A crew member of the Global Sumud Flotilla shares her experience on board and spreads hope amidst the darkness
When states—and even international organisations—stand idle as genocide unfolds at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, what fills the void? The perpetrator, emboldened, escalates. What began as mass killing transforms into calculated, intentional starvation.
But this absence of state action until the peace agreement was signed on 9 October, created space for something unexpected: a rare flowering of global solidarity, manifesting in the bottom-up movement known as the Global Sumud Flotilla.
“When the world remains silent, we set sail.” With this motto, the Global Sumud Flotilla defines itself as a coalition of everyday people—organisers, humanitarians, doctors, artists, clergy, lawyers, and seafarers—united by a single conviction: the siege and genocide must end. Independent, international, and unaffiliated with any government or political party, their allegiance is to “justice, freedom, and the sanctity of human life.”
Mina Morsán, a 35-year-old social psychologist from Mexico, was one of approximately 500 crew members of the Global Sumud Flotilla who set sail in late August from ports in Spain and Italy in an attempt to break the Israeli siege on Gaza and deliver vital supplies. She was aboard the boat named Shireen, tasked with legal observation and support.
I met Mina by chance on 6 October 2025 in a bustling university courtyard in Nicosia. A Greek Cypriot academic was about to hand her off to a Turkish Cypriot colleague for a tour of northern Nicosia—she’d spent the previous night at an activist lawyer’s home in the south. Here was someone from the far reaches of the Western world who had just traveled to Gaza in the name of solidarity, now being showered with solidarity herself. Throughout our time together, her “comrades”—as they called themselves—kept calling: Had she eaten? Would she make the bus to Pafos for her flight home? If a storm hit, her shipmates were welcome to shelter with them.
Mina had met the captain of Shireen at a Climate Justice Congress in Milan two years earlier. When the captain called her that summer to say she’d been asked to lead the boat accompanying the Sumud Flotilla, she invited Mina to join.
Life on the boat
Solidarity was at the core of the journey in every way, according to Mina. Even though the Shireen had its own stock of food and supplies, the fleet was organized so that boats could help one another. “If you were running out of coffee and your neighboring boat was short of bread, you could communicate and exchange,” Mina explained.
Some boats were big, others smaller, so some carried more supplies than others. “We were carrying lawyers and medics. If needed, they could change to another boat.” Mina supported not only the Shireen’s crew but any other boat that needed help, in whatever way she could. As a keen diver, she would freedive with fins and a mask to check boats for signs of sabotage. “One time they had put chains and ropes in the propeller of a boat, which broke it and wasted them a lot of time,” she said. Her familiarity with the sea also made her capable of helping comrades who got seasick. During her month aboard Shireen, she cleaned, fixed whatever needed fixing, and did whatever else was required.
“Everyone could be useful in a mission like this,” Mina said. “You are an engineer, a captain, a lawyer, a medic, a diver—anyone could have something to offer there.” She paused, laughing. “Of course, engineers were popular. Social psychologists were not that popular.”
Mina recalls looking at the stars, trying to spot drones. “I’m a star and binocular psycho,” she says. “My best friend was the binoculars, and my favorite shift was 4 a.m. till 8 a.m., when I was just looking at the sky all night as much as I could. I was like, ‘Okay, this is the fourth drone. They’re gonna crash onto us. Oh no, they didn’t. Are they coming?’ And if they were approaching, I would tell whoever was with me, ‘Hey, let’s keep an eye on that.’”
Every day they tried to cook nice meals, utilising whatever they had available, Mina says. It was their way of taking care of each other—through food and music, and frequent check-ins to make sure everyone was okay. Two of her comrades from Palestine taught the rest Palestinian songs at night under the stars.
It was a bit like camping, Mina explains. “When you are surrounded by darkness and maybe dangerous things out there, but you are with people you trust and singing sounds and things like that.” The presence of other boats around was also comforting, she adds. “It was like, we’re together in a very dark place, out of our comfort zone, for sure, but we’re together, and yeah, what are you gonna do? Turn around and go home? Not possible anymore.”
To Mina, that was the ultimate form of solidarity.
All I could respond was how impressive I found it that the anarchists, leftists from all over the globe had come together and actually put into practice all of its beliefs for this one cause.
“I would expect this to happen in the anarchist world,” Mina responds, without flinching.
What struck Mina most profoundly wasn’t what happened on the water, but what rippled back home. In Mexico, friends from privileged backgrounds—people she describes as living in a bubble, often blind to injustice even in their own country—suddenly began paying attention to Palestine. Because someone they knew had gone there, the cause became real, even legitimate. For her wealthy, Catholic friends to see beyond their insulated world and recognize this as a humanitarian issue aligned with their own values felt, to Mina, like the mission’s greatest victory.
