Hanging over the activists on board the Global Sumud Flotilla as they prepare to attempt to break the naval blockade on Gaza is the history of violent action by Israel to prevent such boats landing.
The recent apparent use of drones to attack the boats is unprecedented, and European governments have clearly been alarmed by private warnings they have received from Israel.
The Italian defence minister this week described a “worrying” atmosphere, and stressed that two naval ships sent by Rome to protect citizens would be unable to help once the flotilla enters Israeli-controlled waters.
Never before has Israel faced such a large civilian attempt to break the blockade; it is unclear what it might do to stop the 50 boats.
RM Block
This is Sinn Féin Senator Chris Andrews’ fifth flotilla, and he says no two have ended the same: one was stopped through diplomatic pressure, one by apparent sabotage. Another was apprehended by the Israeli navy and the passengers deported.
Yet the incident that hangs heaviest over the sailors is the violent raid on the Mavi Marmara of 2010, when Israeli commandos scaled down ropes from helicopters on to the deck and killed 10 Turkish activists who were on board.
Drone attacks: Gaza aid flotilla comes under fire
It caused a six-year diplomatic rift between Israel and Turkey, which told a United Nations panel that autopsy reports showed five of the dead were shot in the head at close range.
It is no accident that many who have joined the Global Sumud Flotilla are lawyers. It has a dedicated “legal support” boat, the Shireen.
The legality of Israel’s naval blockade, and therefore whether it has the right to enforce it by stopping boats, was a subject of furious dispute long before the current conflict. Many legal scholars see it as illegal collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population, and a breach of Israel’s obligations as an occupying power.
This isn’t an unchallenged position however. The UN panel of inquiry into the Mavi Marmara incident found the blockade to be a “legitimate security measure” to prevent arms deliveries to Hamas and that Israel was therefore “entitled to enforce it” – though it found its actions in doing so “excessive and unreasonable” and the killings “unacceptable”.
Its view on the blockade might be different 15 years later, now that famine has been declared in the strip. That panel assumed aid could go through the land crossings into Gaza. Currently, the UN’s human rights office says Israel allows only a “small trickle” to enter Gaza by land, that is “totally insufficient to alleviate starvation”.
In 2024, the International Court of Justice also ordered Israel not to do anything contrary to the Geneva Convention “including by preventing, through any action, the delivery” of aid.
The situation is not helped by the fact that the international laws governing armed conflict at sea are incomplete and outdated. The last comprehensive treaties date back to before the first World War.
Navies currently rely on “manuals”: interpretations of law and practice produced by academics.
The most authoritative is considered to be the San Remo Manual of 1994. But it was written before cyberattacks and drones became a feature of warfare, and it doesn’t address non-international armed conflicts at all. An effort to update it was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the meantime rival legal interpretations have grown, filling in the gaps in codified law with what is customary in practice.
In 2014, a judge in the Israeli port city of Haifa ruled that he could act as a “prize court” judge. This was a revival of antique law that had fallen into disuse regarding “prizes” – vessels and cargo seized during war – that had its heyday when rival powers captured each other’s ships using sail power and cannons.
Israeli forces began seizing boats to enforce the naval blockade declared on Gaza in 2009. The judge ruled he could rule on who now had property rights to the boats, because he had inherited the authority of a prize court that existed in Jerusalem during the British mandate.
The Haifa prize court cases, one of which ended up in Israel’s supreme court, are now wrapped in as part of customary practice in a naval law manual published by the US Naval War College in 2025.
This new “Newport Manual” rejects two key humanitarian conditions that the San Remo Manual holds are necessary for naval blockades to be legitimate.
It rejects that the blockade is unlawful if it has “an effect on the civilian population that is disproportionate to the military advantage gained from the blockade”.
It also states that “there is no exemption from blockade enforcement for vessels carrying humanitarian materials intended for the civilian population of a blockaded area.”
The source cited is an academic paper about the Haifa prize court cases, written by the then-head of the International Law Department of the Israel Defense Forces.
You could see this as creating a circular situation where the longer Israel enforces its blockade, the more customary precedent is created.
The activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla believe they are part of a critical historical moment in which they have the chance to change how the situation of Palestine is perceived around the world.
Asked to address legal questions in a video conference by flotilla organisers on Thursday, lawyer Lamis Deek suggested that activists should avoid getting bogged down in legalities and focus on influencing public perception instead.
“Assert this in all of the conversations – the ICJ has declared Israel’s occupation and siege completely illegal. I would keep it at that,” she advised.
“What’s important is changing the narrative, because law and discourse is reciprocal,” she continued.
“The implementation of this depends on the narrative that you are all brilliantly elevating.”
