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Israeli forces have intercepted 39 boats carrying aid and foreign activists, including Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg, to Gaza, leaving only one vessel still sailing toward the Palestinian enclave, the flotilla organizers said on Thursday.

Cameras broadcasting live feeds from the boats, verified by Reuters, showed Israeli soldiers sporting helmets and night vision goggles boarding the ships, while passengers huddled together in life vests with their hands up.

A video from the Israeli foreign ministry showed Thunberg, the most prominent of the flotilla’s passengers, sitting on a deck surrounded by soldiers.

Passengers diverted to an Israeli port

According to a tracker on the organizer, Global Sumud Flotilla’s website, one boat was still sailing. “Several vessels of the Hamas-Sumud flotilla have been safely stopped and their passengers are being transferred to an Israeli port,” the Israeli foreign ministry said on X. “Greta and her friends are safe and healthy.”

The flotilla, which set sail in late August, is transporting medicine and food to Gaza and consists of more than 40 civilian vessels with about 500 parliamentarians, lawyers and activists. It’s the highest-profile symbol of opposition to Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

The flotilla’s progress across the Mediterranean Sea garnered international attention as nations including Turkiye, Spain and Italy sent boats or drones in case their nationals required assistance, even as it triggered repeated warnings from Israel to turn back.

Turkiye’s foreign ministry called Israel’s “attack” on the flotilla “an act of terror” that endangered the lives of innocent civilians.

The Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office said it had launched an investigation into the detention of 24 Turkish citizens on the vessels on charges including deprivation of liberty, seizure of transport vehicles and damage to property, Turkiye’s state-owned Anadolu news agency reported.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro ordered the expulsion of Israel’s entire diplomatic delegation on Wednesday following the detention of two Colombians in the flotilla and terminated Colombia’s free trade agreement with Israel. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim condemned Israel’s actions and said Israeli forces had detained 23 Malaysians.

Interception triggers global protests

Israel’s interception of the flotilla sparked protests in Italy and Colombia, while protests were also called in Greece, Ireland and Turkiye. Italian unions called a general strike for Friday.

Israel’s navy had previously warned the flotilla it was approaching an active combat zone and violating a lawful blockade, and asked organizers to change course.

It had offered to transfer any aid peacefully through safe channels to Gaza.

The flotilla is the latest seaborne attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, much of which has been turned into a wasteland by almost two years of war. In a statement, Hamas expressed support for the activists and called Israel’s interception of the flotilla a “criminal act,” calling for public protests to condemn Israel.

The boats were about 70 nautical miles off Gaza when they were intercepted, inside a zone that Israel is policing to stop any boats approaching. The organizers said their communications, including the use of a live camera feed from some of the boats, had been scrambled.

Greece said it has been informed that 39 boats from the flotilla are sailing to the Israeli port of Ashdod and that everyone onboard is safe, no violence was exerted, the Greek public broadcaster reported.

The flotilla had hoped to arrive in Gaza on Thursday morning if it was not intercepted.

Israeli officials have repeatedly denounced the mission as a stunt.

“This systematic refusal (to hand over the aid) demonstrates that the objective is not humanitarian, but provocative,” Jonathan Peled, the Israeli ambassador to Italy, said in a post on X.

Prior attempts aid by sea

Israel has imposed a naval blockade on Gaza since Hamas took control of the coastal enclave in 2007 and there have been several previous attempts by activists to deliver aid by sea.

In 2010, nine activists were killed after Israeli soldiers boarded a flotilla of six ships manned by 700 pro-Palestinian activists from 50 countries.

In June this year, Israeli naval forces detained Thunberg and 11 crew members from a small ship organized by a pro-Palestinian group called the Freedom Flotilla Coalition as they approached Gaza.

Israel began its Gaza offensive after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken as hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies. The offensive has killed over 65,000 people in Gaza, Palestinian health authorities say.

GAZA: Nancy Abu Matroud has already lost three children during Gaza’s war.
Now, the Palestinian mother, 22, is fighting to save her daughter, Etra — a two-year-old cancer patient newly deprived of vital medical care: the children’s hospital treating her shut down last month during Israel’s latest offensive in Gaza City.
“We are just asking for a shelter,” Abu Matroud said. “I don’t want to lose the daughter I still have.”
A deadly mix of disease, displacement, lack of medical care and malnutrition has beset most Gazan families during the almost two-year-old war, but the turmoil has placed a particular burden on young children and pregnant women such as Abu Matroud. She was six months pregnant with twins when, fleeing Israeli bombardment in Gaza City last month, she arrived in the central Gaza Strip after three days of walking, she said, along with her husband and Etra.
After the family reached Al Nuwairi area, her belly started to hurt and her waters broke, Abu Matroud recounted. She gave birth to her twins prematurely.
One of the twins died in Al-Awda Hospital in nearby Nuseirat. The second child was transferred to the infants’ department in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. After two days, that child also died, said a spokesperson for Al-Aqsa hospital, Khalil Al-Daqran.

NOT ENOUGH HOSPITAL EQUIPMENT
Premature babies are exceptionally vulnerable to the pressures of Gaza’s war; in particular, there are not enough incubators and ventilators available to keep them alive, according to Jonathan Crickx, a spokesperson for UNICEF State of Palestine.
“There is an increase in the number of babies who are born premature,” he told Reuters. “The incubators needed to keep the baby in a protective environment... the ventilators that help them to develop their lungs, all of this equipment is not available in sufficient quantities today in the Gaza Strip.”
The children’s father, Faraj Al-Ghalayini, 53, sits in the dirt by the side of a street, heating a can of chickpeas for two-year-old Etra on a fire he made using twigs.
“What is our fault? We have nothing to do with this. What is the fault of our children?” he said.
“God gave me a daughter, she is two years old now, and I was waiting for these two coming twins.”
Now the parents don’t know what will happen to their curly-haired daughter, who sits on a blanket on the roadside in a grubby stripy t-shirt and plays with a rag doll.
“We don’t know what to do, no one asks about us — no nation nor those from our own care about us,” said Al-Ghalayini.
With resources exhausted amidst nonstop Israeli shelling, hospitals in Gaza have been forced to shut down. Only 14 out of 35 hospitals in the enclave are functioning, and those only partially, Crickx said.
The Israeli military told Reuters it continues to take steps to enable the provision of medical care and the ongoing activity of medical institutions in the Gaza Strip, in coordination with international humanitarian organizations.

DISPLACEMENT AND FAMINE
Most of the enclave’s around 2.2 million population have been displaced between the north and south several times during the war. Women moving from one place to another with no proper care are at a higher risk of undergoing premature birth, with malnutrition exacerbating the situation.
Famine was declared in Gaza City, the enclave’s largest urban center, in August by global hunger monitor IPC, before Israel unleashed a long-threatened ground assault on the city, deepening the humanitarian crisis.
“UNICEF has treated in the month of August 13,000 (children) below the age of five for acute malnutrition, it is a very big number — among them, babies, premature babies,” Crickx added.
Abu Matroud said her four-year-old son from a previous marriage went missing at the beginning of the war. Losing the twins was another unbearable tragedy.
“I named the boy and the girl,” said Abu Matroud, who named her twins Mahmoud and Farida.