Freedom flotilla endorses ‘Madleen Declaration’ on World Refugee Day

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, whose Gaza-bound humanitarian vessel Madleen and its crew were attacked and seized in international waters in an act of piracy by Israel, has announced its endorsement, on World Refugee Day, of the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy’s (PICS) Madleen Declaration:

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition proudly announces our endorsement of The Madleen Declaration, a bold and urgent call launched by the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy.

This declaration connects the dots between genocide in Palestine, extractivism, militarized borders, refugee deaths at sea, and environmental devastation in the Mediterranean. It demands nothing short of a total transformation—social, political, and ecological—grounded in justice and liberation.

On 9 June 2025, Israeli forces violently boarded our civilian aid boat Madleen in international waters to stop it from reaching Gaza with life-saving supplies. Just weeks earlier, the Conscience was bombed near Malta. These attacks are not isolated—they are part of a global pattern of impunity, settler-colonial violence, and criminalization of humanitarian action.

The Madleen Declaration names this system for what it is: a network of deadly alliances between occupying powers, fossil fuel giants, weapons manufacturers, and surveillance regimes. And it offers a vision of what must replace it:

A free Palestine.
Free movement for all.
Care and solidarity over profit and repression.
A just transition for the planet and its people.

We are honored to stand with climate defenders, human rights activists, Indigenous peoples, and displaced communities around the world in lifting up this call.

In place of borders and bombs, we demand life.

In place of siege and surveillance, we demand freedom.

The declaration, in full, reads:

The Madleen Declaration

This declaration, put forward by the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy, ties together crises of border violence and refugee deaths at sea, extractivism and fossil fuel dependence, militarism, Big Tech and corporate power, the genocide in Palestine, and environmental destruction in the Mediterranean – and argues urgently for a transformative social, environmental and political alternative.

On Monday, 9th June Israeli forces boarded the Freedom Flotilla Coalition sailboat Madleen in international waters and kidnapped her crew to prevent the passage of aid to the besieged Palestinian people. Despite at least 62,000 deaths and countless more people killed, injured, bereaved and displaced over the last two years in Gaza, it fell to one small boat to attempt to break Israel’s blockade.

The international community has allowed a genocide to unfold in plain sight. And the poison of impunity is spreading. A month ago the aid ship Conscience was bombed off the Maltese shoreline, over a thousand miles from Gaza.

Subsequent Maltese obstruction of the Conscience’s requests for aid mirrored Europe’s routine frustration of attempts to rescue people in distress at sea. Tens of thousands – Palestinians fleeing occupation among them – have drowned in the central Mediterranean on the world’s deadliest migration route. Here too, civilian ships and people seeking safety face obstruction and criminalisation as they keep humanitarian action alive; whilst European states sponsor crimes against humanity.

En route to Gaza, the Madleen crew rescued four Sudanese refugees, fleeing genocidal forces backed by the West’s Gulf allies. They were unable to prevent the others on board being returned to Libya by an EU-backed militia, where people seeking safety routinely face slavery, incarceration, and death.

Meanwhile the same Israeli Heron drones that surveil and target Palestinians in Gaza also police the Mediterranean for EU’s border agency Frontex. Across the Mediterranean, European states funnel money, weapons and political support to authoritarians and militias whilst claiming to uphold human rights.

In return, Europe demands its neighbours act as border guards, buyers of its weapons and tech, and a steady supplier of fossil fuels and resources. The outcome is a sea where humanitarian ships and refugees are blocked whilst deadly arms and ecosystem-destroying fossil fuels move freely.

And the sea itself is suffering. Amid successive years of record heat, the Mediterranean that is now warming a fifth faster than the world’s other oceans and much of the plant and animal life on its shores is dying out.

The climate campaigners on the Madleen sailed to a Gaza where ecocide has compounded genocide, through a Mediterranean where more storms, fires and floods than ever before drive people from their homes and destroy their livelihoods. Those who protest the confluence of state violence and environmental destruction are targeted.

From Italy to Egypt, harsh civil liberties restrictions have recently targeted climate activists, human rights activists and migrants first. Governments that claim to be protecting their people from the crises we are living through are in fact exacerbating them. This is as true in Europe as it is in Trump’s America, despite the growing schism between them. Palestine provides a glimpse of where this could end for us all.

Israel’s new so-called “aid” distribution system in Gaza: a labyrinth of surveillance drones and biometric gates operated amid a lethal blockade by troops and private security companies, is a terrifying model of modern repression. And the technologies it uses are both imported and exported globally. Against this system, we must build a different future while we can.

In place of war and genocide, we demand a free Palestine.

In place of racialised and deadly borders and blockades we demand free movement.

In place of destructive and polluting rearmament programmes and aid budgets being torn apart, we demand wages and housing and humanity.

In place of tech billionaires’ dreams of mass surveillance and control, we demand that humanity’s technological capabilities are harnessed towards increasing, not restricting our freedom.

In place of climate and environmental destruction and extraction we demand a just transition, the restoration of our natural world, and cheap clean energy for all.

‍In place of a Mediterranean Sea torn apart by state, corporate, and neocolonial violence, we demand a shared home in which we all can thrive.

In place of death and despair, we demand life and hope.

French MEP Rima Hassan, after her release from detention in Israel, gave a speech in which she said the next flotilla vessel is already in preparation to sail to Gaza. In addition, Malaysia has also reportedly mobilised a fleet of more than a thousand ships to sail to Gaza to break Israel’s illegal starvation blockade of Gaza.

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