Human rights for all: Why I am in Egypt to join the Global March to Gaza
The people of Gaza are also starving. They have no access to food.
This is by design. Thousands of trucks packed with food and medical supplies have been waiting at the border for more than two months. Israel has refused to let them in. Instead of opening the border it is setting up militarised distribution points, and then shooting the starving civilians who gather, desperate for food.
Israel is purposely starving Gazans to force them to give up their struggle for freedom and accept their removal out of the strip. This is the definition of ethnic cleansing.
I do not merely give my opinion here. This is actually the stated policy of the Israeli government, which has boasted that the 'Trump Plan' to remove Palestinians from Gaza is one of their central war aims.
Even a former Israeli prime minister, who has been defending the war for 20 months, now concedes that Israel is committing war crimes.
But this isn't just a war crime. According to Holocaust experts like Raz Segal as well as independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, this is a textbook case of genocide.
We are looking at what is arguably the worst atrocity of the 21st Century. If not that, certainly the most documented.
The Global March to Gaza is a humanitarian protest that seeks to pressure the Israeli government to stop the blockade and end its genocidal war in the Gaza Strip.
Along with more than 50 other South Africans, we have flown to Cairo. From there we will take a bus into the Sinai Peninsula and march for two days (50 kilometres) all the way to the Rafah Crossing.
The march will also be joined by the Sumud humanitarian convoy of 7,000 people that began in Tunisia and will also reach Rafah on 15 June.
Despite the obvious danger, we have decided to join this first-of-its-kind global march to the doorstep of genocide.
For over 20 months, we have been protesting against the genocide in our own countries. (Some of us have been protesting Israeli apartheid for decades.) We have been publishing articles, writing books, painting murals, hanging banners, speaking at Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith events. We have also been lobbying our governments to act against and sanction the Israeli regime.
Yet the genocide has continued.
Where is the backbone of those governments who claim to support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians?
We feel we have no other choice but to try something new.
Never before have thousands of civilians travelled thousands of kilometres to converge on the site of an ongoing genocide to try to stop it.
We are doing this because we are desperate for real change rather than platitudes. When we see photos of starving children, when we watch videos of a man pushing a wheelbarrow of dismembered body parts through the ruins of Khan Yunis, when we hear the last words of little Hind Rajab before being shot by surrounding tanks, we see what could so easily be ourselves.
And we see the necessity of our intervention.
What if this were happening to us? What would we want the world to do about it?
This is why we chant we are all Palestinians. This is why we call for freedom from the river to the sea.
When Jews have asserted 'never again' after the Nazi Holocaust killed tens of millions of Roma, Slavs, homosexuals, disabled people and people of the Jewish faith, we know that its real meaning was not 'never again' just for Jews.
For those of us who believe in the equality of all human beings, we recognise that this means that we should stand against the persecution of all people. We mean that we must fight all structures of colonialism, racism, sexism, queerphobia and of all other forms of oppression — wherever we encounter it.
Since never again must mean never again for anyone; we march to make this a reality.
