WeeklySA_AdminBUOYED: The largest civilian-led maritime effort involving 50 ships – with Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla Mandela and nine other South Africans aboard – sails on with food aid to challenge Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza…
By Peoples Dispatch
Activists aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla vow to continue their mission to set sail to Gaza, insisting nothing will stop them from breaking Israel’s blockade and bringing aid to Gaza.
Members of the Flotilla have reported two suspected drone attacks on their boats while docked in Tunisian waters. Still, the first wave of Flotilla ships departed the Sidi Bou Said port in Tunisia where they were stationed last night, and the rest were set to depart today (September 12).
“We know who has interest in stopping these flotillas, in stopping this mission to Gaza,” Mariana Mortágua, a member of the Portuguese Parliament who joined the Global Sumud Flotilla, told Democracy Now!, indicating that Israel had a role in the attacks on the ships. “We are very also aware of the fact that Israel did this at the same time they were displacing 1 million people in Gaza. So, there is these tactics that they use all the time to change the attention, to move the eye from Gaza to the flotilla, from the flotilla to Qatar.”
Despite the attacks, activists aboard the flotilla have vowed to continue their mission. “No acts of aggression will stop us. In the coming days the flotilla will be united at sea in our mission to break the siege, to end the genocide and to stand with the Palestinian people in their just struggle for freedom,” said Saif Abukeshek, Global Sumud Flotilla steering committee member.
“People who hit you, as an individual, or as a group, they are also doing that to teach a lesson,” said Francesca Albanese, and the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. “To make sure that this works as an alert, as a red flag so that others will not follow you.”
“If there is a state behind it, not only it shows the level of conviction that impunity is still that enabling ground, but also it shows the fear,” Albanese articulated.
The Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) is the largest civilian-led maritime effort to challenge Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza, and builds on the efforts of previous flotillas attempting to deliver aid to the besieged Strip, aiming to bring food and medical supplies. The pilgrimage brings together more than 50 ships and delegations from at least 44 countries.
The GSF comprises grassroots organisers, sailors, doctors, artists, and solidarity activists, including celebrities and celebrated activists such as Greta Thunberg and Irish actor Liam Cunningham. Many of these organisers are part of groups including the Global March to Gaza, Sumud Convoy, Sumud Nusantara, and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
Among the delegation is former South African President Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla, joined by nine other South Africans, who are Fatima Hendricks, Zaheera Soomar, Jared Sacks, Elham Mouaffak Hatfield, Zukiswa Wanner, Irshaad Ahmed Chotia, Fazel Behra, Nurian Saloojee and Reaaz Moola.
“Many of us that have visited the occupied territories in Palestine have only come back with one conclusion: that the Palestinians are experiencing a far worse form of apartheid than we ever experienced,” Mandela told reporters at Johannesburg Airport recently as he prepared to board a flight to Tunisia to join the Gaza-bound flotilla.
“We believe that the global community has to continue supporting the Palestinians, just as they stood side-by-side with us.”
Mandela, whose country strongly opposes Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, stressed that when apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, it was the result of intense pressure and sanctions from other nations.
In November 2023, South Africa filed a request with the International Court of Justice to investigate Israeli attacks on Gaza. A month later, it filed a case against Israel at The Hague-based court accusing Tel Aviv of violating the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued international arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, charging them with war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza
As international organisations and aid groups have reported for months, Gaza is on the brink of mass famine due to Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid. Aid organisation Action Against Hunger reports that in July and August alone, their nutrition teams “received more than 400 cases of malnourished children, with 20% of cases classified as severe.”
Beyond depriving Palestinians in Gaza of food, Israel is also depriving Palestinians of medical supplies. “Just a few days ago, I spoke with a doctor in Gaza who told me about 3,600 Palestinian children with type 1 diabetes who no longer have access to insulin,” Moroccan pharmacist and human rights defender Aziz Rhali, a part of the Flotilla crew, told Peoples Dispatch. “For a child with type 1 diabetes, insulin is a matter of life or death. Those 3 600 children face a death sentence.”
“At the same time, healthcare workers themselves have been deliberately targeted by the Israeli forces, precisely because their presence signals the presence of civilians,” said Rhali. “Why has Al-Awda Hospital been attacked so many times? Because the hospital’s existence in the north means Palestinians remain in that region. The goal is clear: to push Gazans to leave by destroying the healthcare system, and therefore eliminating the medical staff who sustain it.”
“What we are seeing in Gaza City is not just a crisis, it is a collapse of human survival,” says Natalia Anguera, Head of Operations for the Middle East at Action Against Hunger.
“Families are hungry, exhausted, grieving, and can’t imagine having to move their children again – some for the twenty-sixth time in less than two years. Despite our teams’ relentless efforts, they too are facing this same collapse.” – People’s Despatch, additional reporting by Türkiye news agency Anadolu Ajansi
Comment
RESPECT WISHES OF THE DEAD
The row over the burial of former Zambian President, Edgar Chagwa Lungu, could be a breach of the long-standing African tradition that the wishes of the dead must always be respected and honoured.
Lungu, who died of cardiac complications aged 68 at a private clinic in Pretoria on June 5 this year, has still not being buried following a court wrangle over where he should be buried. The family stressed that one of his dying wishes was that his successor, Hakainde Hichilema, should not go anywhere near his body.
The Lungu family turned to the Pretoria High Court for an order to allow his wife, Esther, to bury him according to her wish – here in South Africa – but the court ruled in favour of the Zambian government who insisted that Lungu should be accorded a dignified State funeral in his own country.
This decision has piled more pain and grief on Lungu’s wife and family who have since appealed this decision of the Full Bench.
We enter the fray of this unfortunate battle mindful of the fact that there might be laws that govern the dead and even denies their spouses the right to bury their partners. Those of sage, including the applicants and respondents, recently placed their arguments before court again with lawyers for the Lungu family applying for leave to appeal. Judgment has been reserved.
The Zambian government might be having genuine reasons of burying their former leader in the Heroes Acre and giving him a State funeral. The authorities are however urged to consider the wishes not ony of Lungu’s wife but of the late President himself.
There is nothing that hurts than denying a grieving woman to bury her husband the way she wants to. Afterall, the two were married and had pledged to be together until death made them part. They lived in accordance with that vow. To now deny his wife the right to bury her partner of so many years is not ony an injustice. It is against the wellknown African tradition that grieving spouses have the right to respect and bury their partners in peace.
While we await the outcome of the decision of the Full Bench of the Pretoria High Court on whether they can can appeal their decision or not, we urge both the Zambian government and the bereaved family to meet and try to reach an amicable solution to this battle that has kept Lungu’s lifeless body in the refrigerator for almost four months. This is unacceptable.
If there are laws that prescribe that former State Presidents must be accorded State funerals in the name of giving them a dignified funeral and denying the bereaved familes the right to bury their loved ones according to their wishes, then those laws need to be revoked.
Instead of helping the bereaved families to find closure, these laws are rubbing salt into the wounds of those who had suffered the severe pain of losing a loved one.
What the family deserves now is nothing but closure to this 4-month-old drama that has kept Lungu’s body in limbo.
