Activists bearing Palestinian flags, pots and pans and flyers calling a resident a “war criminal” descended on a North Arlington home last week.
The Friday protest was the second time in recent days that activists have targeted the Williamsburg residence of Loik Henderson, a member of the board of directors at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
In a previous incident at Henderson’s home late last month, a neighbor told ARLnow, vandals spray-painted the driveway and killed grass in the front yard to spell out “Gaza.”
The GHF is an Israel and U.S.-backed nonprofit that has received intense criticism from the United Nations and other organizations, which accuse Israel of trying to replace the U.N.-led aid network in Gaza with a handful of distribution sites in highly hazardous conditions.
The D.C.-area chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement — which recently organized another protest at the Vienna home of John Acree, interim executive director of the GHF — casts itself as holding leaders accountable for civilian deaths.
“We must ask ourselves not how far protesters are willing to go to confront these war criminals,” organizers told ARLnow. “Instead we ask: how far has our society come that we allow murderers in suits and white collars to live in peace while they steal money from American citizens to massacre starving Palestinians in the hundreds?”
The Arlington County Police Department responded to a request for crowd control during the Friday demonstration and made contact with the organizers, police spokesperson Ashley Savage told ARLnow. However, “no significant incidents were reported and no arrests were made,” she said.
The Emergency Communications Center also received a call about a vandalism in the area on July 28, but the caller never filed an online report with police, Savage said.
Henderson wasn’t home at the time of either incident, a neighbor said, but his wife and one of his daughters were.
“Just kind of an odd thing,” said the neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous. “You don’t see it happen every day, here. … It’s not like Benjamin Netanyahu is living next door.”
This isn’t the first time that pro-Palestinian activists have targeted a private residence in Arlington. Last year, protesters camped for months outside then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s residence on Chain Bridge Road.
That encampment, known as “Kibbutz Blinken,” involved activists holding signs, waving flags and occasionally dumping fake blood on the street in front of a motorcade. The Virginia Department of Transportation dismantled the site in July 2024.
The State Department has allocated $30 million to support GHF, although only about $3 million of that funding has been disbursed, according to the Washington Post.
The U.N. and numerous nonprofit groups accuse the foundation of stepping into aid distribution with little transparency or humanitarian experience, and, crucially, without a commitment to the principles of neutrality and operational independence in war zones.
Since the organization started operations, several hundred Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded in near-daily shootings as they tried to reach aid sites, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Witnesses have accused Israeli troops of firing heavy barrages toward the crowds in an attempt to control them.
The Israeli military has denied firing on civilians. It says it fired warning shots in several instances, and fired directly at a few “suspects” who ignored warnings and approached its forces.
“Our wages are being stolen by the likes of Loik Henderson and the GHF to fund brutal massacres,” the regional chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement said. “The genocide in Gaza is personal not just for Palestinians. It is personal for every US taxpayer forced to bankroll Israel.”
Reporting from the Associated Press contributed to this story.
