Rockhampton army veteran sails for Gaza with aid flotilla

Before he left Rockhampton, Rob Volker heard from a friend he calls Uncle Jenko that people were saying to him, “it’s incredible that someone from Rocky’s doing this”.

The machinist from Central Queensland will set sail for Gaza with the Global Sumud Flotilla this month, together with about 1000 people from around the globe carrying 500 tonnes of aid to Palestinians living under occupation and genocide.

The 35 year-old veteran flew out of Brisbane in late March to help prepare about 100 boats for launch, where civilians sailing from ports around the world will converge to break Israel’s 19-year naval blockade on Gaza. It will be the biggest humanitarian maritime mission to ever sail for Palestine.

“I was starting to get bit of a hero complex,” he says with a smile. “I walked into the pub one day and one fellow offered to buy me dinner, and then people bought me beers, and it sort of made me a little bit embarrassed.

“All I had to do was get on a train and come to Brisbane. Then I'll fly over there. There's nothing holding regional Queenslanders back from voicing whatever social issues or opinions we want to voice. We shouldn't just let lobbyists and wankers do that for us.

“The support I got was incredible… It touches your heart. It’s great to see that people care. I think it’s been good because a lot of people have gone and looked into the cause and come back and told me about it.”

In 2021 and 2022, leading human rights organisations Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released damning reports declaring that Israel’s decades-long system of oppression against Palestinians amounts to apartheid. In September last year, a UN commission found that “Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza”.

Since a ceasefire was declared in Gaza on 10 October 2025, Al Jazeera reports that Israel has violated the agreement over 2000 times with almost daily attacks, killing at least 713 people. More recently, on 30 March 2026, Israel adopted death penalty laws exclusively targeting Palestinians, which human rights organisations say may amount to war crimes.

“The international community must exert maximum pressure on the Israeli authorities to immediately repeal this law, fully abolish the death penalty, and dismantle all laws and practices that contribute to the system of apartheid against Palestinians,” said Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara-Rosas.

The last flotilla sailed in September 2025 with 462 people on 42 boats carrying baby formula, food and medical supplies. After taking shifts monitoring their boats from his bedroom in Rockhampton, Rob says he “committed this year to taking that step and going over”.

Late last month when he was leaving for Brisbane, Rob received a surprise send-off from friends and neighbours at the train station.

“One of my mates from the pub is an old fellow called Tim. I didn’t know he was going to do this, but he came and met me at the train station this morning,” he says.

“I remember him asking what time the train was leaving and everything. And my mate’s missus, she’s a carer and she was coming home from an overnighter, so she pulled in at the train station, and I waited with them for the train to come.”

Rob pulls a folded envelope from his pocket and shows us its contents.

“Tim gave me this little package here, and he wished me luck and everything, and he didn’t say much, and he walked off. There’s some US dollars in here, some Euro, gave me a bit of Aussie money, and he gave me this pendant.”

"I know he's travelled, and I don't know if he's been to Türkiye, but this is from the House of the Virgin Mary, which is in Türkiye... and so I'll wear that, and maybe it'll give me some luck, you know?"

Rob is one of 17 Australians who have committed to joining the flotilla and he says his experience serving in the army, including deployment to Afghanistan, prepared him for a journey like this.

He joined when he was 17 after getting kicked out of school, and he served for seven years. When he was accepted, his dad wouldn’t sign the paperwork unless he took on a trade, so he decided to be a fitter and did his apprenticeship with the army.

“I was the youngest soldier in my corp for nearly a full year.”

After completing his apprenticeship, his main role was in infantry battalions “to work on weapons and some small generators and chainsaws and things like that”. In his sixth year, he was sent to Townsville to work on boats, landing craft, zodiacs, and similar.

“When I heard about the flotilla forming again and I was talking to my friend, she said…my mechanical background and my experiences might be quite useful for them on the ground there.

“I hope that my skills are useful… I hope that we can get things as smooth as possible for running maintenance-wise and those sorts of things. That's what I want to wrap my head in when I get there.”

Rob says he feels honoured to participate, “like a small piece in the big cog of humanity”.

“It’s nice to try and scream for human rights. It’s nice to scream for the end of suffering, you know? It’s nice to try and hold evildoers to account.

“As a veteran, I’ve seen warfare. I’ve experienced being part of warfare, and I can say with confidence that what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinian people is not warfare.

“The conditions on the ground in Palestine, that Palestinian people are living through, are worse than hell. They’re being starved. They’re losing their medical facilities and schools, and to call it anything but a genocide is not acknowledging reality.”

Rob says he’s “definitely nervous” about the safety of the flotilla participants from attacks and detention by the IOF.

“To say I'm not nervous or anything would be a lie… You’d be silly not to be nervous to sail into a naval blockade.

“Probably the most important thing for us to remember as civilians is that we are entering a conflict zone, and that being detained by a military force is a little different from being detained by a policing force… There’ll be guns pointed at us. We need to ensure that they know that we're compliant and not aggressive.

“From my limited personal experience with those sort of environments…as the person on the other end of the gun, you don’t know what’s going on. There's a lot of scenarios you can run through your mind of what's going to happen.”

Participants in the September 2025 mission were detained in Israel’s Ketziot Prison for a week, and reported sexual assaults, beatings, threats to themselves and their families, and continued denial of food, water and critical medication.

Even with these risks, Rob says it’s a privilege to participate.

“I think it’s really important for us as Australians, and we’re privileged – not all of us – [but we], as people with the ability to, should look more towards helping raise everyone else up. Australia has become complicit in the genocide that’s happening in Palestine through their support of the Israeli government, and their refusal to call them out.

“Human rights are everyone’s rights, and if we’re going to allow this tumbleweed of human destruction to start in one area of the world, in a globalised world…then what’s to stop that tumbleweed rolling back around to us? We can’t build a good future society on the ashes of horrible crimes.”

When we ask Rob if he has anything else to say, he says he’ll miss his dogs the most.

“I’m a little inseparable from my dogs. I've got 3 mongrels… They’ll be quite happy to see me when I come home.”

This piece was first published in Green Left with their own edits.