Kidnapped on the Global Sumud Lifeline to Gaza 2026 is the first-person account of Fra Hughes, a Belfast activist who sailed with the Global Sumud Flotilla in April 2026 on a humanitarian mission to break Israel’s siege of Gaza. Carrying food, medicine, and an unshakeable conviction that another world is possible, Hughes and his comrades were intercepted in international waters by Israeli commandos. What followed were three days of kidnapping, imprisonment, and deliberate degradation—from a metal shipping container in the Mediterranean to the high-security Ketziot Prison in the Negev desert.

Told with unflinching honesty and dark Irish humour, this memoir spans three decades of activism. Hughes traces his journey from the streets of Belfast during the Troubles—where solidarity with Palestine was forged in the shadow of British occupation—through fifteen years of campaigns, convoys, and protests in Brussels, Barcelona, Cairo, and beyond. He documents the first Gaza convoys of 2010, the slow-burning solidarity movement that kept faith through years of failure, and the 2026 flotilla aboard the Alma: the preparations, the dangers, the extraordinary community of international activists who risked everything together on the water.

The book weaves together multiple voices, including Tadhg Hickey’s account of a separate vessel in the same flotilla, and bears witness to atrocities—beatings, sexual assaults, mass arrests—documented in Istanbul medical centres and activist testimony. Against the normalisation of Gaza’s genocide, Hughes insists on naming what he saw.

Returning to a hero’s welcome in Dublin and Belfast, his message is unambiguous: international solidarity is not charity but resistance. Kidnapped on the Global Sumud Lifeline to Gaza 2026 is a testament to sumud—steadfast endurance—and a call to action for everyone who refuses to look away.