So went last Thursday’s radio exchange between Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) activist Luca Poggi and the bridge of the Sunaid X, a container ship that local unions had identified as a supplier of the NATO military base Sigonella, the U.S. Navy’s air station in Sicily. After lying in wait for a week, living aboard three GSF sailboats at the port, around ten GSF members sprang into action midday on October 22. According to a statement from Gruppo Autonomo Portuali (GAP), an autonomous collective of Livorno dockworkers, and the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), an independent rank-and-file union that has led Livorno’s port blockades, the Sunaid X links Livorno with Sigonella for the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency. The shipping vessel was due to load bulk chemicals, paints, food, and lithium batteries for drones at the Terminal Darsena Toscana (TDT).
Weather delays had already pushed back the Sunaid X’s arrival by two days. The ship missed its 2 p.m. Thursday berth at the TDT, Livorno’s main container terminal. Two of the sailboats held the harbor entrance, while the third took up position at the ship’s berth, and from roughly 2:30 to 8:30 p.m., the Sunaid X lay at anchor offshore. On land, USB called a strike, and GAP and USB picketed the terminal gate. When the ship finally docked that evening, dockworkers on the night shift refused to service it, and Friday’s morning shift did the same.
The Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s militarized financial and customs police, seized the three sailboats and held the GSF crews into the evening at a barracks beside the harbor master’s office. All ten were released late Thursday after being reported to prosecutors for “disruption of a public service,” an accusation that will go before a local judge, where the defendants will be represented by Tatiana Montella, a lawyer who works with GSF, according to the organization. The boats remain confiscated and under seizure.
A solidarity rally had gathered in the city that evening as the GSF activists were detained. “The boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla have led the way, and dockworkers have continued this fight on the docks, transforming solidarity into concrete action,” one protester told the local press. “Words are no longer enough: we must stop the trafficking that fuels war!”
The dockworkers suspended their strike after winning a meeting with Livorno’s Prefecture, TDT, the Port Authority, and the harbor master. USB has said that four “suspicious” containers awaiting to be loaded onto Sunaid X held drone batteries, military equipment, gas, and propellants, a claim that has not been independently verified. According to the striking dockworkers, the Port Authority agreed to inspect the cargo, but it is unconfirmed whether the inspection took place or what it found. The Sunaid X has since left for Augusta, in Sicily, where it was again met by GSF activists at sea on Monday
The Latest Action of a Year-Long Effort
Thursday’s joint GSF-USB-GAP action is just the latest in a year of escalating attempts by Livorno’s dockworkers to stop war cargo from moving through their port. It was also the first time GSF boats and striking dockworkers moved together against the same vessel.
“You have to pick the important cases,” said Giovanni Ceraolo, who has organized with USB since 2014 and now works on its national ports coordination. “You have to understand what the right moment is and the right situation, because if you think you can block everything, in the end, you block nothing.” Ceraolo sat down with me for an hour-long interview, conducted through an interpreter, on October 20, the day the Sunaid X was first due in port. “Weapons pass through the ports every day,” he said, “and it would be practically impossible to think you could block every shipment.”
Livorno’s harbor master’s office reported that more than 600 tonnes of explosives, mostly ammunition and rocket motors, were shipped from the port to countries outside the EU between January 2025 and May 2026, though the data, obtained by the journalist Linda Maggiori and port safety representatives, do not show where any of it ended up.
Law 185 of 1990 bars Italy from exporting arms to countries at war or under embargo, or letting them pass through its ports. The law is “almost never enforced,” Ceraolo said, but he noted that filing a formal complaint, “together with the action, the strike,” has at times been enough to call a shipment into question. Enforcing it has become a standing demand of the port strikes, and it was a plank of the national port strike that USB and ORSA Porti called in May. Still, Ceraolo was clear that it would not matter if the shipments were judged legal under the law. “Even if there were military traffic authorized under this law, we’d be against it anyway and we’d act anyway,” he said. “Weapons are weapons, period.”
