TAREK FROM GAZA TO ITALY
"100 Harbors – 100 Cities" is an initiative of Freedom Flotilla Italia. Since it is not possible to reach Gaza because of the illegal Israeli blockade, the idea of the campaign is to do the opposite, bringing Gaza into different Italian cities through the Flotilla.
On 27 May 2026 the boat named after Ghassan Kanafani arrived in Naples. There we met with Tarek AlFarra, a student from Khan Yunis and survivor of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He arrived in Italy six months ago, after completing a bachelor’s degree in English language in the midst of the war. During the genocide he taught English to children in the Strip, allowing them not only to further—or even start—their education, in one of the most highly educated areas in West Asia, but also providing them a way to escape from the harshest reality. Building the schools upon the rubble of the destroyed city, with those children hungry to study also because at home they had to do their parents’ jobs, is one of Tarek’s dearest memories.
‘Gaza was like a five-star prison’ before being subjected to the fury of the peak of the incremental genocide, starting in 1948: ‘we had 8 hours of electricity, universities, schools, hospitals... But at the same time everything was limited: all the necessities, food, supplies, everything was controlled by the occupation. At any time you could find the borders closed and yourself trapped. We were living in instability: you could wake up in the morning to find your neighborhood bombed for no reason’.
Violations of international law and the restrictions on the movement of people and essential goods started way before 2023. To be specific, after the agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1979, the most recent and decisive restrictions to close and isolate Gaza formally started in 1991, after the First Intifada, a largely peaceful popular mass uprising preceding the Oslo agreements.
Then, after October 2023, they systematically used ‘the excuse of the political party’ (meaning Hamas) ‘to destroy everything and to kill anybody, without caring if they were children or old people’. We have seen how those excuses were pushed beyond imagination: just think of the sadistic traps for human beings sold as “humanitarian distribution centers”. And also the ceasefire is ‘fake, an excuse to keep killing’.
But the occupation's death-laden intentions did not stop the desire to live. Proof of that is the children to whom Tarek taught English in schools built on the rubble of destroyed lives. But the desire to live does not suffice: we need justice! That is why ‘a strategy to stop the occupation all over the world, not only in Palestine’ is needed. Otherwise the violations of the most basic rights we have seen in Gaza ‘will reach you’, Tarek warns. And even if this gloomy prediction does not spread beyond the borders of West Asia, stopping this massacre is still a moral imperative, before being a pragmatic one. ‘It is not a political question anymore, it is about humanity. You cannot stand between justice or injustice, between black or white. There is no gray in this area now’.
At
the end of the interview I felt an urgency to say to Tarek that I was
sorry because, as an Italian, I had failed personally and
collectively to put sufficient pressure on my government to stop
funding the genocide. That is why we need to multiply our efforts and
to experiment with new tactics or strategies, so that the minimum
legal safeguards are restored: they are not a destination for our
society, but rather a necessary starting point.
Paolo
Maria Addabbo
Find the full interview on our YouTube channel, and also on PeerTube, a part of the Fediverse, the self-managed alternative to mainstream platforms, which are complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
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