Published on •Updated
The “Global Sumud Flotilla” is ready to sail to Gaza again, after its previous mission was intercepted last October by Israeli authorities and failed to reach the Strip.
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Almost a hundred boats with around 1,000 people on board will be involved in the new mission, meant to deliver humanitarian aid in Gaza, bypassing Israeli controls. The new initiative is considered even more dangerous than the last one, given the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.
The last boats are expected to depart on Saturday from Augusta, Sicily, and join up with other vessels departing from Barcelona and Marseille. In the past few days, the flotilla tried to stop a cargo ship carrying raw materials en route to supply the Israeli military industry. Other boats are expected to join along the way to Gaza, departing from Greece and Türkiye.
The Gaza-bound initiative will be the largest civilian maritime mission for Palestine in history, almost double the size of the previous one, according to its promoters, a network of students, union workers, humanitarians and pro-Palestinian associations. Their ultimate goal is to break what they define as “the illegal siege imposed by Israel on Gaza”.
The last flotilla, made up of almost 50 vessels, was stopped in international waters north of Egypt in October 2025, while attempting to enter an area that Israeli authorities warned them not to cross, a few days before the ceasefire in Gaza was reached.
The Israeli navy approached the flotilla and boarded the vessels, seizing the boats and detaining activists, journalists and politicians who were on board, including climate activist Greta Thunberg. The interception sparked protests in many cities across Europe, however all of the people taken from the boats were released after one or two days in prison in Israel and subsequently returned to their home countries.
The Israeli government said it had the right to enforce a naval blockade on Gaza during the war against the terrorist group Hamas, considering the flotilla action “not a humanitarian mission but a political provocation” and claiming it had been financed by Hamas. The Global Sumud Flotilla organisation rejected this accusation.
This new initiative risks ending up the same way, as it is very unlikely that Israel would allow the vessels to reach the Gaza Strip. “It is a fear that we have. We know what we are going against,” Navid Lari, a Belgian activist who is sailing in the mission, told Euronews.
However, he and his fellow activists consider Israel’s interception system not unbreakable. “Last time they had a hard time intercepting forty-five ships, we saw the limits of their system,” he said, claiming that the strong civil society mobilisation that followed the flotilla’s interception had influenced some EU governments’ stance on the issue.
Ahead of the launch, the Global Sumud Flotilla convened a Congress in Brussels on Wednesday, including members of the European Parliament, politicians from several EU and non-EU countries and UN officials such as Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The “Brussels Declaration”, signed by the participants, calls for the establishment of a humanitarian maritime corridor to Gaza, grounded in international law and verified by the United Nations.
