The Flotillas to Gaza Are the World’s Conscience

January 16, 2026 By Chris Hedges , ScheerPost

OME, Italy — There will be a new flotilla in April 2026 that will attempt to break the 18-year-old Israeli blockade of Gaza. The mission is expected to be the largest maritime action for Palestine to date, involving more than 3,000 activists from 100 countries on 100 boats, including a medical fleet of 1,000 health care workers to deliver 500 tons of life-saving aid, equipment and medical supplies that Israel has blocked from entering Gaza.

Once again, activists from all over the world will sail toward Gaza in an attempt to end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. Once again, their journey will be minutely tracked on social media. Once again, Israeli drones will be sent out in international waters to intercept and attack the boats. Once again, the boats will be boarded by masked, heavily armed Israeli soldiers. Once again, activists will be arrested. Once again, they will be sent to high-security prisons. Once again, they will be physically abused, placed in solitary confinement, insulted, berated, forced to watch Israeli propaganda videos about Oct. 7, or raped by Israeli prison guards. Once again, Palestinians, many of whom wait on the beach in the hope that the latest flotilla will get through, will see they are not alone. And once again, the world will look away, ignoring its legal mandate to intervene to end the genocide, as per Article I of the Genocide Convention.

And yet, despite the almost certain outcome, the flotillas are imperceptibly chipping away at the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza. They are reminding the world of its moral and legal duty to intervene. They are shaming not only Israel, but the Western governments whose complicity sustains the genocide. They are illustrating that we are not powerless. We can act.

“How did you feel when you watched the flotilla?” I asked the Palestine ambassador to Italy, Mona Abuamara, when I joined the Italian dock workers strike in Genoa and national demonstration for Palestine in Rome at the end of November 2025.

“Like a child,” she answered. “You know how when you know the end of a movie but you still want it to be different. I kept thinking, ‘Let it pass. Let it pass.’ As if it could. We knew it wouldn’t. That’s part of the beauty of those people on those boats. They knew they’re not going to be allowed to pass, but they refused to accept the status quo.”

I met Thiago Ávila, a Brazilian activist, and Swedish activist Greta Thunberg early in the morning at the MAAM Museum in Rome, its labyrinth of halls, corridors and rooms filled with street art, including a sign that reads, “Spoiler YOU WILL DIE.” Some 200 migrants from various countries live as squatters in the abandoned slaughterhouse and museum. Artworks, including huge, elaborate murals by some of Italy’s best artists, cover the cement walls of the former meat factory. At the entrance, satirizing the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, in huge letters, is the word “FART.”

“For all the years I’ve been an activist, I have, every day, lost more and more hope — if I even had any — in the institutions and our so-called leaders, corporations, elected officials, banks, whatever it is, to come to our rescue,” Thunberg said. “They are the ones who have put us in this situation. The system is not flawed. It is designed to be destructive. It is designed, in my view, to have unequal power structures. It is designed to keep some people oppressed. It is designed to keep nature as a distant, separate entity that is not a part of us in order to exploit it. In order to oppress people, we have to dehumanize them. The only way out is to reclaim power, which is one of the main reasons why I’m here supporting the striking workers in Italy. This is such a clear, textbook example of what it looks like when people take back power and show where the real power is.”

Ávila organized the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and the newly formed Global Sumud Flotilla. He was part of the crew of the Madleen, a boat that departed in June 2025 with, among others, Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian Member of the European Parliament who was beaten in custody by Israeli prison guards.

The Madleen was intercepted by the Israeli navy in international waters and towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod. Ávila was held in solitary confinement in Ayalon Prison, where he took part in a dry hunger strike until he was deported.

“I’ve been on so many failed attempts I can’t count,” Ávila told me. “I’ve been in boats that were unfortunately bombed. I’ve been in boats that were sabotaged. Boats that were defeated bureaucratically by countries pressured by Israel. We’ve been trying for years to break that horrific siege. Eighteen years. The last two attempts I was with Greta. I made it close to Gaza twice.

While in prison, he said, Israeli guards kicked him and slammed his head onto the asphalt. They interrogated him for hours in an attempt to extract details about the flotillas while a guard pointed a shotgun at him. They sent snarling guard dogs into his cell. They constantly moved him from one cell to another. They woke him up repeatedly during the night.

“How many countries have you managed to mobilize?” Israeli interrogators asked Ávila.

“Who are the representatives in the countries?” they demanded to know.

“I’m not going to give you any information that would put anybody into a dangerous position,” Ávila answered. “But anything that is public, you can check on our website. We are very transparent.”

“Look, what you make your people go through,” the interrogators sneered. “Look at all the money that you spent, that you wasted. Think of what you could have done with this money?”

“Why are you doing this?” the army interrogators, intelligence agents and Israeli judges invariably asked.

“Because for eight decades you have been committing genocide and ethnic cleansing,” Ávila always answered. “You have structured an apartheid and colonial state. You are ruling this land, not by a religion, but by a racist and supremacist ideology, which is Zionism.”

“What’s their reaction?” I asked Ávila.

“They hate it,” he said.

“Most of the Israeli government wanted us out of there as soon as they could the last time we were held,” Ávila said. “It was a horrible PR situation. But Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security — who manages the Israeli prison system — didn’t want to let us out. He wanted to punish us. He wanted to make a political statement. There was this internal struggle. Eventually they tried to get rid of people.”

“International solidarity has the responsibility to be more useful to the Palestinian cause,” Ávila said. “We need to have a bigger impact. This time, we managed. When we went with the Madleen, we had been trying for the previous five months. We tried three other missions that failed. And to be honest, the world barely knew about them.”

On one of the failed missions, shortly after midnight on May 1, 2025, 20 miles off the coast of Malta, one of the flotilla’s boats — the Conscience, registered under the flag of Palau — was struck by missiles launched from two drones. The missiles appeared to target the ship’s generators. The strikes caused a fire and a breach in the hull. Communication with the ship was lost. It was loaded with humanitarian supplies.

“The European Union didn’t condemn the attack,” Ávila said of the strike. “It was a hard defeat for us. But we knew we had to keep trying. We didn’t have any more big boats. All we had was a small boat for 12 people. It could only carry a symbolic shipment of aid. But that is when the world paid attention. There was a huge mobilization to support us.”

There is always the possibility the Israeli assaults will turn deadly.

In May 2010, the Mavi Marmara, carrying activists and humanitarian aid, was raided by Israeli naval commandos in international waters as it sailed toward Gaza. Nine people — eight Turkish citizens and one with dual Turkish American citizenship — were killed by the Israelis who claimed they were attacked by activists armed with clubs and knives. Another 24 were seriously injured by live ammunition fired by Israeli forces…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“The most heartbreaking thing was to be so close to Palestinians and at the same time not able to stop, for a second, the violence,” Lio said.

No nation, with the exception of Yemen, has made any effort to physically halt the genocide. The United States and European nations have supplied Israel with billions in weapons – the U.S. alone has provided $ 21.7 billion to Israel since Oct. 7 – to sustain the mass slaughter. These nations have criminalized those, such as members of Palestine Action, several of whom are in perilous physical conditions from a prolonged hunger strike in prison, who protest the genocide. They have shut down free speech in the media and on college campuses. They will support Israel until the final phase of the genocide – the mass deportation of the Palestinians from Gaza – is complete. It is up to us to act. If we fail, there will be no rule of law. Genocide will become another tool in the arsenal of industrial nations and the Palestinians, once again, will be betrayed.

The flotillas not only keep alive resistance, they keep alive hope. https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/16/chris-hedges-the-flotillas-to-gaza-are-the-worlds-conscience/