As we head to Rafah, you can support our call to end the siege and end the genocide by following our journey, by amplifying it on social media, and by calling on your government to sanction the Israeli regime. DM
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British-Cypriot coach Louis Allan, 33, sits atop an olive tree on a main road in Nicosia on May 7, 2025, as he continues a week-long silent sit-in and hunger strike in support of Palestinians in Gaza and calling for an end to the war between Israel and Hamas. University of Pretoria Staff For Palestine (UPS4Palestine) As an academic collective from the University of Pretoria, we offer the following reflections on the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as a contribution to a growing number of South African academic voices against the genocide. The increased horrors faced by the Palestinian people in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and especially from March 2025, with the enforcement of a total siege and blockade of all humanitarian aid (barring the trickle that Israel permits), are on an unimaginable scale. 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Furthermore, the ongoing attacks on Palestinian children have resulted in about 3,000 children having amputations as a result of traumatic force injuries, burns, and infection. This has resulted in thousands of children with a new disability facing uncertain futures. Starving and quarantined within a desolate strip of land, denied basic human rights and continually brutalised by the Israeli Defence Force, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza is a stain on the human conscience, especially the leading Western nations and leaders of the world, who have sacrificed international law and human rights in favour of their imperialist interests in West Asia, as represented by Israel. Effectively, the genocide in Gaza reveals the persistence of the global division of humanity produced and maintained by centuries of European colonialism. It is a genocide transmitted in real time, watched by millions of outraged people around the world and by complicit leaders, journalists, academics, and religious figures, especially in the West and in the Arab world. The Palestinian genocide that has been unfolding for the last 20 months has shown up the fallacy of the international rule of law - permitting Israel the right to carry out this genocide in the full glare of world attention; and also turning a blind eye to Israeli occupation, violent settler colonialism and the denial of Palestinian human rights and sovereignty since Israel's official establishment in 1948. The increasing evidence of the genocide in Gaza, which includes scholasticide, has not sufficiently galvanised many institutions, such as universities, including many in South Africa. While a few South African universities have taken a brave stand, such as the University of Fort Hare and Nelson Mandela University, and thereby risked not only public opprobrium from sectors of South African society but also much-needed funding, other universities blithely carry on 'with business as usual'. Debates in some institutions invariably devolve into spurious and disingenuous comparisons with atrocities in other parts of the world – the by-now common 'whataboutism' – to even more fallacious arguments about a complex situation, two-sidedism, 'not our problem', and the 'hand-wringing, what can we do' argument. The global solidarity we garnered in our struggle against apartheid is a long-distant memory for some. For others who were quite comfortable with apartheid, the international cultural, academic, sports, and economic boycott against apartheid South Africa was an outrage. For such South Africans, a similar outrage should not be perpetrated against Israel, a historical ally of the apartheid government. The inaction and 'apolitical neutrality' of historically white universities, which were bastions and intellectual playgrounds of apartheid, is particularly shameful and is indicative of the superficiality of transformation in these institutions as well as the lack of a genuine commitment to the pursuit of justice. While university leaders spout empty rhetoric about transformation, the pursuit of justice, and responsiveness to local and global issues, their inaction is more telling of their complicity. Erasure through violence and destruction of both tangible and intangible traces of place and belonging, and denial of sovereignty and personhood are core elements of settler colonialism, whether in the Americas, Australia, Africa, or Palestine. These core elements are inextricably linked to race and ethnicity. Thus, as early as 1917, the discourse of erasure and denial of sovereignty and personhood is already clearly evident in the Balfour Declaration, which not only favoured 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', but also posited the Palestinians as the 'other' in contradistinction to the Jewish people. Historian Avi Shlaim argues that the genocide in Gaza is a 'direct result of the Balfour Declaration'. It set in motion the colonisation of historic Palestine and the systemic erasure of native Palestinians. Whereas Jews constituted only 10% of the population and owned a meagre two per cent of the land by 1917, the so-called British Mandate facilitated the mass invasion of mainly European Jews into Palestine and the displacement of Palestinians. This freed up land for Jewish settlements in historic Palestine to create the state of Israel. This process of colonisation continues to this day, and explains why Britain, despite mass support from its citizens for the national liberation of Palestine, has provided unconditional support to Israel in the commission of the genocide in Gaza since October 2023. Defined by racism, oppression, and brutal violence, the Zionist project in Israel has consistently and continually sought to erase the Palestinian presence in its onward march to 'Greater Israel'. This march to 'Greater Israel' has gathered a violent pace in the past 20 months. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian and foreign aid workers, predominantly Palestinian journalists, medical personnel, teachers, and academics, children, and the old are all cannon fodder to the Israeli march to 'Greater Israel'. The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as 'any of the following acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group' by any means of the following actions: Killing members of the group Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and Forcibly transferring children of one group to another. Israeli actions in Gaza constitute a textbook case of genocide, according to Holocaust scholar, Raz Segal. Yet, like in the case of the genocides of the Harara, Herero, and the San, Western political elites, corporate media, and academics refute and deny the evidence. In the case of Gaza, the denial is particularly startling as the evidence is transmitted daily on social media platforms and independent media. The complicity of the so-called 'democratic free' world of the West is monstrously on display.
