Irish activists join largest flotilla attempt to break Gaza blockade

On a Sunday morning in Barcelona, roughly twenty vessels of every conceivable size—from century-old wooden sailboats to industrial cargo ships—cast off from the harbor bound for Gaza. The Global Sumud Flotilla, as it was named, carried food, water, and medicine. It also carried hundreds of activists, journalists, and politicians from forty-four countries, among them the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, Irish actor Liam Cunningham, Irish comedian Tadhg Hickey, author Naoise Dolan, and TD Paul Murphy. Thousands of supporters lined the Barcelona pier that morning, many wearing keffiyehs, chanting for Palestine and against Israel, waving flags from boats painted in Palestinian colors. The Sirus, one of the departing vessels, was more than a century old.

This flotilla represented the largest maritime attempt in eighteen years to breach Israel's blockade of Gaza—a siege that has choked off the territory since 2007. Organizers expected around seventy boats to eventually join the convoy, with additional ships departing from ports in Italy and Tunisia in the days ahead. If all went according to plan, the fleet would reach Gaza waters around September 14 or 15. The timing was urgent. Food experts had warned just days earlier that Gaza City was sliding into famine. Half a million people across the strip faced catastrophic hunger. The war that had begun on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants killed roughly 1,200 people inside Israel and took 251 hostages, had now stretched nearly twenty-three months. The death toll in Gaza had exceeded 63,000. Among them were 332 people who had died of malnutrition, including 124 children.

Thunberg, perhaps the most recognizable figure aboard, had tried this route before. In June, she had been deported by Israel when the ship carrying her and eleven others, the Madleen, was intercepted by the Israeli military in international waters. She spoke to reporters before departure about what she saw as a pattern of deliberate deprivation. "The story here is about Palestine," she said. "The story here is how people are being deliberately deprived of the very basic means to survive." She had told the Associated Press the day before that Israel had continuously violated international law by attacking ships, unlawfully intercepting them in international waters, and preventing humanitarian aid from entering the territory.

Liam Cunningham, the Irish actor, brought with him a video he played for reporters at the Barcelona press conference. It showed a girl named Fatima singing while planning her own funeral. She had died four days before the flotilla departed. "What sort of world have we slid into where children are making their own funeral arrangements?" Cunningham asked the assembled journalists. The question hung in the air without answer.

This was not the first attempt in 2023 to break the blockade by sea. In May, a ship called the Conscience had set sail from Malta only to be attacked by drones. In June came the Madleen and Thunberg's deportation. In late July, the Israeli military stopped another vessel, the Handala, detained twenty-one international activists and reporters aboard, and seized its cargo—baby formula, food, medicine. Now, as this fourth major attempt departed Barcelona, Israel announced it would soon halt or slow humanitarian aid into parts of northern Gaza as it expanded its military offensive against Hamas in Gaza City, which had just been declared a combat zone.

The activists and politicians aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla knew the odds. They knew the history of interception, of deportation, of cargo seized. They sailed anyway, carrying supplies for a population that international observers said was being systematically starved. The journey ahead would take them across the Mediterranean toward waters Israel had long controlled, toward a territory where the blockade had held for eighteen years, where half a million people were hungry, where children were singing about their own funerals. What would happen when they arrived remained uncertain.