Health Workers Picket for Flotilla to Be Protected

Dozens of people, many of them health workers, picketed outside Red Cross Hospital on Thursday.

Dozens of people picketed outside the Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Rondebosch, Cape Town on Thursday. It was one of several hospitals where members of Healthcare Workers 4 Palestine-South Africa (HCW4P-SA) protested, calling for the protection of the Global Sumud Flotilla. The flotilla is attempting to deliver aid to Gaza.

They also demanded boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, including the suspension of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) from the World Medical Association (WMA).

A letter by HCW4P-SA addressed to South African health care institutions states: “Over the last two years, as Israel’s destruction of Gaza has accelerated, these appeals have intensified. The death toll now exceeds 65,000 officially recorded deaths.”

“History provides us with guidance. During the era of apartheid, international boycotts were critical in isolating South Africa and in pressuring its medical and scientific institutions to align with global ethical norms,” the letter states.

“The Commonwealth Medical Association rightly expelled South Africa for its medical complicity in racist policies while the World Medical Association, to its ongoing shame, failed to take appropriate action.”

Professor Usuf Chikte, coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), called for sanctions against Israel. “We want Israel to be isolated. It is a pariah state.”

He called for South Africa to follow the example of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has expelled Israeli diplomats.

On Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters off the coast of Gaza reinforces Israel’s continued “violation of international law and infliction of suffering, including starvation, on the Palestinian people”.

“This action also violates an International Court of Justice injunction that humanitarian aid must be allowed to flow unimpeded,” he said.

Those detained included Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela. Activist Greta Thunberg’s boat was also intercepted by the Israeli navy.

© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.