21 August 2025
Protesters gathered outside the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition’s offices in Cape Town on Thursday. Photos: Matthew Hirsch
The South African BDS Coalition’s energy embargo campaign wants the government to ban coal exports to Israel.
More than a hundred protesters from the movement gathered outside the offices of the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition in Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria on Thursday.
They handed over a memorandum to the department’s regional manager, who assured the protesters it would be given to the office of the minister, Parks Tau.
South Africa has “exported approximately 1.6 million metric tonnes of coal to Israel” and “allowed our national ports to be used as conduits for transporting fuel, minerals, and other dual-use goods to Apartheid Israel,” the memorandum reads.
The protesters in Cape Town carried placards which read “DTIC you decide - no more coal for genocide” and “ban coal exports to genocidal Israel”.
They also chanted, “Parks Tau, what do you say? Stop the coal trade today,” and “coal fuels bombs, coal fuels war, we won’t ship it anymore”.
The protesters want the government to follow the example of Colombia, which suspended coal exports to Israel last year.
In the memorandum, they call on the department to “lead in implementing a coal embargo and stop our complicity in feeding the Israeli electricity grid that fuels the genocide, illegal occupation and Apartheid Israel’s military industrial complex”.
Andile Zulu, of the Alternative Information and Development Centre, addressed the protesters. He said it saddens and angers him to see that “politicians are engaging in moral hypocrisy and political cowardice”.
“We have made a very clear international commitment to end the genocide in Gaza by suffocating them economically and by stopping all means of support. And yet we continue to allow our corporations to export coal to feed the economy of colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing,” he said.
The department’s spokesperson Bongani Lukhele told GroundUp that the minister, who is currently in Japan, will respond directly to the organisations that submitted the memorandum.
Protesters say the South Africa’s coal exports to Israel are “fuelling genocide”.