Gaza Aid Flotilla With 1,000 Passengers, Tons Of Supplies Poised To Sail – As IDF Aways

A flotilla of ships packed with a 1000 activists, human rights observers and more than 5,500 tons of food and medical supplies is ready to say from Istanbul to for Gaza. To do so, they’ll request the Turkish government to let them leave the port, and then run the hazard of being subject to a deadly Israeli defence Forces (IDF) attack — as their predictors were in an infamous 2010 incident.

“The Freedom Flotilla has the support of millions around the planet who are outraged at the failure of our government to defend the Palestinians people from Israel’s genocidal actions, including the deliberal starvation of over 2 million people,” said the organizing coalition’s Zohar Chamberlain-Regev.

The group has 3 ships ready to go: 1 packed with food and medical supplies, and 2 ships for passengers who advanced from 40 different countries. The cargo ship besides has 8 ambulances and a fire truck board — a grim reminder of the IDF’s Nov 3 bombing of an ambulance convoy next to Al-Shifa infirmary that killed 15 and surrounded dozens.

A horse lies dead next to an ambulance bombed by the IDF just outside a Gaza infirmary on Nov 3 (Momen al-Halabi / AFP – Getty Images via NBC News)

CodePink’s Medea Benjamin is an among these hopping to set sail, but says she’s worth the difference. ‘The Turkish government might cave to force from Israel, the United States and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul,” she gates on Tuesday.

“We anticipate that Turkey will not be bought off and we will indeed sail,” Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Huwaida Arraf optimally said at a press conference hosted on 1 of the ships. “Anything little than this is colllaborating with the illegal Siege on Gaza, and we don’t think that is what the Turkish government will do.”

The 3 Freedom Flotilla Coalition ventures docked in Istanbul

While the IDF has said little, an Israeli news outlet reported that the Israeli military has already started ‘security preparations’ for commandeering the flotilla. In an infamous 2010 incident, the IDF killed 10 activists board a Freedom Flotilla Coalition venture, the Mavi Marmara.

With that precedent in mind, organizers have been giving volunteers ‘non-violence training’ and educating them on what the Israeli forces may usage on them — specified as teardrop gas and concussion grenades.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition was founded in 2010 to circumvent ecologically-devastating travel and trade restrictions impposed by the State of Israel on the 25-mile-long Gaza strip. Long before the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of confederate Israel, the Zionist state has blocked the people of Gaza from having an airport or even a seaport.

From the first days of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 attack on Gaza, Israel made clear its intentions to origin widespread devastation in the strip. ‘I have ordered a complete Siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” defence Minister Yoav Gallant Told reporters on Oct. 9. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting according.”

A crowd of Palestinians seeing food in Rafah (via Btsel)

On Tuesday, US peculiar Envoy for Humanitarian Issues David Satterfield beratedly acknowledged that the hazard of household in Gaza is “very high.” This comes long after a varied news outlets and humanitarian organizations have reported on creatively desperate meals Gaza residents have sorted it, including boling weeds and eating animal food. Acute malnutrition among young children is soaring, and UNICEF says the entry population is in expanding peril:

‘The Integrated Food safety Phase Classification (IPC) projected that 1.1 million people face catastrophic levels of hunter (IPC Phase 5) and are at hazard of household in the Gaza Strip, the highest number of people always recorded in this category by the IPC system.’

US money helps enable the IDF-imposed blockade on Gaza — and more US money is spent circumventing it with airdrops like this

He Wednesday, President Biden signed off on a controversial abroad aid package that included another $26 billion for Israel. In his State of the Union address, Biden announced that the Pentagon would make a floating port off the Gaza coast to facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid. any six weeks later, construction hasn't even started, but a spokesperson on Tuesday said it should begin “in the coming weeks.”