Al-Qalam 
Amidst genocide and expansionist aggressive war, South Africa will next month join the Global Sumud Flotilla together with many countries across the globe.
The objective of the Mission is to open a humanitarian aid sea corridor to Gaza and challenge the conditions that allow for starvation and an almost two-decade-long siege of over 2 million people in a concentration camp.
The blockade on Gaza has resulted in one of the most devastating man-made famines in history. As per the most recent Integrated Food Security Phase Classification data, between 16 October and 30 November 2025, around 1.6 million people (77 percent of the population analysed) faced high levels of acute food insecurity. This includes more than half a million people in Emergency, and over 100,000 people in Catastrophe. This wilful deprivation echoes centuries of colonial deployment of malnutrition as a tool of subjugation, settler colonialism, and submission.
Israel and its co-conspirators in genocide have expanded this violent policy of weaponising starvation despite censure from major human rights organisations. They have bolstered the blockade despite the provisional measures laid out in the 28 March 2024 order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ordered Israel to ensure the unhindered provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza. This is also an obligation under international law that the international ‘community’ has failed to enforce.
In this context, the South Africans set sail where States have failed to fulfil their compulsory legal and moral universal duties to Palestinians and to all humanity to punish and prevent genocide as set out in the Genocide Convention.
They sail against structural impunity for apartheid, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, aggressive war, and settler colonial genocide. They sail in the spirit of the long history of mutual solidarity between anti-apartheid South Africa and Palestine.
They sail against starvation and imperial climate catastrophe. They sail against the genocidal racist regime of Zionism. They sail against the ongoing Nakba.
A spokesman for the Global Sumud Flotilla said the participants will “set sail with the spirit of solidarity that the South African people have with our Palestinian comrades and siblings. They sail with total commitment to the cause of Palestinian self-determination.”
“They sail because complicit States continue to arm the genocidal Israeli State. Mining conglomerates like Glencore continue to power the Israeli grid, fuelling multiple genocides and wars across the globe while grossly exploiting labourers and plundering the environment. As the South Africans sail, they carry our redoubled commitments to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.”
From Palestine to Venezuela, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Cuba, from South Africa to Sudan, they sail knowing our struggles are connected. They sail in solidarity with oppressed and subjugated people in South Africa, Africa, and all over the continent in the face of the colonial racial capitalist machine.
They sail in the footsteps of thousands who resisted and continue to resist apartheid, fascism, and genocide in Southern Africa, Palestine, and across the world. They sail in the slipstream of millions in the Global Majority who have risen to resist colonial domination throughout history.
They sail against the winds of war as the tide turns at the end of a dying empire.
They sail to bear witness as judgment day looms.
They sail with the knowledge that all colonisers fall eventually.
They sail, in the words of writer and delegation co-chair Zukiswa Wanner, towards “a world already in the making, in which the solidarity of those who stand on the side of justice is as global as the profits of the plunderers.”
