[News] 2nd intl. aid fleet heads for Gaza after Israel’s globally condemned interception of Sumud Flotilla

[Anti-Imperialist News]

presstv.co.uk 
<https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2025/10/03/756217/Gaza-second-flotilla-Global-Sumud-Israel-siege> 



  2nd intl. aid fleet heads for Gaza after Israel’s globally condemned
  interception of Sumud Flotilla

Presstv
October 3, 2025
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ae51adab-f17d-46ef-bec8-7dbc589ac846.jpg
Undated picture shows a vessel belonging to the Global Sumud Flotilla 
that has been intercepted by Israeli forces while trying to reach the 
Gaza Strip.

*Another international humanitarian fleet has set sail to break the 
Israeli regime’s near-total siege of Gaza after Tel Aviv intercepted the 
Global Sumud Flotilla, a monumental 50-strong convoy seeking to deliver 
aid to the coastal sliver’s war-stricken and starving Palestinians.*

The 10-boat fleet headed out of the Italian and Spanish coastlines 
between September 25 and 27, Drop Site News, an American investigative 
outlet, reported on Friday.

The fleet, it said, has been organized by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition 
(FFC), which has been organizing such Gaza-bound convoys since 2010, 
with the grassroots Thousand Madleens to Gaza (TMTG), named after a 
Gaza-bound aid ship that was targeted by the regime in June.

It carries nearly 70 people from more than 20 countries, including 
parliamentarians and elected officials from Ireland, Belgium, Spain, 
Denmark, France, and the United States.

*Additional vessel challenges Israel’s press blackout *

On its way, the fleet was joined by the Conscience, a massive vessel 
that departed from Otranto, Italy on September 30 carrying 80 people, 
including international journalists, medics, and several Palestinian 
doctors, who volunteered in Gaza.

“For nearly two years, the illegal Israeli occupation has blocked 
international journalists from entering Gaza, creating one of the most 
dangerous press blackouts in modern history,” the FFC said. “This boat 
is our challenge to that silence.”

The Friday report came after the regime intercepted the last vessel that 
had joined the Global Sumud Flotilla, which had set sail from Barcelona 
late last month on a mission to challenge what human rights groups have 
condemned as one of the harshest and most inhumane blockades in the world.

Described as the largest maritime effort of its kind in decades, the 
flotilla had brought together delegations representing at least 44 
different countries.

The interception spree was met with far-and-wide global condemnation.

*Israeli minister calls GSF’s activists ‘terrorists’*

Also on Friday, Drop Site News cited Adala, a rights group based in the 
occupied city of Haifa, as enumerating the violations committed by the 
regime against the GSF’s activists.

After being seized from international waters, the participants “were 
forced to kneel with their hands zip-tied for at least five hours, after 
some participants chanted Free Palestine,” the group reported.

At the occupied port of Ashdod, at least 331 of the activists faced 
hearings before Israeli immigration authorities, it added.

Adalah condemned the regime’s handling of the detainees as unlawful, 
humiliating, and systematically abusive.

It noted that far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir would disrupt 
lawyer visits, while participants were being filmed.

The outlet posted a video on X, former Twitter, showing Ben-Gvir 
addressing the detainees in a degrading manner and calling them “the 
flotilla terrorists.”

Detainees were denied water, medicine, and legal access, with lawyers 
being excluded from hearings that began without representation, the 
group said.

Transferred from Ashdod to the regime’s Ktzi’ot Prison afterwards, 
participants reported threats and harassment.

Adalah stressed that the entire process violated the international law, 
calling the naval interception an abduction and the blockade itself an 
illegal act of collective punishment and genocide.

It demanded the activists’ release, accountability on the part of the 
regime, and return of confiscated belongings and aid supplies.

The developments took place as the regime keeps using the siege to 
weaponize starvation amid its October 2023-present war of genocide on 
the Gaza Strip.

The war has seen Tel Aviv use a combination of bombings and starvation 
to kill nearly 66,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

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