Dockworkers in Italy Block Arms Shipment to Israel

 Consortium News, August 7, 2025

This outcome adds to a growing list of union-led actions across Europe in solidarity with Palestine and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Ana Vracar reports.

Dockworkers in Genoa, Italy, protesting forced complicity of Italian ports in Gaza genocide, June 2025. (Unione Sindacale di Base via Peoples Dispatch)

By Ana Vracar
Peoples Dispatch

Italian port workers secured a significant win last week in their ongoing resistance to militarization and arms transfers, as shipping operators decided they would not unload military cargo destined for Israel from the vessel COSCO Shipping Pisces — returning the containers to their point of origin instead.

“We were informed today that the three containers carrying military equipment, destined for La Spezia and transported aboard the COSCO Pisces, will not be unloaded in either Genoa or La Spezia,” the union Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) said on July 29. “This decision marks a tangible result of union action and the pressure exerted by USB.”

Costco Pisces in the Dutch port of Rotterdam in 2019. (kees torn/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)

This outcome adds to a growing list of union-led actions across Europe in solidarity with Palestine and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where at least 60,000 people have been killed by the Israeli occupation.

“From Greece to Liguria, as previously demonstrated with the support of French dockworkers, the network of dockworkers across Europe and the Mediterranean has shown that stopping war logistics is possible, legitimate, and necessary,” Unione Sindacale di Base wrote.

Following the announcement, a planned Aug. 5 strike was called off. However, Genoa dockworkers have pledged to continue mobilizing against the arms trade. They have also announced plans for an international assembly on Sept. 26–27, which aims to lay the groundwork for a sector-wide strike.

“We are not alone: our struggle unites Marseille, Piraeus, Hamburg, Tangier,” trade unionists declared earlier in July. “If the war comes through the ports, the response must come from the ports.”

Unione Sindacale di Base logistical workers continue to expand their campaign on the principle that strikes are a legitimate tool in the fight against war, militarization and forced worker involvement in arms trafficking.

“Law 146/1990 speaks clearly: war operations are not essential services, and a strike is legitimate if it serves to defend collective security and constitutional order,” the union noted. “Stopping arms is not just a political choice, it is a right.”

Locally, from Genoa to Brescia, workers’ actions are disrupting the chains that fuel massacres and armed conflict, USB emphasized. Their mobilization against the arms trade, including strikes, is backed by a growing international solidarity bloc.

“Dockworkers in Europe, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere will not become accomplices of the murderous state of Israel and its allies – the USA, NATO and the EU,” the All-Workers Militant Front (PAME) wrote in a statement of support to dockworkers in Italy. “They will not allow ports and infrastructure to become instruments of war for the slaughter of people by the imperialists.”

Ana Vracar is a correspondent for Peoples Dispatch.

This article is from Peoples Dispatch.