Located just 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Marseille in southern France, Marseille-Fos is one of the busiest ports in France, handling over 70 million tons of goods a year. In June, dock workers there were busy rummaging frantically through thousands of shipments to find small crates of links for rapid-fire bullet belts. The workers had received information that the crates would be loaded onto the Contship Era, bound for Haifa.

Since the French workers were unsure whether they would locate the pallets with the crates in time, the port’s union coordinated their action with their colleagues across the border in Italy’s Genoa port, where the ship was due to dock on its way to Israel. Should the French workers fail to locate the crates in time, their Italian counterparts would seek to prevent the shipment from reaching its destination in a show of cross-border coordination against arming Israel as it fights in Gaza.

The French port workers were also joined in the effort by the French legal organization JURDI, the Association of Jurists for the Respect of International Law, which petitioned a local court on the matter.

After being halted for several days at Marseille-Fos, the Contship Era was eventually forced to set off for Israel without the crates of bullet links. It is not clear what happened to the crates, but it appears that they were returned to the sender, Marseille-based company Eurolinks.

“Port workers refused to load the crates,” Alfonso Dorado, a lawyer for JURDI, told Shomrim. “This is our small victory.”

As international audiences grow more concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and are pushing their governments to do more to pressure Israel, they are also taking grassroots actions aimed at frustrating the war effort in whatever small ways possible. Beyond France, union workers in Italy, Greece, Belgium, Morocco, and Sweden have announced that they will act using the same method to halt military shipments bound for Israel.

These worker-led protests, along with arms embargoes from some countries and the risk of Houthi attacks disrupting Asian transport routes, are putting heavy pressure on Israel’s already strained supply chain — a complex system vital to Israel’s access to arms. Despite the country’s push toward self-reliance in manufacturing military supplies, any disruption to the delivery of even small parts can lead to prolonged delays, potentially carrying strategic consequences.

“While........

© The Times of Israel