A flotilla of defiance in Gaza’s endless night

I SIT here, staring at the screen, the glow casting shadows that feel too much like the ones etched into my soul these past months. It’s September, and the world spins on, coffee sipped in cafes, deadlines met in boardrooms, while in Gaza, the earth itself weeps blood.

- VANESSA GOVENDER

Govender is an author of the children’s book, The Selfish Shongololo, the bestselling memoir, Beaten But Not Broken, and the recently released memoir, The Village Indian.

Satellite images don't lie; they scream. Entire neighbourhoods in Gaza City, once alive with the laughter of children chasing kites now lie as rubble-strewn graves. Over 64 000 souls extinguished since October 2023, a number that is in all likelihood much higher, 163 503 more carrying wounds that fester in the silence of indifference.

And the children. One hundred and thirty, starved to whispers by a famine Israel has engineered with surgical cruelty. I close my eyes, and I see them: tiny hands clutching empty bowls, eyes hollowed by a hunger that gnaws deeper than bombs. How did we get here? How did a people, resilient as the ancient cedars of Lebanon, become pawns in a theater of endless atrocity?

Netanyahu’s voice echoes like a dirge: no Palestinian state, ever. Evacuation orders rain down on Gaza City, herding a million souls south to a strip of land already choked with the displaced, where “safe zones” dissolve into kill boxes. Yet here I am, an ocean away, fingers trembling over keys, wondering if my rage is enough. It’s not. It never has been.

But in this abyss, a flicker: the Global Sumud Flotilla. Oh, that name, Sumud, steadfastness. It stirs something primal in me, an ache that blooms into fire. Launched on August 31 from ports across the Mediterranean, this armada of over 50 vessels, carrying delegations from 44 countries and more than 1 000 activists.