Maltese MEPs meet former Palestine prime minister amidst Gaza ‘genocide’

Maltese MEPs Meet Former Palestine Prime Minister Amidst Gaza ‘Genocide’: A Mediterranean Island’s Cry for Justice

In a dimly lit conference room at the European Parliament’s Brussels headquarters last Tuesday, Maltese MEPs Alex Agius Saliba and Josianne Cutajar sat opposite Dr. Rami Hamdallah, former Prime Minister of the State of Palestine. Over strong Arabic coffee served in delicate glass cups, the three islanders—two from a limestone speck in the middle of the Mediterranean, one from a land under siege—found common language in shared histories of colonisation, resilience, and an unbreakable attachment to the sea that laps at both Gaza’s and Gozo’s shores.

The meeting, hastily arranged after Israel’s latest escalation pushed the Palestinian death toll past 34,000, was small but symbolically weighty. For Malta, whose own collective memory is scarred by the 1565 Great Siege and the 1940s blitz, the imagery of an entire population trapped under bombardment resonates viscerally. “When I look at Gaza’s skyline, I see Valletta in 1942,” Agius Saliba told Hot Malta afterwards, voice cracking. “Our grandparents hid in catacombs; Palestinians now shelter in hospital basements. Geography changes, but the human story repeats.”

Local NGOs had spent the previous weekend in Marsa’s refugee centre packing boxes of Maltese tinned tuna, sea-salt crackers, and hand-written letters in Maltese, English, and Arabic for the next flotilla heading to Gaza. The Knights of Malta’s 16th-century mission to “protect the faith and succour the sick” has evolved into 21st-century humanitarian convoys, and the meeting in Brussels was the political coda to that grassroots effort. Cutajar, herself born in Sliema but tracing family roots back to Egyptian traders who once used the Grand Harbour, spoke of “duty written in limestone and salt.” She pressed Hamdallah on what concrete pressure Malta, the EU’s smallest state, could realistically exert.

Hamdallah’s answer was as pragmatic as it was emotional: “Malta carries moral weight disproportionate to its size. When you speak, the Mediterranean listens.” He cited the 2019 UN resolution that Malta co-sponsored on protecting Palestinian children, noting that the tiny archipelago had punched above its diplomatic weight. For Maltese listeners, the compliment stirred national pride—memories of Dom Mintoff thundering at the UN in 1973, insisting, “Malta is not a client state.” That same spirit animated Tuesday’s meeting: an insistence that geography does not dictate destiny.

Meanwhile, back home, the Maltese-Palestinian Friendship Society screened the Oscar-nominated documentary “No Other Land” at Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta on Wednesday night. The theatre sold out; elderly couples who once sheltered in the wartime tunnels queued alongside TikTok-generation activists wearing keffiyehs bought from the same Luqa market stalls that sell festa bandanas. During the Q&A, a 19-year-old student from Mosta asked Hamdallah via live link what single image he would want Mediterranean youth to remember Gaza by. The former PM paused, then described fishermen at dawn “casting nets while drones buzz overhead—because hope, like tuna, must still be chased.”

Community impact is already visible. The University of Malta’s Faculty of Theology announced a new scholarship for Palestinian students specialising in maritime law—an academic echo of the island’s centuries-old role as a legal crossroads. Parish churches in Birkirkara and Żebbuġ will ring their bells in unison on Friday at noon, a gesture borrowed from the 1989 peace rallies that marked Malta’s Independence Day. And the band club in Għaxaq, rehearsing for next month’s village festa, has woven a traditional “ġilwa” rhythm into its set—claiming the Arabic maqam scale as Malta’s own sonic solidarity.

Critics argue Malta risks overextending itself, that a country of 516,000 souls cannot solve a conflict older than its own Republic. Yet the Maltese response, steeped in Catholic social teaching and maritime identity, is that small islands survive by forging alliances across the waves. As the meeting concluded, Hamdallah gifted the MEPs a fragment of a destroyed Gaza fishing boat, its blue paint blistered but still recognisably Mediterranean. Agius Saliba held it up like a relic. “From the same sea that gave us lampuki season,” he said. “We will not look away.”