The Israeli interception of the Gaza flotilla last week highlighted the connections between an organization sanctioned in the United States as a terrorist group front and a New Jersey organization that appeared last year.
New Jersey resident Amrou Ibrahim was named by Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) NJ in a Friday press statement as one of the Gaza flotilla activists who had been detained and deported after a failed blockade run to Gaza.
Ibrahim was part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FCC), one of the factions working with the Global Sumud Flotilla. An FCC website profile details the activist’s background organizing protests and events in New York and New Jersey, focusing on “Palestinian political prisoners” and the “Palestinian resistance,” but an archived version of the profile provides more exact information about his affiliations.
Flotilla activist founding member of sanctioned terror group
According to the now-deleted profile version, Ibrahim was named as a founding member of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network NY/NJ chapter. In October 2024, the US and Canada sanctioned Samidoun and designated it as a branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization. Since then, the international organization’s NY/NJ chapter became defunct.
Yet another piece of information about Ibrahim that arose following his arrest shed light on an organization with a similar ideology, rhetoric, and allies as Samidoun that was founded in April.
Al Ahrar Palestinian Prisoner Support Toronto condemned the detainment of Ibrahim in a Wednesday Instagram post, claiming him as a member of Al Ahrar NY/NJ.
Ibrahim’s membership of Al Ahrar NY/NJ is of note for an organization that announced itself in June by stating on social media that while it was a new organization, its “members have been doing solidarity work with Palestinian prisoners internationally for years.”
Pro-Palestinian organizations tied to terror org
The nascent international organization only has two chapters, in Toronto and NY/NJ, yet almost as soon as it began to operate in April, it already had close ties with Masar Badil Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path, Tariq El-Tahrir Youth and Student Network, Nidal Seattle, and Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return University of Washington (SUPER UW). All of the organizations collaborating with Al Ahrar have documented ties and overlapping membership with Samidoun.
The FCC profile on Ibrahim also noted that he was working to launch a new organization called “Nidal,” which focused on “cultivating resistance culture in the West and building solidarity for the Axis of Resistance.”
Nidal is also the name of one of the organizations founded in the wake of Samidoun’s banning, with Nidal Seattle headed by former Samidoun Seattle coordinator and Masar Badil executive committee member Bissan Barghouti. A branch of Barghouti’s organization supposedly exists in New York City, but does not appear to have been operational since October.