Video: Freedom Flotilla’s Handala sets sail for Gaza from Sicily on Sunday

18 volunteers sailing on new voyage to break Gaza blockade

This Sunday, 13 July, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) vessel Handala will set sail from Syracuse, Sicily, on the promised new volunteer journey to break Israel’s criminal starvation siege of Gaza and its 1.8 million surviving people – a civilian boat setting out to challenge Israel’s illegal, deadly blockade.

This mission comes just weeks after Israel’s illegal attack on the Handala’s sister ship Madleen, seizing the Madleen and its crew in international waters. Twelve unarmed civilians – including a member of the European Parliament, a doctor, journalists and human rights defenders – were abducted by Israeli ‘commandos’, in effect pirates, and taken against their will to Israel, where they were interrogated, abused, then deported for daring to try to bring food, medicine, and solidarity to Palestinians under siege. The UK Starmer regime did nothing, said nothing, even though the Madleen was a UK-flagged vessel.

French MEP Rima Hassan quickly announced, on her return to France, that a new voyage was already in preparation. Now the Handala, like its predecessor, will carry life-saving humanitarian aid and a message of solidarity from people around the world refusing to stay silent as Gaza is starved, bombed, and buried under rubble.

The Handala launches in the shadow of ongoing mass atrocities. Since Israel broke its never-honoured ‘ceasefire’ on 18 March at least thousands of Palestinians have been killed and tens of thousands injured, with the death toll of the genocide now around 400,000. More than seven hundred civilians have been gunned down as they waited for food at ‘aid’ distribution points controlled by Israel – a death trap masquerading as an aid scheme to facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The occupation regime has now closed all but one of these traps and is converting it into a concentration camp for 600,000 people – and says it will kill any of the 1.8m survivors who refuse to enter.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition is a grassroots international network that has been sailing against Israel’s blockade since 2010. The international volunteer crew will include volunteer medics, lawyers, social justice activists, journalists, and community organisers.

We are not governments. We are people taking action where institutions have failed. For the children of Gaza

The Handala volunteer crew.

The vessel is named after the Palestinian cartoon figure Handala – a barefoot refugee child who turned his back on injustice and vowed not to turn around until Palestine is free. A coalition statement says that:

This boat carries his spirit, and that of every child in Gaza who has been denied safety, dignity, and joy. In 2023 and 2024, Handala sailed to ports across northern Europe and the UK, breaking through the media blockade, engaging the public, and building solidarity through press events, art installations, and political education in every port it visited.

The children of Gaza—who make up over half the population—have been living under a brutal blockade and siege for their entire lives. Since October 2023, over 50,000 have been killed or injured, tens of thousands orphaned, and nearly a million forcibly displaced and homeless. All now face famine, disease, and trauma few of us can imagine.

This mission is for them.

The world will again watch with baited breath to see how the terrorist occupation state will respond, but the voyage will again put all eyes where they should be: on Gaza and its suffering people and on Israel’s endless crimes against them.

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