On Sunday, October 4, around a dozen activists protested the arrival of the container ship called Zim Virginia at New Jersey’s Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal. According to these activists affiliated with the eponymous Port of Elizabeth Movement (POEM) and Port Workers and Communities for Palestine, the ship was being used to carry various weapons components to Israel.
The month prior, four activists known as the Port Elizabeth Four were found guilty in municipal court on charges relating to their protest on the main roadway of Port Newark-Elizabeth in October 2025. That day, the Maersk Sentosa container ship was intended to be loaded with 1,000 tons of military cargo to be used by “the Israeli Ministry of Defense in missile casings, launcher systems, and other applications,” according to For Sea. The defendants were charged with traffic obstruction, interference of commerce, and failure to obey police orders, and they were all convicted of low-level, disorderly persons charges. Last week, ten more protesters—the Port Elizabeth Ten—had a court hearing for chaining themselves together to block truck deliveries to Zim Virginia in May. They have not yet been given a court date.
Despite the prosecutions and convictions, local organizers remain committed to ending the use of the port to ship weapons to Israel.
“Whatever a court decides is not going to deter or sway whatever we have to do,” says Haqq Sankara, a community organizer with POEM who uses a pseudonym for safety reasons.
The Port Newark-Elizabeth shipping yard is the third-largest port in the United States and the single most important commercial weapons exporter to the Israeli army outside of official U.S. military bases, according to recent reporting by CounterPunch. And according to a report by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Progressive International, between January and August in 2025, the port shipped nearly 1,000 tons of weapons and military components per week to Israel. Most of the weapons come from an Israeli military-affiliated G&B Warehouse in Jersey City and are shipped through Maersk and Zim ships, according to Drop Site News.
Over the past few years, several groups—especially PYM and POEM—have called attention to the Danish shipping company Maersk’s involvement in supplying weapons to Israel during its genocidal war. In October 2025 and May 2026 protests, activists from campaigns to disrupt weapons shipping blocked Maersk shipments by lying in the way of traffic to stop them from proceeding. Protests like these, along with other international port blockades, eventually led Maersk to issue a statement in July 2025, claiming the company “upholds a strict policy of not shipping weapons or ammunition to active conflict zones.”
The Maersk statement was seen as a great win for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and the PYM’s “Mask Off Maersk” campaign. However, a recent report by Oxfam Denmark and the PYM found that Maersk continues to ship essential military arms to Israel.
“A lot of the time, companies like Maersk will use this sort of weaseling around with their words by saying, we’re merely providing supplies, tactical cargo, defensive measures, anything,” says Jabari Lawrence, an active organizer in POEM.
Last August, Maersk delivered 66,600 kilograms of type III aluminum powder to Israel. This powder is the key component that allows tritonal bombs to reach temperatures high enough to evaporate human beings. The aluminum powder is one of many weapons parts that Maersk continues to ship to Israel.
“Whether or not they will admit to shipping Merkava tank parts, you could absolutely call [weapons] supplies and still be shipping them,” Lawrence adds.
In anticipation of their trial, the Port of Elizabeth Four organized several testimonies arguing that their actions were justified under the “legal doctrine of necessity,” which permits unlawful actions done to prevent imminent harm, and under international law, which Israel has repeatedly violated.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa—who worked in Gaza as a physician and authored the first major public investigation into what American healthcare workers witnessed in Gaza—wrote a letter for the Elizabeth Four to provide testimony to support the necessity of their action.
“By all accounts I have seen, all four engaged in entirely nonviolent disruption directed specifically at stopping or slowing the movement of heavily subsidized weaponry and munitions from the United States to the State of Israel. There is no doubt whatsoever that slowing or stopping this movement of weaponry saved the lives of civilians in the Gaza Strip, specifically of children, who were then and continue now to be subjected to genocide at the hands of the Government of Israel,” wrote Sidhwa in his letter.
“I hope the court will break with the shameful legacy of the federal government of the United States and recognize that blocking a roadway that is being used to facilitate genocide, whatever local ordinance may be violated in doing so, is not a crime,” he continued.
During the trial, however, the judge refused to consider any testimony linking the port’s shipments to Palestine.
“A lot of evidence was not accepted,” says Danny Creamer, one of the defendants. “We know the states and the courts aren’t really willing to hear about Palestine or do things about Palestine or acknowledge the reality of Palestine and what’s happening there. We didn’t go into this expecting the court to be on our side. I personally wasn’t shocked.”
Dr. Sidhwa expressed a similar sentiment after learning that his and others’ testimonies were not heard in court. “You start challenging imperial necessities, and all of a sudden you find that the law just doesn’t matter,” Dr. Sidhwa tells The Progressive.
Nonetheless, the presiding judge reduced the four defendants’ sentences from felony charges to disorderly conduct, and now each must either pay a $500 fine or complete 120 hours of community service. The Port Elizabeth Ten are facing similar misdemeanor disorderly person charges. Despite these trials, activists continue to show up at the port.
Several activists drew inspiration from other port protests worldwide and now hope their actions will draw attention to the continued use of the Port of Elizabeth for military shipments.
“At the moment, our direct actions are to inspire other direct actions,” Sankara says.
“A key ripple of this is awareness,” says Basher, another organizer who has participated in actions at both New York and New Jersey ports. The activist notes that they were inspired by port strikes in Italy and have since noticed aspects of shared tactics in later Palestine Action protests against Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, such as their use of the ‘Sleeping Dragons’ protester lockdown techniques.
Recently, similar ripple effects have appeared in arms-embargo actions at Brooklyn Navy Yard and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Dock Workers from 113 ports have called for a global strike against war and genocide.
Despite legal challenges of their own, activists at the Port Newark-Elizabeth continue to draw attention to the Port’s complicity with genocide. The end goals have remained the same for activists on the ground: Break the chain and cut ties with genocide.