Helen O’Sullivan, 65, a grandmother of eight, is a social work field educator and human rights activist from Bundjalung Country (Gold Coast, Australia). She has been a registered Mental Health First Aid Instructor for over 20 years and brings more than four decades of experience working with people in crisis in remote and diverse communities across Australia and overseas.
Helen first joined the Freedom Flotilla Coalition in April 2024 in response to mounting evidence of Australia’s and other Western governments’ complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Helen joined Free Gaza Australia and joined hundreds of humanitarian and human rights activists engaged in nonviolent action to protest documented evidence of Israel ‘s decades long war crimes. When the 2024 flotilla was blocked in Istanbul, she joined the International Solidarity Movement, volunteering alongside international humanitarians in the West Bank to provide a protective presence for Palestinians facing attacks from Israeli soldiers and settlers.
On her first day in the field, following nonviolence training, Helen witnessed the brutal and deliberate sniper killing of US / Turkish citizen Eysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old human rights activist, shot and killed by an Israeli military sniper. Helen later provided witness statements to prosecutors for the Palestinian Authority and prosecutors in Türkiye, who are seeking to hold those responsible to account. Failure of the international community to hold Israel to account not just for this war crime but Israel’s continued breach of humanitarian international laws, apartheid and genocide gives, Helen little hope that this will occur anytime soon.
Over the following two months, Helen lived with Palestinian families from Masafer Yatta to the Jordan Valley. She worked as a volunteer accompanying children to school, supporting farmers as they grazed their goats, and assisting families during the olive harvest. During this time, she witnessed not only the daily realities of life under an oppressive apartheid system, but also the constant aggression faced by civilians, particularly children.
One Palestinian family Helen stayed with remains a stark example of the trauma endured by children. Each night, the parents slept with their children in the back of a disused trailer after their small concrete home was firebombed by Israeli settlers just weeks earlier. . Another family, with several young children, faced regular nightly incursions by armed settlers arriving in SUVs, damaging their farm equipment and water supply. While these children are accustomed to such violence, they are not desensitised, their trauma is visible in their faces.
In May 2025, Helen joined the Freedom Flotilla in Malta in another attempt to break the illegal siege on Gaza. That flotilla was bombed by Israeli drones just kilometres off the Maltese coast.
Helen has again joined Free Gaza Australia as part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, the Global Sumud Flotilla, and the One Thousand Madleens initiative, efforts to break the siege and refocus global attention on a genocide that must not be met with silence or complicity.
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