USB and GAP have developed a three-pronged method, to which GSF has now added a blockade by sea: “Information, pickets, strike. That’s the only method we have for now, and it’s working, on and off.” The information comes mostly from the dockworkers. When activists blocked a military train at Pisa in March, Ceraolo said, the tip came from workers at the Piombino steelworks, where the train was being loaded. Next, the picket and the strike play out on the ground. “In practice, there are only two ways to block this traffic: with pickets and blockades, and with the strike. When we’ve managed to do both, we’ve pulled it off.” Put a physical blockade together with a strike in the rail and port sectors that have to handle the cargo, he said, and “you put war logistics in serious difficulty.”
He traces the method back to September 2025. As the fall Global Sumud Flotilla sailed toward Gaza, protesters forced open one of the port’s gates and occupied the quay where the SLNC Severn, a U.S.-flagged ship serving the nearby U.S. Army base at Camp Darby, was due to berth. “We stayed there three days straight, 24 hours a day,” Ceraolo said. “All together: students, workers, dockworkers, teachers, the whole city. Even the mayor came.” The ship never docked. “For us, it was an important event,” he said, because of how close Livorno is to “one of the biggest American bases in Europe.” A week later, the Israeli-owned ZIM Virginia docked and left the same evening without loading or unloading any cargo, after dockworkers struck at the call of Filt-CGIL, the transport federation of Italy’s largest national union confederation.
When Israel intercepted the flotilla in October 2025, Livorno joined the general strike that shut down ports and highways and disrupted rail lines across Italy. Even the organizers were unprepared for the national reverberations of the call to action. “What happened last year was something nobody in Italy expected, and least of all, us in Livorno,” Ceraolo said. “We were flooded with phone calls from people asking how to go on strike, because these were people who had never been on strike in their lives. They didn’t even know what striking meant.” People “who, the day before, never even thought about it were, the next day, behind a burning barricade on the Aurelia,” the coastal highway, he said. “Ordinary people.”
The lesson Ceraolo took was that mass moments can’t be summoned on command. “There’s nothing automatic between daily work and mass moments,” he said. “You have to try, you have to push, talk to people.” What September and October proved, he said, is “that if the conditions are there, people will take to the streets.”
On October 30, international dockworkers, seafarers, and portworkers plan to test that idea well beyond Livorno. The day of action grew out of a declaration agreed by Mediterranean and European port unions in Istanbul in May. In July, it was announced by unions in six countries: France, Greece, the Basque Country, Turkey, Morocco, and Italy, where USB and ORSA Porti signed on. Organizers now say about 100 ports in 17 countries will take part, among them dockworkers in Oakland, Hamburg, and Veracruz, and that around 40,000 containers could be held up for the day. In Italy, eight ports are set to strike, Livorno and Genoa among them, and USB has called a general strike across every sector. The sectoral demands go beyond the genocide in Gaza. Organizers are calling for an end to using ports to move arms to war zones or as bases for NATO, the U.S., or EU militaries; an end to European rearmament; and higher wages for the workers who keep the ports running. The strike has been endorsed by 17 Palestinian trade union bodies.
Disturbing the Machine From the Inside
“I have a son, who is what drives me to do what I do,” said Simone D’Aversa, a 39-year-old Livorno dockworker who helped found GAP. Over the past few years, he said, he came to see his own work as “extremely involved in war,” and it pushed him to act. “It made me commit: to try to find a way to become something that disturbs this machine from the inside.”
Italy’s labor movement has two tiers. The big national confederations—the CGIL, CISL and UIL, known in Italian as the confederali—negotiate the national contracts that set most workers’ pay. Smaller, independent sindacati di base, or rank-and-file unions such as USB, have built their membership on the shop floor. When GAP started out, D’Aversa said, the group went to every union in the port and asked them to protect any worker who refused to handle certain cargo. “On one side, we found USB willing,” he said. “It’s a rank-and-file union that had already been working against the arms trade for years. On the other side, we hit a wall” with the union confederations.
