Greta Thunberg again sets sail with a gaza aid fleet

The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has once again set sail on board a ship of a Gaza aid fleet. Around twenty boats under Palestinian flag left the port of Barcelona on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. (local time) with hundreds of activists on board.

“A mission like this shouldn’t actually exist,” Thunberg told the AFP news agency on Saturday. However, it was necessary because the states and their elected representatives do not do enough “to maintain international law, prevent war crimes and prevent genocide”.

The states and governments are not in the way of their responsibility and violated “their legal duty,” Thunberg criticized. “And with that they reveal the Palestinians, but also all of humanity.”

The new Gaza aid fleet is organized by a group that describes itself as a “independent” organization and calls itself Global Sumud Flotilla. “Sumud” is the Arabic word for “resistance”.

According to Thunberg, the activists involved pursue the goal of bringing humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and “announcing the opening of an aid body and then bringing in more help”. The campaign is against Israel “illegal and inhumane siege of the Gaza Strip,” said 22-year-old Swede.

The Brazilian activist Thiago Avila said in Barcelona to journalists that it was “the greatest solidarity mission in history, with more people and boats than in all previous attempts”. Boats from ports in other world regions will also join the action.

In addition to the people on board the fleet, numerous activists took part in the campaign in dozens of countries, including the Irish actor Liam Cunningham. “The fact that the fleet is on the road shows the failure of the world, to enforce international law and humanitarian rights,” said Cunningham to journalists. It is a “shameful time in the history of our world”.

Spain supported the action. The Spanish government will “use all of its diplomatic and consular protection to protect our citizens,” said Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares on Saturday.

In June and July, Israel prevented two attempts from activists to bring relief supplies into the Gaza Strip with an aid fleet. The Israeli army stopped the ships involved, arrested the crews and referred them to the country. Thunberg participated in the auxiliary fleet in June, which was stopped by the Israeli Navy about 185 kilometers west of the coast of the Palestinian area. The Swede had previously participated in pro-Palestinian protests.

Regardless of the war in the Gaza Strip, Israel strictly ranks the Palestinian area from the sea. This was introduced in 2007 after the Islamist Palestinian organization Hamas was taken over in 2007 and is officially supported by Egypt, which borders on the coastal strips in the south. The scraping is used to prevent weapon deliveries to Hamas.

On August 22nd, the UN said that there was a famine in the Gaza Strip. She threw Israel the “systematic disability” of aid deliveries into the Palestinian area. The Israeli government rejected the allegations.

The calls worldwide are getting louder after an end to the war on the Gaza Strip that has been going on for almost 23 months. The humanitarian situation in the Palestinian area is catastrophic.

The Hamas and allies with it triggered the Gaza War with their brutal major attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Since then, Israel has attacked the Gaza Strip massively. According to the Hamas authorities, more than 63,370 people were killed, most of them civilians. The information cannot be checked independently, but is classified as plausible by UN representatives.