Malta Sends 500 Tonnes of Flour to Gaza Ahead of Historic Palestine Recognition

Flour from Malta reaches Gaza ahead of recognition of Palestinian state
By Hot Malta Staff

VALLETTA – On a humid Tuesday morning, the MV Lifeline 3 slipped out of Malta Freeport with 500 tonnes of Maltese-milled flour bound for Gaza. By Friday, the sacks—stamped with a discreet eight-pointed cross and the words “Il-Ħobż tal-Paċi, Malta”—were being off-loaded at Al-Arish and trucked to Rafah. The shipment, coordinated by the Malta-Palestine Community Network (MPCN) and funded by €350,000 raised in village bake-sales, band-club benefit concerts and a single anonymous donation from a Gozitan olive-oil dynasty, arrives just days before Malta is expected to formally recognise the State of Palestine on 28 May.

For a country that still measures history in sieges and supply lines, sending bread to a besieged strip feels less like charity and more like continuity. “We know what it is to starve,” says 82-year-old Carmenu Xuereb, who as a boy queued for kerosene and American powdered milk during World War II. “My nanna mixed crushed broad-bean pods with whatever flour she had. Today we can share the real thing.”

The flour itself is a soft-wheat blend grown in the northern wheat belt of Canada, shipped raw to the Maltese islands and stone-ground at the 400-year-old mill in Żurrieq that once fed the Knights’ galley fleet. Mill-owner Aaron Micallef waived his fee, insisting only that each 25 kg sack carry the word “għaqda”—unity—stencilled in Arabic as well as Maltese. “Bread is the first thing cut in a siege,” he says, brushing white dust off his jeans. “We’re putting it back.”

From hipster sourdough bakeries in Sliema to the qassatat stalls outside Gozo’s Victoria market, the Gaza shipment has sparked a national conversation about Malta’s own food security. Supermarket shelves emptied by the pandemic and February’s Libya-bound grain-blockade scare are still fresh memories. “We import 80 % of what we eat,” warns Dr. Marthese Portelli, head of the Food Systems Unit at MCAST. “This gesture reminds us how intertwined we are.”

Schools have latched on. At St. Benedict’s College in Kirkop, Year 9 students spent last week baking 1,000 miniature ħobża biż-żejt, sold for €2 each to finance a second flour convoy. “They asked why Gaza can’t just grow wheat,” says teacher Rania Ali, whose father fled Jaffa in 1948. “We opened Google Earth and zoomed in on the buffer zone—14 % of arable land, irrigation pipes bombed. The room went quiet.”

The timing is political, but the impulse predates parliament. Maltese solidarity with Palestine runs through folk memory: the 1947 dockworkers who refused to load British munitions destined for Haifa; Dom Mintoff’s 1973 expulsion of the Israeli ambassador; the annual Bethlehem-in-Birgu Christmas cribs that swap the Three Kings for Palestinian doctors, farmers and teachers. In 2021, when Israeli shells damaged Gaza’s only flour mill, Maltese NGOs sent wheat berries and spare sieves. This year they escalated to finished flour because, as MPCN chairperson Leila Hassan puts it, “you can’t eat symbolism.”

Yet symbolism still matters. On Sunday, parish priests in ten churches read a bilingual prayer for “those who break bread under falling skies.” In Valletta’s Is-Suq tal-Belt food hall, baker Johann Farrugia has created a limited-edition “Gaza loaf” using the same protein-rich blend: crusty outside, tender crumb, proceeds to UNRWA. By 10 a.m. the queue snakes past the old butcher’s stall. “People want to taste what sharing feels like,” Farrugia says, scoring another oval with a blade shaped like a Maltese cross.

Recognition of Palestine will be debated in parliament under a portrait of Tony Zahra, the Maltese father of UN peacekeeping who once described neutrality as “the art of taking sides with the victim.” Government sources say the motion will pass unanimously, making Malta the 10th EU state to extend full recognition. Foreign Minister Ian Borg told HOT Malta the flour shipment “sets the moral tone: we feed first, formalise second.”

Back in Żurrieq, Aaron Micallef watches the last pallets disappear into a container. “My grandfather milled for the Relief Convoy of 1942,” he says. “Same stones, same sea, same fear of empty bellies. Eighty years on, the bread is going the other way. Maybe that’s what growing up as a nation looks like.”

The mill’s ancient wheel keeps turning, white as the limestone walls around it, carrying Malta’s smallest export—hope, one sack at a time.