After several delays of mostly floating around (without a shower) at anchor in the eastern Mediterranean sea off the coast of Cyprus, the Freedom Flotilla finally set sail for Gaza, its declared destination, on Sunday evening.
There is a one-year-old baby on board the large Turkish passenger ship, the Mavi Marmara, which is said to be carrying between 600 and 778 civilians.
The Israeli government has ordered the country’s navy to block the Flotilla.
The Turkish organization for humanitarian relief, IHH � its website says: “We are taking the largest fleet of aid to Palestine to date” — has been responsible for the geometrically-larger size of this venture in comparison with the eight Free Gaza expeditions that preceeded this effort.
The Freedom Flotilla is a coalition of several organizations (including Free Gaza) which do not always seem to agree on tactics and strategy, and this appears to be one of the reasons for some of its difficulties.
While participants have praised the organizational skills of the largest participant in the Freedom Flotilla, which is the Turkish humanitarian relief organization IHH, it is also evident that the decisions and the details are much less transparent than the 8 sea expeditions previously organized and dispatched by the Free Gaza movement (one of the participants in this Freedom Flotilla).
Kevin Ovinden, a member of Viva Palestina (which had a hard time entering Gaza via the Egyptian crossing at Rafah at the beginning of this year, is on board the Freedom Flotilla. He wrote Sunday morning that the boats which were finally able to sail on Sunday “are larger boats and the clear lesson is that for such an operation a few larger and well fitted vessels are more effective than a larger number of smaller boats. A coalition of organisations and initiatives has come together in this flotilla, but the Turkish IHH has set the standard by raising around 20 million USD and setting about the mission with elan, peerless organisation and a collegiate approach that belies the extent to which they are responsible for the impressive force that is gathered now in the Eastern Mediterranean”.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense said on Thursday that “From the moment of their departure, the ships will receive formal warnings at various stages of their journey, requesting them to stop their trip to Gaza´s shores”.
One of the boats in the Freedom Flotilla is reportedly flying the U.S. flag. Three boats are flying the Turkish flag.
On Thursday, according to an account in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,”Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke with the foreign ministers from several countries on Thursday … The defense minister told the foreign ministers that ‘Hamas, which rules Gaza, is a terror organization supported by Iran. It smuggles weapons and rockets with the sole purpose of harming Israelis, as it has done many times in the past’. The minister explained that Hamas has been holding Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit captive for four years, in complete isolation and in prevention of Red Cross intervention. ‘For these reasons Israel must oversee the waters in the area’, Barak said”. This Haaretz report is published here.
A polemic has developed in Israel around the issue of the captured Israeli soldier. Some Israeli media — backed on Sunday by a statement from Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon — claim that the Freedom Flotilla organizers have refused to carry a letter or even a food parcel for Gilad Shalit, who has not been visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross during his entire captivity. The members of the Flotilla say it is completely untrue, and they said they were waiting to hear more from a lawyer intermediary.
In recent days, meanwhile, the Israeli Air Force has been busy bombing Gaza — including the already-damaged-to-the-point-of-inoperability, and only, Palestinian airport which is located near Kerem Shalom, where Gilad Shalit was captured in late June 2006.
On Sunday evening, PRESS TV reported, in a live stand-up from on board the Freedom Flotilla´s Mavi Marmara — a passenger ship now sailing toward Gaza with some 600 or more passengers� that Israel has announced an increase in its declared maritime no-go zone to 48 miles off the coast of Gaza.
Israel declared a 20-mile naval blockade in January 2009, just as it started the ground invasion during Operation Cast Lead.
Earlier Sunday afternoon, organizers on board the Mavi Marmara reportedly confirmed receipt of a fax from the Israeli military.
The head of IHH, the Turkish humanitarian relief organization which is spearheading the Freedom Flotilla excursion, has said that this is “ironic” because there are dozens or more commercial ships which are now in this newly-expanded no-go zone.
When it was intercepted and boarded by the Israeli Navy in late June 2009, the Spirit seems to have just entered inside Gaza’s maritime space (its geographical coordinate were given by Free Gaza ast 31.68 04, 34.11 43.
The interception point is at the point shown on the graphic below, very kindly and obligingly prepared by Aletheia Kallos:
caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”413″ caption=”Site where Free Gaza ship, the Spirit, was intercepted in late June 2009 – graphic map by Aletheia Kallos”][/caption]
A note of caution from AK: “the geodetic datums for the several pushpin positions are unknown & tho they were plotted with as much care & precision as possible they are still not necessarily in exact agreement with the wgs84 datum used by google earth so a slight datum shift among the depicted features is possible..]
To put this into political context, here is the map of Gaza’s maritime space as delineated in the Oslo Accords, from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, here:
[The little hand-written note, in Arabic, above the late Yasser Arafat’s name indicates that there is a separate “letter” related to this matter...]