GAP’s members now range from USB members to workers without a union. Some still belong to the big unions, he said, and these workers are unhappy with them but can’t break away “for reasons that are also purely about their jobs.” He described GAP and USB as two “gears” that are “separate and autonomous from each other. In practice, when it’s needed for blockades and strikes, they act as a single entity.”
The organized dockworkers can’t do it alone, D’Aversa said. GAP works with what he called “a strong city network” of student collectives, social centers, associations, and environmental groups. “There’s a real diversity of struggles, and that’s partly what lets us make up for the fact that, yes, we represent Livorno’s dockworkers, but not all of Livorno’s dockworkers,” he said. “So we need a push that also comes from the territory and from the city, which is starting to feel that the port [is] something collective.” He sees that push as an expression of larger possibilities. In Italy, he said, there is “a total lack of trust in politics, in institutional politics, and instead a huge need among people to feel part of politics.”
Last fall’s mobilizations, he said, “came from a union’s leadership, yes, but just as much from the push the masses gave [for] the union to move.” What gave that push a direction was a speech in Genoa by Riccardo Rudino of CALP, Genoa’s autonomous dockworkers’ collective, who promised that, if the flotilla was stopped, the ports would block everything. “Having a date and a clear goal was the spark that made all the mobilizations possible.”
“It’s true that governments are complicit in what happened,” D’Aversa said. “But I think the act that most challenges our privilege is admitting that we are complicit with our governments, if we don’t do [on October 30] what we did in September and October.”
For Luca Poggi, a 29-year-old former economist at an environmental NGO, who quit his job after the flotilla’s second mission to organize full-time with GSF, the boats are the seafaring half of the same confrontation at the port. “The disruption of the supply chain is what can hit the genocide the most,” he said, “because you hit on the economics.” The people GSF is up against, he said, “are CEOs of big banks, big investment funds… prime ministers of important governments. So we are fighting against the most powerful people and the most powerful entities in the world.”
GSF, he stressed, does not break the supply chain itself. “We don’t go and assault vessels. We are nonviolent. We chose nonviolence as a strategy, not as a principle.” He emphasized that the point is numbers. “They might be a hundred. We will be one million,” he said. “The moment we are one million, even money loses its value.” The boats have become a symbol of “David against Goliath… we load toys, baby formula, food, medicines, and we go against those who load bullets.” The sea gives GSF room to maneuver that acting on land does not. “It’s much easier to act at sea than acting on land,” he said. “The sea doesn’t have the same law of the land.”
Two days before Thursday’s blockade, Poggi called it GSF’s “way to launch the strike of the 30th of October, Flotilla-style.” The goal was to “show the participation of this company in the war and in the genocide, and also the complicity of our governments that allow all this to happen.” Each sailboat would take a role at a different stage of the ship’s maneuvering, and planning for the action was conducted in person on the boats while awaiting the arrival of Sunaid X. “Consider that the ship we want to block is 8,000 tonnes, while our boats are less than eight,” he said. “We will not do anything dangerous. We will stay far. But at the same time, we have ways to block it from entering the port.”
“If a ship is delayed by one day, the delays pile up, and a logistics mechanism breaks,” Ceraolo said. “It’s a political signal, but also economic damage. Both things together. So, for us, beyond everything, it’s a historic day.”
Alex Colston is an independent journalist, editor, and organizer. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, but he prefers to be at sea.
Photo: “Global Sumud Flotilla sailboat faces a Guardia di Finanza patrol boat at the mouth of Livorno’s harbor. Top right: The Sunaid X on the horizon off the Tuscan coast. Bottom right: Containers stacked behind a wall at the Port of Livorno. October 22, 2026. Photo: Andrea Bellaroto.”
