On Thursday morning, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) intercepted around 40 vessels participating in the “Global al-Sumoud Flotilla,” which had set sail towards the Gaza Strip carrying international activists and humanitarian aid in an attempt to break the 18-year-long blockade imposed on the territory.
The attack took place while the ships were sailing in international waters, some seventy nautical miles off the coast of Gaza, in what constitutes a clear violation of international maritime law.
Organisers of the flotilla confirmed that occupation forces boarded several boats, including the Spectre, Alma and Sirius, while the status of the activists remains uncertain.
Later, the occupation’s Foreign Ministry announced that the activists would be deported to Europe. Video footage showed the moment some of the vessels were seized, with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg seen sitting on the deck of a boat surrounded by armed soldiers.
According to international law, the interception of civilian ships on the high seas constitutes an act of piracy. Furthermore, the blockade imposed on Gaza for the past 18 years, tightened further by the closure of the crossings since last March, is considered under the Fourth Geneva Convention to be a form of collective punishment and a war crime for which the occupying power bears full responsibility.
The United Nations stressed that any attack on the flotilla is “unacceptable,” while some European states limited themselves to sending vessels for humanitarian monitoring before withdrawing their escort at a distance from Gaza, citing “security concerns.”
This interception comes at a time when more than 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza are enduring catastrophic conditions caused by famine, following the ongoing genocide since 7 October, which has claimed over 66,000 lives and left 168,000 wounded, the majority of them women and children.
IOF carried out similar acts in the past, most notably the attack on the “Freedom Flotilla” in 2010, which resulted in the killing of a number of civilian activists, documented in UN reports and deemed an unlawful act of aggression.
The interception of the “Global al-Sumoud Flotilla” can only be read as yet another episode in a systematic policy designed to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza, reflecting the occupation’s determination to persist in collective punishment against the besieged civilian population, in flagrant disregard of its legal and humanitarian obligations.
