- The Global Smud Flotilla To Gaza, First Hand Experiences and Stories – Hear First Hand Account From Canadian Activists Who Went There in May 2026
- Zoom Webinar – Panel Discussion
- Join us on July 21 at 7 pm EST for this Zoom Webinar – Panel Discussion
OPSEU/SEFPO’s Coalition of Racialized Work will be hosting The Global March Global Smud Flotilla To Gaza, First Hand Experiences & Stories webinar.
In cooperation with Global Smud Canada, this is a panel discussion including four Canadian activists who went all the way to participate in the Global Smud Flotilla in order to break Israel’s siege on Gaza and demand a Humanitarian Corridor for the Palestinian People in May of 2026. The activists were kidnapped in international water, detained and tortured by Israeli military forces in a blatant violation of human rights and international law.
From the press conference that the Canadian delegation to the Global March to Gaza held with supporting MPs on June 3, 2026 on Parliament Hill, the statement of the Statement of Ehab Lotayef, spokesperson of Canadian Boat to Gaza.:
“For Canada to do nothing consequential after Canadian citizens were attacked in international waters, abducted, imprisoned, tortured, injured and terrorized for days by Israel, is an unacceptable insult to Canadian sovereignty. To restore Canada’s dignity among the nations of the world, our government must immediately impose meaningful economic, diplomatic and political sanctions against Israel – against the whole Israeli state, not just individual cabinet ministers”.
The missions in Summer 2025, our Spring 2026 are the largest coordinated civilian maritime effort for Palestine to date: 70+ boats and over a thousand participants from 70+ countries including Canada.
The Global Smud Flotilla is a global movement of everyday people: organizers, humanitarians, doctors, students, union workers, and seafarers uniting across professions and continents to uphold the human dignity and international law that governments have failed to protect.
Our panelists will share their first hand stories about the experiences they faced with the apartheid Israeli regime that kidnapped, tortured, and physically abused the members of the flotilla while they were in international waters. The panellists will discuss why they felt the need to take action themselves to act to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people who are now suffering a man made famine while being gunned down and bombarded from the air by Israel.
Hats off to these courageous activists who went on this trip knowing all the dangers and that they might not come back to their families.
Meet Our Panellists
Safa Chebbi is a decolonial activist and holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her research focuses on urban violence, stigmatization, and processes of subalternization.
For more than fifteen years, she has been actively involved in movements in solidarity with Palestine and in anti-racist organizing in Quebec, grounding her work at the intersection of critical scholarship and grassroots activism.
In the spring of 2024, she was one of the organizers and spokespersons for the student encampments in solidarity with Palestine, notably through the Al-Aqsa Popular University at UQAM and the Al-Soumoud encampment in Montreal’s Victoria Square. In June 2025, amid the intensification of the genocide and following a series of local and national initiatives, she helped expand international solidarity efforts by co-coordinating the Canadian delegation to the Global March to Gaza in Egypt. More recently, she founded Global Sumud Canada and took part in the 2026 Freedom Flotilla, whose participants were intercepted and abducted by Israeli occupation forces.
Her writings focus on Palestine and anti-colonial struggles and have been published in several independent Quebec journals, including Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, À bâbord!, Liberté, Ouvrages, and Pivot, as well as in France through the QG Décolonial and Les Indigènes de la République. She is also a contributor to the collective volume Razing Palestine: Punishing Solidarity and Dissent in Canada (Baraka Books, 2025).
Shahid Mahmood, a Canadian peace activist and software engineer from Belleville, ON, Canada, is the founding member of Belleville for Justice and Peace, a regional group of peace advocates committed to being the voice of the oppressed. The group has organized a series of community events in collaboration with Doctors Against Genocide, Amnesty International, Independent Jewish Voices, and local faith communities, focusing on interfaith dialogue, raising awareness about the plight of Gaza’s healthcare workers, and addressing genocide and starvation in Gaza and Palestine.
On May 18, Mahmood and 19 others aboard the Kasr-I Sadabad vessel were violently abducted in international waters. Masked Israeli soldiers boarded the boat, fired shots, broke windows, destroyed humanitarian aid on board, kidnapped all passengers, and subjected them to humiliation, forced stress positions, starvation, verbal abuse, and physical violence.
Ehab Lotayef is a Canadian IT Manager, poet, writer and community activist, of Egyptian origin
He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering (1981) from Ain-Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. Ehab moved to Canada in 1989, is a father of two and has four grandchildren.
Ehab has been working at McGill University, as an IT manager, since 1999. Before joining McGill, Ehab worked for internationally renowned companies, in Canada and abroad, including Schlumberger, Linotype and Pratt & Whitney.
Ehab is deeply involved in social and community work, including, campaigns against the sanctions and war on Iraq, opposing the blockade of Gaza (organizing and being on board the Freedom Flotilla, 2011, 2015 & 2026) and advocating for Native Rights. Over the years he served on the boards of Egyptian Canadian Coalition for Democracy(Pres.), Muslim Council of Montreal, Muslim Schools of Montreal, the Canadian Arab Federation (V.P.), Fair Vote Canada and the Board of Governors of McGill University; and Montreal City Mission. Ehab is also a founder and former chairperson of both”Muslim Awareness Week” (MAW) and the “Non a la loi 21” (#NL21) campaign. Ehab is a founder and coordinator of Kalemat, a freethinkers’ forum aiming to advocate open dialogue especially among Arabic speakers in Canada.
In 2020 Ehab and his family founded the Dr. Fatma Amer Educational Charity in Canada, in the honor of his late mother, which helps women and girl facing financial challenges in Egypt complete their higher education.
As a poet and writer, Ehab published a bilingual poetry collection: “To Love a Palestinian Woman” (TSAR 2010) and the CBC produced his play “Crossing Gibraltar” in 2006. His writings also appeared in many anthologies and zines and he wrote numerous OpEds on various subjects in many Canadian papers over the years. His Arabic poetry collection “Abwab” (Doors) has just been published by Qanadeel in Baghdad, Iraq. Ehabalso served on the boards of Teesri Duniya Theatre, CKUT Radio and the Quebec Writers Federation .
Luiza Ravalli is a registered nurse, social scientist, community organizer, and militant eco-humanitarian. In addition to nursing, she also has a degree in Global Health and a master’s degree in Social Anthropology. She completed her doctoral coursework in Cultural, Social, and Medical Anthropology at McMaster University but withdrew her candidacy after Year 1 in protest of the university’s refusal to divest their portfolio from the North American/Israeli war machine. She has completed original research in grief, memory, and material culture, and hopes to one day continue and complete her dissertation on the human a non-human effects of climate change and extractive environmental losses in the southern Greek islands.”