Activists fast for 35 hours outside Castille in solidarity with Gaza siege

**Thirty-five hours without food, water, or shade: Valletta vigil links Malta to Gaza’s hunger**

By 8am yesterday the plastic chairs outside Malta’s Prime Minister’s office already looked baked by the sun. A circle of activists—some barefoot, some in kufiyyas, one cradling a toddler—sat in silence, refusing the bottles of water passers-by offered. They had been there since 9pm the night before, launching a 35-hour solidarity fast to echo the humanitarian “hunger clock” now ticking inside the Gaza Strip.

Organisers from the Maltese-Palestinian Friendship Society (MPFS) and the grassroots collective Moviment Graffitti say the length of the protest—35 hours—symbolises the 35 days that UN agencies warn remain before northern Gaza faces full-blown famine. “We are not pretending to suffer like Palestinians,” said MPFS coordinator Yasmin Abela, her voice cracking after 14 hours without water. “But we can give our bodies, our stomachs, our public space, so the issue is not reduced to another headline we scroll past.”

The choice of Castille was deliberate. Malta may be Europe’s smallest state, yet it wields a vote in every EU council discussion on humanitarian pauses, arms-export licences and Red-Cross access. Activists handed a letter to a junior government official demanding that Malta endorse immediate sanctions on arms sales to Israel and reopen the Maltese search-and-rescue corridor that once ferried wounded children from Gaza to St. Luke’s Hospital. “We are not asking for charity,” said 24-year-old architecture student Mireille Farrugia, who took annual leave to fast. “We want policy, not platitudes.”

### A Mediterranean mirror

For older Maltese, the imagery of a naval blockade cutting off food and medicine carries uncomfortable echoes. In 1940-42 Axis bombers and an Italian naval siege brought Malta to the brink of starvation; the monthly bread ration dipped to 280g per adult. “My nanna still hoards rice because she remembers hunger,” said Labour MP Rosianne Cutajar, who stopped by with a handwritten message from party leader Robert Abela. “We are a nation that survived on humanitarian convoys; now we must be the convoy.”

The cultural resonance is not lost on tourists. British visitor Claire Hodges, 58, asked her tour guide why locals were sleeping on cardboard beneath the baroque façade of Auberge de Castille. When told, she cancelled her Gozo jeep safari and joined the vigil for three hours. “I expected Malta to be beaches and temples,” she said. “Instead I found the moral compass my own government has lost.”

### Community impact

By evening the square had morphed into an open-air university. Palestinian chefs living in St. Julian’s demonstrated how to stretch a single sack of flour into 400 flatbreads; Maltese bakers responded by pledging 200 loaves a week to refugee centres. A Gozitan farmer arrived with crates of tomatoes, silently placing them in a display labelled “Not for consumption—see what Gazans lack.” Children from Valletta primary school tied 2,000 orange ribbons to the railings, one for every reported child amputated without anaesthetic.

The fast also reignited debate inside Malta’s churches. Archbishop Charles Scicluna tweeted a prayer at dawn, prompting parish priests in Żejtun and Rabat to open their cloisters as rest points. “Solidarity fasting is in our DNA,” Fr. Joe Mifsud told Times of Malta, referencing the traditional Maltese “ġimgħa l-morda” Friday fast for the sick. By midnight, 400 people had signed up to relay-fast in their homes once the Castille vigil ended.

### Political ripples

The protest produced immediate, if modest, results. Foreign Minister Ian Borg’s office confirmed Malta will co-sponsor an EU resolution calling for “unimpeded humanitarian access” and has offered the island’s new €8-million maritime field hospital as a floating surgical unit off Gaza. Critics say the pledge stops short of endorsing an arms embargo, but activists see a wedge. “For years Malta claimed it was too small to shape Middle-East policy,” said Moviment Graffitti’s Andre Callus, breaking his fast with a single date at 6am. “Tonight we proved that a handful of citizens outside Castille can shift the Overton window in 35 hours.”

As the sun rose over the Grand Harbour, the circle of chairs emptied, leaving only a pile of orange ribbons fluttering like prayer flags. Taxi drivers honked in support; a jogger shouted “Għajnsielem sent us breakfast!” and placed two bottles of water—still sealed—at the foot of the monument. They were never opened, but they sent a message: in a country that once survived on convoys, the convoy now starts at home.