But Gaza’s agreed maritime space, as defined by the Oslo Accords, extends 20 nautical miles out to sea from the coastline (it is Area L. minus a strip south of the Israeli border, and a strip north of the Egyptian border), and can be viewed here.
Israel’s formally-declared naval blockade of Gaza was announced on 3-4 January 2009, just as the Israeli ground operation in Gaza began during Operation Cast Lead (27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009) — and it was not extinguished after the two unilateral cease-fires (Israel’s and Hamas’) went into effect at the end of that massive military operation.
Though the formal official notification of the blockade has not yet turned up, Israeli statements indicate that it corresponds exactly to Gaza’s maritime space (fishing and economic activity zone) as agreed in the Oslo Accords…
In mid-2008 — as the Free Gaza movment was preparing its first expedition by sea from Cyprus to Gaza — Israel published this notice to mariners about Area L (which it referred to as “Security Area L”):
Chart Update NM 5452/2008 for Chart 2634
SECURITY AREA L
(31� 33��8N., 34� 10��6E.)
Vessels are advised to remain clear of
Security Area L extending north-westwards
from the coast of the Gaza Strip. Vessels
approaching this area are requested to
maintain radio contact with the Israeli Naval
Forces on VHF channel 16 and will be subject
to supervision and inspection.
Israel, like many countries in the world, claims a 12-mile territorial sea off its shoreline. (Since 2009, Israel also, surprisingly, seems now to claim 3 miles off Gaza’s coast, according the British Admiralty notices to mariners: “reduced to 3M off Gaza” – see footnote 17 on latest list of Maritime Claims here from www.ukho.gov.uk…)
In fact, that looks suspiciously like a territorial claim — for whatever reason, including security — and it adds one more question that must be addressed by those who argue that Israel’s occupation of Gaza ended with Israel’s unilateral “disengagement” in 2005.
Also intriguing is the fact that the 3 mile slice of Gaza’s maritime space that Israel now appears to claim is also exactly the space to which Israel restricts Gaza fishermen.
The Free Gaza movement carried out 8 expeditions to Gaza (6 before the IDF Operation Cast Lead from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009; the 7th was in the early days of Operation Cast Lead, and the 8th, a much smaller prototype of what is likely to happen this weekend, set sail at the end of June 2009).
Meanwhile, Allegra Pachecho, a Jewish Israeli lawyer who lives with her Palestinian husband and children in the Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem, and who worked with the UN´s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Jerusalem for some seven years, has just published a commentary on Electronic Intifada, saying: “Indeed, in the last two years of the blockade, the weekly average for humanitarian supplies going into Gaza hardly ever reached more than 20 percent of the total goods Israel allowed to be imported. Israel benefited from the limited aid since it made the siege tolerable and reduced the urgent need to ´break´ it. Despite this, in the three years of the blockade, the UN and Western-backed relief organizations continued to collaborate and comply with Israel´s prohibitive blockade guidelines for the import of goods and maintain their limited aid amounts. They never took any real steps to break the siege nor to send in the prohibited but critical goods through other routes like the sea, air, the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border, or even through the hundreds of smuggling tunnels which the World Bank reports constitute the main import route for most of Gaza´s goods. Each one of these alternative routes would have entailed challenging the two main political positions of the Quartet (the US, EU, Russia and UN) and other Western donors on Gaza — supporting Israel and Egypt and the non-recognition, no-contact policy with the Hamas authorities. Even the London-based international humanitarian nongovernmental organization coalition, InterAction, comprised of 150 humanitarian organizations including Oxfam and Save the Children UK, rejected calling for goods to be sent via the sea as part of their large campaign against the siege last winter. Not that nothing was attempted. Aside from the limited aid, the UN and international aid community held many private meetings with the Israelis and issued statements, and more statements, each one half-heartedly calling for Israel to “open the crossings” and warning of the disaster to come. They also spent almost half a year and dozens of hours debating and drafting a three-page document called the ‘Minimum Framework for the Delivery of Humanitarian Assistance to Gaza’, which did not focus on how to ensure that enough aid would reach the people of Gaza, but ironically, on the minimum necessary to ensure neutral and impartial humanitarian operations. Describing itself as providing a modus operandi for the provision of assistance to Gaza, the framework offered no concrete plan of action on how to meet the humanitarian needs of Palestinians in Gaza (i.e. by delivery through alternative routes), and made no call, let alone suggestion that the siege must end. The great heavily-funded halls of these enormous relief operations continue to buzz with talk, rumblings of new strategies, monitoring frameworks and expensive but limited assistance operations. However, the bona fide humanitarian leadership and inspiration to break the siege and end the suffering in Gaza, is not emanating from these halls today, but rather from the deep waters of the Mediterranean Sea aboard the Freedom Flotilla”. This can be read in full here.
The Israeli government has ordered this Flotilla stopped and interdicted because the aid would benefit Hamas, which it would not do if it went through Israeli security inspection and then through the land crossings controlled by Israel — as Israel is offering as an alternative to a confrontation at sea?
