Global March to Gaza is a moral reckoning
More than 2,000 people – 55 from South Africa – have converged in Egypt in a show of international solidarity.
This week, I joined a South African delegation en route to the Rafah border in Egypt as part of the Global March to Gaza — a peaceful international mobilisation demanding an end to Israel's siege and the immediate opening of humanitarian corridors.
We are not here as observers. We are here to demand life for Gaza.
More than 2,000 activists have converged in Egypt in a coordinated show of international solidarity. South Africa is represented by a 55-person delegation comprising civil society leaders and grassroots activists — one of more than 50 national groupings unified in this global effort. Together, we will walk nearly 50km across the Sinai Desert toward Rafah, Gaza's last, closed lifeline.
This is no symbolic journey. It is a moral reckoning.
Since October 2023, Israel's unrelenting assault on Gaza has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians. Thousands more remain buried beneath the rubble. Tens of thousands have been maimed, orphaned or injured. Nearly the entire population of Gaza — 2.2 million people — is being starved. According to the United Nations, less than a third of the required humanitarian aid is making it through.
In early May, an estimated 500 trucks were needed each day to sustain life in Gaza. In recent weeks, that number has plummeted to fewer than 100. Some days, none arrive.
We are marching to say: Let the aid in. End the siege. Let Gaza live.
We are not alone in this call. Early this week, Israeli naval forces seized the
MV Madaleen
— a vessel carrying aid and 12 international activists, including 22-year-old Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg — intercepting it in international waters and towing it to Ashdod. The yacht, part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was en route to Gaza with medical supplies, baby formula and essential foodstuffs. Its capture has been condemned as an act of piracy by human rights groups. As the sea is closed, so too is the sand, reinforcing the systematic isolation of Gaza from every direction.
The Global March to Gaza, running from 13 to 19 June, is a high-profile action that brings together a broad constellation of global solidarity — activists, health professionals, scholars and civilians — united by one shared conviction: the world can no longer look away.
This morning, 13 June, delegations from across the world will leave Cairo for al-Arish, a city in Egypt's North Sinai region roughly 344km from Rafah. From there, we begin the 48km Global Walk to Gaza — a multi-day overland march through the desert. We will walk during the cooler hours of early morning and evening, resting overnight in tents — tents that will later be donated as part of the aid package for Gaza.
At Rafah, we will establish a protest encampment, holding vigils and staging peaceful sit-ins over several days to demand the opening of the crossing. We are expected to return to Cairo on 19 June. But the march's goal is not simply to arrive at Rafah. It is to hold space. To create pressure. And to break the silence.
Alongside us is the Soumoud convoy, an independent land convoy made up of volunteers from Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. Travelling from Tunis across North Africa, the convoy brings humanitarian supplies and messages of solidarity. It is an act of regional mobilisation grounded in a single word —
soumoud
, or steadfastness.
Saif AbuKeshek, chair of the march's international committee, says the march was born out of people's growing refusal to accept government complicity. 'People are no longer willing to tolerate their governments' silence while a people continues to be annihilated,' he told organisers. 'That's where our pressure is going: for the international complicity in the genocide.'
For South Africans, this march carries particular weight. We come from a nation that knows too well the brutality of repression and the necessity of international solidarity. Our government's referral of Israel to the International Court of Justice was a bold act of legal principle. This march is its moral mirror. It is the people's turn to take a stand.
We walk because Gaza is not just a humanitarian crisis—it is a test of the world's moral compass. We walk because silence is complicity. We walk because starvation must never be a tool of war. And we walk so that the world cannot say, 'We did not know.'
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