2nd intl. aid fleet heads for Gaza

The 10-boat fleet headed out of the Italian and Spanish coastlines between September 25 and 27, Drop Site News, an American investigative outlet, reported on Friday.

The fleet, it said, has been organized by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), which has been organizing such Gaza-bound convoys since 2010, with the grassroots Thousand Madleens to Gaza (TMTG), named after a Gaza-bound aid ship that was targeted by the regime in June.

It carries nearly 70 people from more than 20 countries, including parliamentarians and elected officials from Ireland, Belgium, Spain, Denmark, France, and the United States.

Additional vessel challenges Israel’s press blackout

On its way, the fleet was joined by the Conscience, a massive vessel that departed from Otranto, Italy on September 30 carrying 80 people, including international journalists, medics, and several Palestinian doctors, who volunteered in Gaza.

“For nearly two years, the illegal Israeli occupation has blocked international journalists from entering Gaza, creating one of the most dangerous press blackouts in modern history,” the FFC said. “This boat is our challenge to that silence.”

The Friday report came after the regime intercepted the last vessel that had joined the Global Sumud Flotilla, which had set sail from Barcelona late last month on a mission to challenge what human rights groups have condemned as one of the harshest and most inhumane blockades in the world.

Described as the largest maritime effort of its kind in decades, the flotilla had brought together delegations representing at least 44 different countries.

The interception spree was met with far-and-wide global condemnation.

Israeli minister calls GSF’s activists ‘terrorists’

Also on Friday, Drop Site News cited Adala, a rights group based in the occupied city of Haifa, as enumerating the violations committed by the regime against the GSF’s activists.

After being seized from international waters, the participants “were forced to kneel with their hands zip-tied for at least five hours, after some participants chanted Free Palestine,” the group reported.

At the occupied port of Ashdod, at least 331 of the activists faced hearings before Israeli immigration authorities, it added.

Adalah condemned the regime’s handling of the detainees as unlawful, humiliating, and systematically abusive.

It noted that far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir would disrupt lawyer visits, while participants were being filmed.

The outlet posted a video on X, former Twitter, showing Ben-Gvir addressing the detainees in a degrading manner and calling them “the flotilla terrorists.”

Detainees were denied water, medicine, and legal access, with lawyers being excluded from hearings that began without representation, the group said.

Transferred from Ashdod to the regime’s Ktzi’ot Prison afterwards, participants reported threats and harassment.

Adalah stressed that the entire process violated the international law, calling the naval interception an abduction and the blockade itself an illegal act of collective punishment and genocide.

It demanded the activists’ release, accountability on the part of the regime, and return of confiscated belongings and aid supplies.

The developments took place as the regime keeps using the siege to weaponize starvation amid its October 2023-present war of genocide on the Gaza Strip.

The war has seen Tel Aviv use a combination of bombings and starvation to kill nearly 66,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children.