Middle East Monitor / May 17, 2021
Italian workers in the port of Livorno have refused to load a shipment of arms destined for Israel, it has been reported. “The port of Livorno will not be an accomplice in the massacre of the Palestinian people,” said L’Unione Sindacale di Base, an Italian trade union of port workers.
According to Wafa news agency, it was a report by The Weapon Watch, a Genoa-based NGO that monitors arms shipments in European and Mediterranean ports, which tipped off the union about the destination of the ship in question and its cargo.
The union pointed out that the shipment contained “weapons and explosives that will serve to kill the Palestinian population, already hit by a severe attack this very night, which caused hundreds of civilian casualties, including many children.”
It added that it is organizing an event in solidarity with the Palestinians and to call for an immediate end to the Israeli raids on Gaza and the confiscation of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.
Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah has sparked outrage in occupied Palestine and around the world.
The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, responded to the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and Israeli attacks on worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque during the month of Ramadan by firing rockets toward Israel. The occupation state has retaliated with a deadly military offensive on the Gaza Strip, killing 198 people so far, including 58 children and 34 women. Ten Israelis, two of them children, have been killed by the rockets fired from Gaza.
