“We have been here for four days,” says South African writer and academic Jessica Breakey in a voice note sent from the Libyan desert where she and hundreds of volunteers are stuck as they attempt to deliver aid to Gaza. In the background is the sound of people chatting, organising, and singing songs for Palestine.
“There are no toilets. But this is a really interesting, significant story about something that’s happening at the top of Africa. And that no one is really talking about.”
Breakey is part of the hundreds-strong caravan attempting to reach Gaza by road to deliver ambulances, medical supplies, baby formula, food and reconstruction materials. She sends voice notes whenever the signal holds, taking advantage of the brief moments when communications are not jammed. Those fragments, sent from one of the most dangerous regions in the world, tell a story of courage, solidarity and determined resistance.
The land convoy is part of the wider Global Sumud Flotilla initiative, a civilian effort to challenge Israel’s siege of Gaza by sea and land. Organisers say the point of the flotilla is not only to deliver aid, but to confront the systems that have created this humanitarian crisis: the siege, Israeli occupation and the international complicity that sustains both. The convoy’s ultimate destination is Gaza. But for now they are simply trying to get to Rafah. The crossing point near Palestine’s border with Egypt, they argue, should function as a people’s corridor, not a gate opened and closed at the will of Israeli authorities charged with carrying out genocide.
The route itself is part of the action: a moving act of solidarity across North Africa aimed to build public pressure and awareness at a time when media attention has shifted away from the crisis in Palestine.
Breakey’s journey began in Mauritania in the Western Sahara, moving through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia before reaching Libya. In Tripoli, international participants gathered in a camp to prepare the ambulances, trucks and aid. The convoy, she says, moved through western Libya, stopping in the “beautiful town” of Zliten, where residents lined the streets, welcomed them into a mosque and fed them. Here, Nelson Mandela’s grandson and fellow convoy traveller Mandla Mandela addressed a convoy press conference in Zliten, linking the mission to the anti-apartheid tradition of international solidarity.
But now, the convoy is stranded near Sirte, in an area still marked by Libya’s years of war and political fragmentation. Having negotiated its way through previous stops and roadblocks, Libyan militias manning the checkpoint outside Sirte made clear the convoy would not be allowed to continue.
“We were told to pull over,” Breakey says. “And that is where we have been for four days.”
They are now stuck at what Breakey describes as “a small petrol station in the middle of the desert, with abandoned buildings in a former war zone”. It is hot and windy. Food and water are being rationed. And there is no sanitation.
With no toilets, convoy participants pooled their diverse skills to build them. “They went and made pipes,” Beakey says. “They fixed the lights, they fixed the electrical, they fixed the plumbing.” No one gave orders. “They just did it. And they’re doing it for the whole community.”
The camp, Breakey said, has become a small, improvised study in collective care under pressure. Comrades, friends and fellow travellers from around the world have gathered in a desert in north Africa to create a moment of truly international solidarity in an example of what is possible when ordinary people spontaneously self-organise.
Bilal, a chef from Algeria, has become the soul of the camp. Even with food running low and rations being carefully shared, he is always by the fire, always cooking, always making people laugh. He told Breakey that his “big dream” is to go to Gaza and cook for the people there to share his heritage. His mother was a cook, his grandfather was a cook, and he has cooked himself since he was a toddler.
The convoy’s diversity is its strength, according to Felipe, a 29-year-old philosophy student from Chile who is half-Palestinian. The more people join from different backgrounds, he told Breakey, the more creative and powerful the movement becomes.
“We don’t even need to speak the same language,” Breakey recalls him saying. “We have developed a common language – and shared aims for Palestine.”
Eya is a Tunisian architect, who tells Breakey she did not become an architect to build “big fancy buildings”, but to work in post-war reconstruction. That is why she is here. “To rebuild people’s homes after genocide.”
‘Not stopping people’s determination’
Working in parallel with the convoy is a seabound flotilla. Both are part of the same wider refusal to allow Gaza to be cut off from the world. As Breakey puts it: “By land and by sea, Palestine will be free.”
For many in the camp, the connection between the two groups is personal. Many have colleagues, siblings and best friends on the boats.
Reuters reported this week that Israeli forces intercepted all 50 boats in the sea flotilla in the eastern Mediterranean, with flotilla organisers saying 428 participants from more than 40 countries were detained. Organisers said Israeli forces opened fire at least twice, while Israel said no live ammunition was used and no protesters were injured.
The Guardian reported that Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, released footage of detained sea flotilla activists being abused, including being forced into stress positions, prompting international condemnation. The European Commission called the treatment shown in the video “completely unacceptable”.
The dangers to the convoy are clear. But, says Breakey, “even the worry about their safety, and our own safety is not stopping people’s determination to reach Rafah.”
This is not the first time volunteers have tried to deliver aid to Gaza via this dangerous desert route. Last year thousands joined a similar attempt. As in this case, the convoy was stopped at Sirte. For those currently waiting in Libya, the need to go beyond Sirte has taken on huge psychological weight. “I think just psychologically, it’s a lot,” Breakey says. “Yesterday [Tuesday] was the hardest day for me since we have been here.”
On Tuesday, the convoy sent a small delegation – 18 people from ten countries, travelling in two ambulances – to deliver a letter requesting safe passage. The journey was only seven kilometres but it meant moving towards the gates of Sirte, past armed forces and militias.
“It was very hard to decide who was going to go,” she says.
The letter, sent by Maghreb Sumud and the Global Sumud Flotilla Steering Committee to the Libyan government and Red Crescent – an international development NGO – describes the convoy as a “specialised international humanitarian relief convoy”, carrying trucks, ambulances and mobile accommodation units, with participants including doctors, engineers, educators, lawyers, media professionals and humanitarian volunteers.
It asks Libyan authorities to ensure “safe and uninterrupted passage” through Sirte, Benghazi and on to the Sallum border crossing, with no “obstruction, detention, intimidation, confiscation, or harassment”.
Now the convoy is waiting for a response.
When the delegation returned safely, Breakey says, “the absolute relief was quite something”.
‘We are learning from Palestinians’
On the first day of the journey, Breakey remembers, organisers asked people to stand if they had previously been on a flotilla and detained by the Israeli military. “Half the room stood up.” Then they asked who had done the convoy before and been besieged. “Eventually everyone was standing.”
Among them was a Turkish search-and-rescue worker who had been on the Mavi Marmara in 2010 and was shot during the raid. The Mavi Marmara was part of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla raided by Israeli forces in 2010. The assault killed 10 Turkish activists.
“What I think is particularly interesting and significant about this one is that this is led predominantly by organisers in the Maghreb,” Breakey says. This land convoy is organised by people from North Africa with “decades-long political entanglements and solidarities with Palestine”.
“Everything we are learning here,” she says, “we are learning from Palestinians. North Africans are singing songs of Palestinian liberation,” she says.
But for now, they wait. Their request to Libyan authorities is the same as it will be to the Israeli authorities should the convoy make it to Rafah: Let us pass.
