THE message from Israel is clear: anyone trying to express solidarity with Palestine’s people — particularly the besieged and brutalised population of Gaza — will be forcefully stopped. This has been Tel Aviv’s policy for decades. On Monday, Israeli forces boarded the Madleen, a vessel carrying peace activists from several countries, who were trying to break the siege of Gaza by bringing a symbolic shipment of humanitarian supplies to the occupied Strip. But for Israel, the Palestinians are apparently not deserving of humanitarian treatment. That much has been proved by the genocidal violence the Palestinian people have been facing since Oct 7, 2023. The ship was travelling in international waters, and Israel’s violent takeover is no different from acts of piracy committed on the high seas. Among the high-profile passengers on board the Madleen were Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a French member of the EU parliament. Several governments, the UN’s special rapporteur in Palestine, as well as rights groups, including Amnesty International, have slammed Israel’s brutal targeting of the Madleen. Yet there is largely silence, or milquetoast expressions of ‘concern’, from most Western governments, despite the fact that citizens from several European states were aboard the vessel.

Sadly, Israel has a long history of thwarting humanitarian missions in support of Palestine, often with deadly force. For example, in 2010, a similar raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla resulted in the deaths of several activists when Israel violently prevented the vessels from reaching Gaza. In 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she protested the demolition of Arab homes in Gaza. Tel Aviv dubbed the killing an ‘accident’. These are only a few of the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinian people, as well as their supporters from across the globe. But when it comes to accountability, the self-proclaimed standard-bearers of human rights reply with a deafening silence. Israel needs to answer not only for the genocide and mass starvation it has engineered in Gaza, but also the criminal attempts to stop humanitarian aid from reaching the battered Strip. As the UN’s Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese put it, breaking the siege “is a legal duty for states, and a moral imperative for all of us”.

Published in Dawn, June 10th, 2025