Ukraine after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country.
A former radio news reporter in Nanaimo, Eastmure said the killing of journalists by Israel was an important factor for her. Since Oct. 7, 2023, at least 250 journalists and media workers reporting on the war in Gaza have been killed, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, with hundreds more who have been injured and dozens who are missing.
“Under international law, the press is supposed to be protected in the same way that civilians are supposed to be protected under international law,” she told The Discourse. “As a journalist, it hits really close to home for me when I see people who are putting their lives on the line to report and share the atrocities being targeted in the way that we’ve witnessed them being targeted, it’s horrifying.”
Eastmure said Nanaimo Coun. Paul Manly was involved in drafting the resolution and that it had support from other progressive councillors.
She said she was “inspired” by the organizing by local Palestine solidarity activists in Nanaimo.
“Their determination has been incredible. I really salute them for that, and I know that they are looking for their elected representatives to show leadership on this issue,” she said. “I thank them for doing what they’re doing. I think Nanaimo activists have been an inspiration to people across the country and across the world.”
VIU professor among hundreds of food scholars who sign letter to Prime Minister
On Sept. 3, an open letter signed by hundreds of food systems and agricultural scholars was sent to Prime Minister Mark Carney calling on the Canadian government to “immediately enact all economic, diplomatic and political measures available to end its complicity with Israel’s genocide, and to pressure the Israeli government to end its military siege on Gaza and its ongoing destruction of food, water and agricultural resources across the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
One of the letter’s signatories is Vancouver Island University social work professor Finn Meyer Cook, who is a long-time member of the Canadian Association of Food Studies.
“I have been deeply disturbed, as so many people are, by the constant bombardment of images of children, babies and adults starving,” they said. “It rocks one’s senses. The level of impunity has reached obscenity.”
Starvation has long-term implications on health, and Meyer Cook said research shows it can lead to children under 12 suffering from delayed bone growth and stunted cognitive development.
Meyer Cook would like the Canadian government to implement a two-way arms embargo against Israel. Currently, there is an embargo on exporting weapons that will be used in Gaza, but there are still reports of Canadian manufactured arms and components being exported to Israel.
They would also like to see humanitarian corridors into Gaza reestablished and said the air-drops of food by western militaries, including Canada, is the “least efficient way in delivering aid” and that it would “take 160 planes to deliver a single meal for all of Gaza’s two million people.”
“The use of starvation as a weapon of war is a war crime and a crime against humanity,” they said.
Meyer Cook is not Jewish but is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor, as her adopted father was sent to the United Kingdom when he was a child.
“I really believe strongly when we say never again, it is never again for anyone,” Meyer Cook said.
Canadian surgeon returns from Gaza and speaks at VIU
When the local Palestine solidarity movement isn’t engaged in weekly protests in Nanaimo and the surrounding area, it is busy doing educational work to bring awareness of what’s happening in Gaza, as well as the history of the Palestinian people.
For Palestine Vancouver Island works with the VIU Muslim Women’s Club to hold regular film screenings and talks at Vancouver Island University.
“These events, especially the ones on campus like the movie nights and this talk right here, these are designed for people who do not know about a lot of what’s going on or who are hesitant about how they can support,” Kishawi said. “But also [the events are for] people who are just seeing it from a both sides perspective, which we know in a genocide, there’s really no both sides.”
Kishawi said the educational events offer people an opportunity to learn more about what’s happening so they can judge for themselves.
“Nobody is going to make a judgement that genocide is okay,” she said. “So we offer these with discussion, so people are able to put ideas back and forth.”
This month, Dr. Deirdre Nunan — an orthopedic surgeon from Moose Jaw, Sask. who has worked in Gaza for years as part of an international humanitarian relief effort — spoke about her recent trip to Gaza in July where she was busy doing emergency surgeries for victims of trauma.
Nunan started working with Doctors without Borders in 2018 and met some colleagues who had worked in Gaza.
“They showed me their photos and told me their stories about working in the Great March of Return and this was something that was very compelling to go and assist in,” she said of the 2019 protest movement, where unarmed people from Gaza attempted to cross the border into Israel to return to their ancestral homes that they were expelled from in 1948 when Israel was created. The protest resulted in Israeli snipers causing “an epidemic of gunshot wounds,” according to Nunan.
She was back in Gaza this summer with Ideals, a small British charity that focuses on orthopedic and plastic surgery in Gaza.
“Now it’s almost exclusively emergency surgery on patients with fresh injuries or follow up surgeries that those patients need,” she said, having worked in Gaza on and off since October 2024.
Nunan spoke about the difficulties of working in hospitals that were shelled and bombed by the Israeli military and shared a graphic CCTV video of the bombing of the European Hospital in Gaza that happened on May 13.
“This was a place that I knew well because I had walked there most days between the place I was sleeping and the hospital where I was working,” she said. “Suddenly, this was cratered by an air strike. People just vanished from the attack.”
She spoke about how health-care workers in Gaza had lost family members, including a nurse who returned to her family tent which had been hit by an Israeli airstrike when she was on shift, killing her brother and wounding her daughter.
Another of Nunan’s colleagues, Ahmed Salah, was killed with his three young sons when she was there in July. His wife survived because she was working in the hospital during the attack and their unborn son will grow up never knowing his father.
“He was working in the operating room, making jokes,” she recalled. “The following day, one of the nurses came into the operating room when I was working and told us that Ahmed had been killed.”
While her work is focused on trauma surgery, Nunan said starvation and a lack of sanitation are the bigger risks on a population level in Gaza.
Nunan supports Canada imposing both a two-way, complete arms embargo on Israel and diplomatic sanctions.
Recently, Canada recognized Palestine as a state, but Nunan said that doesn’t go far enough.
“As my Palestinian friends say, we can’t eat words, and so we need more robust motions from the UN. We need Canada to really support the UN activities and hopefully to work with UN Resolution 377.”
For all the suffering and loss she has seen while working in Gaza, Nunan said it is also a place where she finds hope.
“Hope is not dead. These are human beings with every hope and dream and feeling that all of us have here in Canada,” Nunan said. “My hope is for people to approach Palestinians with a sense of humanity, look at the situation with absolute outrage, and then do something about it.”
With files from Madeline Dunnett and Shalu Mehta.