“People who were never close to the cause are now thinking about it,” she reflects. They know someone -a medic, a graduate student, a diver- who was there. Not a terrorist, just an ordinary person trying to do something. And that personal connection, she believes, dismantles the easiest dismissals. When someone asks, “But what about Hamas?” the answer becomes simple: “I don’t think Mina is in Hamas.”
Drone attacks in Tunisia
One of the darkest moments of the trip, she admits, was when two boats were attacked by Israeli drones while in Tunisia. According to Mina, one of the drones hit a Mexican comrade’s boat. “He was away at that moment, but it was his boat, so it was close enough, and it was really dangerous. And everyone, of course, was super stressed, but nobody was taking a step back. Everyone was like, ‘Okay, this is getting dark, but we will keep forward.’” Following the attacks, everyone on her boat was more alert, as they were leading the way at that time, she said.
Some media reported that the drone attacks in Tunisia were most likely controlled by Israeli submarines following the Flotilla. “People were saying, ‘I’ve seen a lot of bubbles,’ and we were like, ‘Nah, don’t be paranoid,’” Mina said. What happened next proves, in her opinion, that the Israeli army could go to another country and attack boats with international flags with no remorse, and most worryingly, or consequences.
After Tunisia, Flotilla participants spiked from 300 to almost 500 people representing around 46 countries, Mina says. They were forced to dock in Italy for safety reasons before moving on with their journey, and support poured in from every corner. “People were really trying to help the mission,” Mina says. “Even the people that sold us the life rafts for the boats, they were like, ‘Oh, you’re going with the Flotilla, okay, let’s just skip this [bureaucratic process]. We’ll move it forward for you.’ Everyone was doing their best to be part [of our efforts].”
Societal support to the movement
That’s when the real pressure on local governments started. “If we miss communication with you, we’re gonna stop the country,” Mina recalls politicians and unionists saying. And they did so before anything had happened to the Flotilla again. According to Reuters and BBC, some 300,000–400,000 people marched in Rome in solidarity with the people of Gaza during a general strike. People held banners with slogans like “Stop the Massacre” and “Hands off the Flotilla!”
There were around 40 Italians aboard the Flotilla ships. Among the protests that unraveled in cities across Italy, dockworkers in Naples blockaded the port and protesters in Turin pulled metal barriers onto railways. People supporting the cause of the Global Sumud Flotilla and the end of the genocide in Gaza were able to paralyze the EU’s third most populous state.
But it wasn’t just in Italy where people took charge. Following the example of Italians, Greeks too took to the streets in a powerful show of solidarity with the Palestinian people and the efforts of the Global Sumud Flotilla to end the Israeli siege. Workers at the Piraeus port in Athens decided on 3 October to go on a 24-hour work strike denouncing the Israeli attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla in Tunisia. The call to strike was initiated by Palestinian and anti-war organizations but was quickly picked up by trade unionists, workers and students, health workers, teachers, and port workers.
Both the Italian and Greek governments even sent their navies to escort the Flotilla on its way out of their countries. Though it was uncertain whether they did so because of societal pressure, the symbolism of their presence alone might have prevented the Flotilla from being attacked again- this time in European waters and airspace. Mina was unsure too. “None of us trusts the governments,” she said. But she seemed sure of one thing: “People have had enough.”
A failure for the flotilla, a win for humanity
The boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla were intercepted by the Israeli army on 3–4 October. Every crew member on board at that time -437 activists, parliamentarians, and lawyers from across the globe- were arrested and held in detention for several days under questionable conditions. Mina was luckily not one of them, as the legal observation boat she was aboard had spotted the drones gathering above the fleet early enough to change route and dock in Pafos.
Once communication among them was interrupted by the drones, all they had left were their Signal messaging groups. The last messages Mina recalls were “We’re seeing them approaching,” before her comrades threw their phones in the sea so they wouldn’t fall into the army’s hands. All they could do at that point, Mina says, was wish them good luck.
During our time together, she didn’t know the fate of her Mexican comrades. It was later that night, as we rushed to get her to the bus to Pafos so that she could catch her flight, that she received a message saying they were all okay.
“Getting all of these people from so many cultures, languages, nationalities organizing to try to break the siege was a clear message to the countries”, she had told me during our interview. “Your state has the resources and the political status, the power to do this the proper way, but it doesn’t do it. We are trying. States are not even trying.”
Instead of a closure, I asked Mina to send a message to someone who supports Israel’s actions in Gaza. She said she wanted to remind them to ask themselves “who’s winning from this hatred, and if it is indeed solving the threats that the Israeli population has faced since it existed.”
“Is this making Israel safer?” she asks. “I believe that Jewish people should be able to live freely and in a respected way wherever they are. You need to be respected because you’re a human being, not because you belong to a particular state.”
The story was originally published on In-Cyprus.com
ΜΙΚΡΕΣ, ΚΑΚΕΣ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΕΣ 