When a ship sends out a Mayday signal, nearby vessels have a duty to come to its aid. This is a core tenet of maritime law. But on Monday, May 18, when a group of about fifty boats in international waters started radioing out their distress calls, nobody responded. Cyprus, the country nearest and thus responsible for their safety, took no action. Soon armed individuals drew up alongside the boats, boarded, subdued the passengers, and brought them aboard prison ships, where, they later recounted, they were beaten, tased, shot with rubber bullets and pelted with stun grenades, taunted, sexually humiliated, and held in stress positions for hours on end.

This fleet had crossed no invisible line, committed no act of aggression; it was passing through a part of the Mediterranean that yachts and shipping liners regularly traverse. That such violence was permitted to occur becomes plausible only once you consider that the vessels had been on the last leg of their journey toward Gaza, in the hopes of breaking Israel’s total blockade of the strip and bringing supplies to the besieged territory, and were intercepted by the Israeli navy.¹ In the aftermath of the attack, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, released video footage that shows him gleefully berating the imprisoned flotilla activists and shouting “Welcome to Israel, we are the landlords!” as dozens of them are forced to prostrate themselves. As of May 22 all 430 people who were taken have been released, many testifying that they suffered or witnessed beatings and other forms of abuse. The American journalist Alex Colston, who documented his journey toward Gaza and subsequent detention for Zeteo, described a guard methodically wrenching his metal handcuffs until he lost consciousness from the pain. There have been at least fifteen individual allegations of sexual assault.

Over the years the “Freedom Flotilla” movement has made dozens of attempts to breach the confinement zone that isolates Palestine from the rest of the world. Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American lawyer who helped pioneer the tactic back in 2008, is clear that this not just a symbolic effort. “Our small boats are never going to carry the amount of aid that Palestinians need, but it’s always been calculated to challenge a blockade that’s illegal, and doing it by direct action,” she told me when we spoke on May 16.

But it has a symbolic effect, too. Human rights organizations often call Gaza an open-air prison, and as with a more conventional prison, outsiders tend to assume that the horrors visited upon its inhabitants happen in some kind of parallel world incapable of touching our own. To set out to travel there by sea is to assert that Gaza lies not apart from humanity but on a not-so-distant shore in the southeastern Mediterranean, one that can be and indeed has been reached by a handful of activists sailing in a ragtag band of boats. For this is no sleek and uniform fleet: some of the crafts are very small; a few are of especially dubious seaworthiness. Volunteers paint words and images onto the hulls and sails: Palestinian flags, children’s faces, messages of peace.

The latest flotilla was planned and carried out amid a host of alarming tactical and legal escalations by Israel since the country’s official détente with Hamas last October. Israeli forces have persisted with intermittent shelling; over seven hundred Palestinians have been killed and two thousand injured since the so-called cease-fire took effect. Israel now occupies nearly two thirds of Gaza, and relatively few professional observers remain to give a sense of the ruinous conditions on the ground: the IDF has killed over two hundred local journalists there since October 7, 2023, often with targeted strikes, and its recent expulsion of thirty-seven international aid organizations has made “an already intolerable situation even worse,” in the estimation of the UN human rights high commissioner. In the West Bank settlers seize land, kill and injure Palestinian villagers, and demolish their homes with increasing ferocity and abandon; the Knesset has recently moved to annex all Palestinian historical sites in the territory. Mounting, irrefutable evidence testifies to Israeli soldiers’ use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. A law recently passed by the Knesset made execution the default punishment for Palestinians convicted of terrorism. (The last person the Israeli state put to death via the judicial process was Adolf Eichmann.) Now Israel is dramatically expanding its war in Lebanon, warning the Shiite population there to leave their homes, having stated in no uncertain terms that it intends to occupy 10 percent of the country’s territory and bring the “Rafah and Beit Hanoun ​model”—the demolition of homes and creation of an ever-widening buffer zone—to bear on its northern neighbor. 

In a recent essay in the London Review of Books about Israel’s assassination campaigns abroad, Andrew Cockburn quotes a senior Israeli military lawyer who said, in 2009, after the ground campaign in Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead: “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it.” In Gaza, throughout the region, and now in the Mediterranean, Israel has continued to test how openly it can violate the laws that govern the shared use of land and sea—just how widely it can deploy the Gaza model—before foreign nations and international institutions intervene. By putting their bodies at the mercy of the Israeli state, the flotilla activists are confronting those same nations and institutions with a parallel challenge, pressuring their countries to uphold the principles of international law that Israel is daring them to disregard. The Mediterranean has become a kind of stage for these two dramatically opposed efforts to shape how the genocide in Gaza will be met by the rest of the world.

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Working in the West Bank in the early 2000s, when she was in her twenties, Arraf was appalled to see that the Palestinians living there had essentially no recourse against their subjugation. “When they don’t protest, their rights continue to be violated, their land taken over, people being arrested, people having their homes demolished,” she told me. “And then when they do try to protest, they’re shot down, arrested, brutalized, et cetera, with absolutely no accountability.” Along with a few others, she founded a group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). “We put out this kind of Hail Mary call for internationals to come stand with Palestinians in their movement,” Arraf said.

The thinking was that the presence of outside witnesses might deter violence.Instead, Israeli soldiers and settlers started killing and maiming the witnesses. After the young American ISM volunteer Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer and the IDF killed two other foreigners (one of whom was a journalist unaffiliated with ISM), Israel kicked international peace activists out of the Gaza Strip. (It also started requiring foreigners to “sign waivers absolving the Israeli army from any responsibility if the army shoots them,” according to Democracy Now.) Once Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Israel sealed off the Strip from the rest of the world; when the group took power in Gaza from Fatah the following year, the state tightened the noose, controlling everyone and everything that went in or out. Malnutrition quickly rose, and maternal and infant health deteriorated.

ISM watched as Israel erected this barrier. “Writing letters or protests or emails or whatnot, nothing seemed sufficient to challenge this policy that was clearly illegal, it was clearly collective punishment,” Arraf said. In August 2008 she and a few other ISM volunteers, sailing as the Free Gaza Movement, piloted two small fishing boats, loaded with little more than their passengers, some balloons, and a box of hearing aids, toward Gaza. Improbably, they succeeded—the first ships to reach Palestinian shores without going through Israel since 1967. People rushed to the port to greet them. “It was honestly one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Arraf told me. When they left after a few days, seven volunteers stayed behind, and seven Palestinians departed in their place, including a family who had returned to visit and gotten trapped, and a boy in a wheelchair who needed a prosthetic limb.

Hard as it is to imagine today, so calcified and total is the blockade, four subsequent voyages also reached Gaza in quick succession. But after Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, destroying more than ten thousand homes and unleashing white phosphorus on the civilian population, it altered its strategy at sea as well, ramming the boats or seizing them and capturing all aboard. Arraf and her colleagues decided to escalate, too, partnering with the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) and forming the first Freedom Flotilla: a six-boat convoy with three passenger vessels and three cargo ships carrying around 10,000 tons of supplies, led by the repurposed Istanbul ferry the Mavi Marmara.

Around 4:30 AM on May 31, 2010, though the flotilla remained well outside territorial waters, Israeli helicopters and warships approached. From her smaller boat, the Challenger, Arraf saw the beginning of the raid that followed—the commandos rappelling down from their helicopters onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara as its passengers tried to defend the ship by arming themselves with whatever they could (none carried guns, a matter of some dispute later on). She heard the explosion of stun grenades, and then live rounds. The Israeli soldiers aimed to kill. Cevdet Kiliçlar, a photographer from Istanbul there to document the mission, was felled by a single bullet between the eyes. Commandos shot Ibrahim Bilgen, a sixty-year-old man, with a “less-lethal” round at such close range that the beanbag penetrated his skull. The body of Furkan Doğan, a nineteen-year-old Turkish American dual citizen, was found with five bullet wounds, one to the face—the last of which was likely fired, a report by a UN fact-finding mission later determined, after Doğan had already been lying on the dock wounded for some time. The fact-finding mission’s report concluded that of the nine dead, six were killed via “extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution.” A tenth passenger succumbed to his wounds after four years in a coma; dozens more were shot and wounded. The whole thing took forty-five to fifty minutes.

These killings provoked shock and outrage internationally, after which Israel eased its blockade somewhat. It continued to stymie subsequent flotillas, but never again with such deadly force. A pattern took shape: the ships would get within a certain number of nautical miles from Gaza and be intercepted; the passengers would be detained, roughed up, and then released and deported. The flotillas’ movements were also circumscribed by other countries: Greece and Turkey have both at various times prevented boats from leaving their ports.

Over the years the flotilla effort waned, hindered by these operational challenges and lagging international attention to the crisis in Gaza. But after the October 7 attacks, as Israel radically restricted urgent humanitarian aid to the Strip and began killing aid workers at an unprecedented rate, energy returned to the movement. In 2024, while one contingent of the flotilla sailed around Europe on an educational campaign, another convoy prepared to head to Gaza with aid. It was stopped from leaving port, however, when Guinea-Bissau reversed its permission to let two of the three boats use its flags, which flotilla organizers blamed on pressure from Israeli authorities. Multiple smaller contingents managed to set sail over the spring and summer of 2025 but ended in Israeli capture before they could deliver aid.

The flotilla has always been an international coproduction, involving Turks, Europeans, and both North and South Americans, but this has expanded over time. Last summer a new coalition emerged called the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) and quickly drew attention for its high-profile passengers, among them Greta Thunberg (who had sailed with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition earlier that summer). Logan Hollarsmith, an American living in Tucson, first joined GSF in Barcelona last fall. “I was immensely proud of him,” his mother, Sidney Hollar, told me, “and I was really nervous for him at the same time, because they had no idea what was going to happen.”

What happened was that, in early October, after the boats had suffered repeated drone attacks, the Israeli navy commandeered the flotilla and brought its passengers back to Israel, where they were held for five days in Ktzi’ot, a maximum-security prison, then deported. Since then, Israel has sought to paint the flotilla activists both as hardened Hamas affiliates and as self-involved influencers more focused on getting laid than on bringing humanitarian aid to desperate Gazans. The top sponsored result when I googled “Global Sumud Flotilla” last week was an official Israeli government webpage, titled “Waves of Hate,” that purports to document the activists’ sinister ties; the country’s latest propaganda campaign has involved branding GSF as “the condom flotilla.”

At the end of 2025, GSF pledged to send another flotilla in the new year. On April 29, just three days after that flotilla embarked from Sicily, where it had stopped briefly after leaving Barcelona, the Israeli navy gave a preview of what was to come: soldiers forcibly boarded twenty-two of the flotilla’s boats and captured around 175 passengers. Most of them were ultimately deposited on a Cretan beach, but two of the flotilla’s leaders were spirited back to Israel, where they were held for a week and interrogated. A handful more were simply set adrift. Valentina Carvajal Montero, a campaigner with Greenpeace who accompanied the flotilla on its first leg aboard the support ship Arctic Sunrise, told me that when another ship had gone back to the scene of the interception, “they rescued twelve people that Israel had left in the middle of the fucking sea with no way to escape—no communication, no GPS, no nothing.”

This all took place forty to ninety miles west of Crete’s westernmost point: south of the Kalamata peninsula, and significantly west of Athens. “They’ve turned the whole Mediterranean into their piracy playground, and so you don’t really know where they might decide to hit,” Arraf told me less than forty-eight hours before the final apprehension. It came between 250 and 180 nautical miles from Gaza—well outside the range long considered to be the “danger zone.” Hollar told me that Logan—who had gone to Turkey to help out and ended up captaining one of the vessels—had sent her a tongue-in-cheek warning this time around: “He texted me and he said, ‘I think we should make a plan for the second episode of Locked Up Abroad.’”

*

Israel’s violence against international activists has long been facilitated by the complicity and passivity of governments in the US and Europe, as well as international institutions. The 2010 killings caused a scandal in Turkey and provoked protests across the world, but the official US response to the murder of a young American citizen was muted at best: no congressperson said anything, and the Department of Justice intervened in court to toss out a lawsuit filed by Arraf and the other American flotilla volunteers. Furkan Doğan’s father told the Wall Street Journal that he wondered how things would have gone if Doğan had been a Christian still living in the US at the time of his death. (“I know what people do there when a cat gets stuck in a tree,” he said.) When a panel of inquiry established by the UN secretary-general issued its report on the raid (a separate document from the earlier fact-finding mission’s report), it concluded that Israeli forces had used “excessive and unreasonable” force but also criticized the flotilla for acting “recklessly” and deemed Israel’s blockade legal, drawing fire from prominent voices on Palestine: at the time Arraf excoriated the report for prioritizing “political compromise between Israel and Turkey” over justice for the dead.

It’s uncertain if things will be different this time around. Flotilla activists were detained, humiliated, and abused this past fall, including several allegations of sexual assault, but Israeli forces meted out new levels of “extreme violence” this time, Hollar told me.“To know that our tax dollars funded this kidnapping and torture, and more importantly that it’s funding the genocide, is just appalling.” In Europe this month’s clear provocation has stirred up headlines, and some backlash: Giorgia Meloni has called the treatment of the activists “unacceptable,” and the Italian foreign minister told reporters he is in talks with his EU counterparts about the possibility of levying sanctions against Ben-Gvir.

In the US, meanwhile, the abuse of the flotilla’s participants has generated little media attention and almost no public outcry. Earlier this year the Trump White House released a statement condemning the flotilla, which it deemed “pro-Hamas”; when friends and family called the US embassy in Israel to urge Hollarsmith’s swift release, according to Hollar, it was standard for their interlocutor to terminate the call by intoning that the flotilla was involved with Hamas—essentially repeating Israel’s line. “Some people said it appeared they were reading from a script,” Hollar said. On May 19, as the flotilla activists were still being held on Israeli prison ships, the US Treasury announced sanctions against Saif Abukeshek, a Spanish Palestinian flotilla leader and one of the two men who had been seized near Crete and detained just a few weeks earlier.

To appreciate why Europe and the US have been so lax in defending these activists’ rights, it can be clarifying to look at the flotilla movement alongside other, related efforts to show solidarity with the dispossessed. In the thirteen years between the creation of the Freedom Flotilla and October 7, the Mediterranean became the site of another highly contested sort of crossing. The flotillas trace a similar route, in reverse, to the migrants who have come by the dozens and hundreds, in even smaller boats, seeking refuge on European shores, and who perish with regularity in the attempt. (Some of these travelers have been Palestinian, including members of the large diasporic community in Syria, displaced twice over by the civil war.) FRONTEX, the EU’s border police, and the Greek and Italian coast guards patrol, seeking to intercept these boats or push them back into Turkey’s jurisdiction—or into Libyan waters, where it will no longer be Europe’s responsibility if they are imprisoned in dungeons or sold into slavery. Faced with the absence, or aggression, of the state, ordinary citizens and NGOs charter rescue ships to try to save people from drowning.

There are direct ties between the flotilla and the migrant solidarity movement. The ship that rescued the twelve activists the Israeli navy had set adrift belongs to a migrant sea rescue operation, the Spanish NGO Open Arms. Carvajal, who is Spanish, has lately devoted her time to helping secure a partial arms embargo against Israel; we first crossed paths a decade ago while both working in the Jungle, the sprawling, unofficial refugee camp in Northern France. When I asked how she had gotten from Calais to the Arctic Sunrise, she said she wasn’t quite sure: “Fights touch each other… Solidarity with Palestine is something you get in every corner of the social movement here.” Hollarsmith, meanwhile, once organized with the group No More Deaths, supporting people making the treacherous journey across the US–Mexico border.

Engaging in this solidarity work—whether on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza, migrants on the way to Europe, or asylum seekers crossing into the United States—has a way of stripping people of the protections normally provided by their passports or the color of their skin. In 2018 Hollarsmith was one of the No More Deaths activists federally charged for leaving water and supplies on a remote wildlife refuge, an early instance of criminal legal retaliation against migrant rights activists in the US. This sort of repression has been in effect in Europe for some time already: countries from France to Poland to Greece have prosecuted humanitarian volunteers for such crimes as “human smuggling” or “aiding and abetting illegal immigration,” including the sea rescue captain Pia Klemp, whose ships have likely saved some 14,000 lives in the Mediterranean.

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As the flotilla prepared to set sail earlier this year, amid the onset of the US and Israel’s war in Iran, criticism was percolating. Some Palestinians felt that the previous journey had been more focused on the activists themselves than on the genocide occurring in Gaza. In April, speaking at a Global Sumud convening in Brussels, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine who has gained widespread recognition for her moral clarity in the face of global reprisals, said that “performance on its own doesn’t suffice” and mused about whether Western activists’ efforts might be better spent attempting to block arms shipments from leaving their own ports.

When I asked Arraf how she could get back on one of these boats after the horror of 2010, she said, “It’s always been this stubborn refusal to let violence win.” Though her courage and sureness of purpose are remarkable, it’s not entirely clear that the flotilla has been able to make violence a losing proposition for Israel—especially when its participants’ native countries have thus far refused to back them in any meaningful sense. For Arraf this is not a reason to give up the tactic: “I always believe we are stronger than them. We just have to organize better.”

The coalition has engaged in extensive discussions about whether it is acceptable to put people at risk in this way. “This is a big debate that’s been going on while we’re sailing,” Bob Suberi, a Vietnam veteran who’s joined the flotilla each year since 2023, told me. Considerable angst and dissension accompanied the first interception in late April. The movement had previously announced that this would be the biggest flotilla to date, with one hundred vessels and over a thousand participants, but just days after the capture and abduction one of the partner groups opted to withdraw its twenty boats, announcing that it would look for a way to “more directly confront Western complicity in genocide.” “There is not just one answer, because the flotilla is not a movement with one point of view,” Carvajal said.

Suberi and Arraf both told me that they consider the sea voyages to be merely one tactic among many. Arraf noted that the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s Italian branch focuses on political education and mobilizing dockworkers; outrage at the 2025 interception fueled a general strike that helped pressure Italy’s leaders to end their defense agreement with Israel. “We have to do everything,” Suberi said. For him, the obvious danger of these missions must not serve as a deterrent: “If you back down when they get more violent, they’re going to get more violent.” That violence might be less palpable to Western audiences, concealed within Gaza’s refugee camps or behind Israel’s detention center walls, but it won’t stop.

Suberi’s parents, Yemeni Jews, left Mandatory Palestine for the US in 1938; Suberi grew up steeped in Zionism and only began to question it in his fifties. During the pandemic, when the flotillas were on hold, he began making trips to the West Bank with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. He told me about his time in Umm al-Khair, a town that has become an infamous epicenter of settler violence. Since October 7 its residents have lived under a state of siege: settlers are “constantly threatening them, constantly intimidating them, constantly trying to provoke them to react so that they can kill them,” he said. Lately the IDF has taken to blocking the road to prevent schoolchildren from getting to class: “The kids would walk up to the razor wire, and the army was shooting tear gas at these primary-school-age kids.”

Last summer, when an earlier flotilla was waylaid and its passengers, including Suberi and Arraf, were seized, interrogated, and released, one of their lawyers met them at the train station with a message: Someone wants to speak to you. It was Suberi’s friend Awdah, calling from Umm al-Khair to invite them to a party the villagers were throwing to celebrate their release. He said, “We’ve been following you, we’ve been following you, you have to come,” Suberi recalled.

Suberi hadn’t slept or eaten in over twenty-four hours. Pleading exhaustion, he bowed out. “He argued with me, he said No, come tonight, come tonight, and we didn’t,” Suberi told me. “I was planning on going the next day.”

The next day, Awdah was shot and killed by an Israeli settler. The man was released within twenty-four hours. The IDF prevented foreigners from attending the funeral, but Suberi went to Umm-al-Khair anyway, staying for a month. “It’s just gotten worse since then,” he said. “I mean, all they can do is buy time.”

I had a hard time getting in touch with Suberi while he was at sea; he was always on watch, or his phone battery was drained, and the seven-hour time difference didn’t help. But he would periodically send me updates: footage of his boat, the Adalah, and another vessel briefly sailing abreast as their crew chattered across the gap in Spanish; a video of a lone songbird, far from home, perched on the finger of one of the volunteers. This year, the Adalah—which was seized by the Israeli navy on May 18 and set adrift somewhere near Cyprus—bears Awdah’s image: his face lit up by a wide grin, his wavy hair contained by his signature backward baseball cap. “We have his portrait on our mainsail,” Suberi said. “And above it, it says, May your memorybe a revolution.”