All Eyes on Deck: Israeli Navy Intercepts Freedom Flotilla, Blocks Aid Mission to Gaza

On Monday, Israeli naval commandos surrounded the 18-metre boat Madleen in international waters 160 kilometres off Gaza. Videos livestreamed only minutes earlier showed volunteers in orange life jackets as speedboats, flood-lights and shouted orders cut through the dark. “WE ARE BEING ATTACKED!” the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) posted; then the feed went dead. Hours later a pre pre-recorded videos of the activist were posted. 22-year-old Swedish Activist Greta Thunberg said, “If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces or forces that support Israel.”Thunberg and the other activists called for their “friends, family, and comrades” to urge their governments to push for their release as soon as possible.

Israeli officials later confirmed the seizure, said the passengers, including Thunberg, French-Palestinian MEP Rima Hassan, were “unharmed,” and announced the vessel’s tow to Ashdod for detention and deportation.

The Madleen, named after Gaza’s first woman fishing captain, had left Catania on 1 June carrying baby formula, flour, prosthetic limbs, water purifiers and a manifesto of non-violent resistance. Organisers conceded the cargo was tiny in a territory where United Nations agencies report famine-level shortages, yet argued that a symbolic corridor through a 17-year blockade could crack open a moral case that lawyers and diplomats had failed to solve.

Israel framed the interception as routine enforcement of what it calls a “legal naval blockade” imposed to choke off weapons to Hamas. Defence Minister Israel Katz pre-emptively labelled the voyagers “Hamas-propaganda-spouting friends” who “will not reach Gaza,” and authorised “whatever measures are necessary.” Brigadier-General Effie Defrin said the navy “operates day and night to protect Israel’s maritime borders.”

International jurists, United Nations special rapporteurs, and Amnesty International see Israeli intervention as piracy, not policing. Freedom of navigation on the high seas is guaranteed under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; human-rights law bars blocking lifesaving aid. The rapporteurs warned Israel in advance that any force against the peaceful ship would breach international law. Amnesty added that the blockade itself is “unlawful.”

This clash reprises the 2010 Mavi Marmara raid, when Israeli troops killed ten activists on a Turkish aid ship. Competing UN inquiries later split on whether the blockade could ever be lawful, but both faulted Israel’s force, and Ankara expelled its ambassador. The legal fog has never lifted; Tel Aviv continues to claim the right of interdiction far beyond its territorial sea, while critics argue that any wartime blockade loses legitimacy once it starves civilians.

Those civilians are now in extremis. Since Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks, local health authorities count more than 54,000 Palestinian deaths, the majority women and children. UN agencies say 90 per cent of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents face acute food insecurity, hospitals run on dwindling fuel, and infants have died of starvation.

On 2 June, a panel of UN experts accused Israel of wielding aid as “a weapon of war” and urged states to act against what it called “genocide-by-starvation.” Israel denies the charge and cites hundreds of lorryloads entering Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, but aid groups reply that the crossing opens on Israel’s timetable, shipments face hours-long inspections, and daily volumes fall well below the World Food Programme’s minimum.

Inside Israel, little dissent surfaces. Talk-radio callers urged the navy to sink the yacht; only the rights group B’Tselem publicly criticised the operation as “a moral failure.”

The activists, meanwhile, fought a propaganda war. Israeli drones buzzed the boat near Greek waters, GPS signals were spoofed, and Israeli media leaks named the elite Shayetet 13 unit assigned to the capture. Thunberg posted that “the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity”; Katz replied by branding her antisemitic.

As the stand-off built, the hashtag #AllEyesOnDeck trended from Malmö to Dublin. Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald warned that an assault would breach international law; in Gaza, Um Ahmad of Khan Younis tracked the yacht online until its icon disappeared and texted, “Our hearts are with them for trying to help us.”

Israeli officials dismissed the Madleen as a “selfie yacht” and argued that proper humanitarian channels already exist. Yet those channels remain under Israeli control; when they close, no food moves. B’Tselem’s Jessica Bachelet notes that the navy deployed gunboats to block baby formula while Gaza’s hospitals beg for disinfectant.

By Monday evening, the detainees were photographed smiling under armed escort to Ashdod; Sweden and France sought consular access, and Turkey called the raid “unacceptable.” The FFC announced immediate fundraising for another voyage.

Precedent suggests escalation. In early May, an FFC cargo ship named Conscience was reportedly hit by drones in international waters off Malta. Activists blamed Israel; Jerusalem neither confirmed nor denied, and Malta treated the incident as a possible sovereignty violation. That pattern—remote strikes when deniable, boarding when a high-profile capture serves public relations—now defines Israel’s maritime playbook.

Queues for bread in Gaza lengthen while lawyers argue blockades and governments issue calibrated statements of concern. For families there the question is brutally simple: why is a yacht carrying crutches and powdered milk deemed a security threat that warrants commandos? Until that query gets more than a talking-point answer, every aid vessel will sail into waters where international law is proclaimed yet rarely enforced, and hunger remains the region’s sharpest weapon.