For the more than 60 organizers and volunteers of the 2025 Community Encampment for Palestine, we want to extend our appreciation and thanks to the NLG-MA Legal Observers Chapter and especially the Legal Observers [LO] Samira Khadar, Taylor Kim, and one more LO. They provided constant and expert legal eyes and ears during the 2025 Community Encampment in Somerville on July 26. The LO’s presence ensured that our focus – recognizing the struggle for Palestinian liberation and demanding an end to the genocide – remained central and unimpeded by agitators or police interference throughout the day.
As one Encampment organizer said: ‘At a time when voices calling for justice and dignity for Gaza are suppressed and intimidated, criminalized and deported, today, the LOs provided us with a sense of safety so that we could speak out and mourn, take action and celebrate.‘
A collaboration between Community Encampment for Palestine [CEP] and Somerville for Palestine [S4P], the 2025 the Encampment, through education, celebration and activism, called for justice in Palestine. We recognized the martyred Gazan children, and called for local and global actions to protect and free the children surviving in Gaza- from the Israeli genocide and the anti-Palestinian racism that fuels it.
Among Encampment speakers were Doctors Against Genocide, Al Sheba Organizing Committee and Letter Carriers Union. S4P described their ongoing Solidarity Ballot Campaign to allow Somerville community the right to vote for the city to cease doing business with any companies profiting from the Israeli genocide of Gaza.
The 2025 Community Encampment raised more than $10,000 for food and humanitarian aid to families in Gaza.
For more information about the Somerville Palestine Solidarity Ballot Question Campaign & the 2025 Encampment- visit Somerville for Palestine’s instagram . For more information about the history of the Community Encampments for Palestine contact the Community Encampment for Palestine.
For the 2025 Community Encampment for Palestine
Jill El- Ashkar
Community Encampments For Palestine
Leila Skinner
Somerville For Palestine
Somerville for Palestine is an interfaith, interracial, intergenerational community-led effort demanding an end to our Somerville tax dollars funding Israeli apartheid in solidarity with Palestinians in their fight for liberation, self determination, and human rights.
Community Encampments for Palestine [CEP] began in Spring of 2024 in response to the violent closure by university administrations and police of the many Campus Encampments for Palestine in the United States and throughout the world. Determined to carry on their demands for justice in Palestine, CEP held successful community encampments in Salem, Cambridge and Lynn in 2024. CEP also carried on the ‘tent communities’ to carry on the students recognition that Palestinian refugees depended on tents to survive during the Nakba.
