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WHILE WORLD LEADERS DITHER OVER A GAZA PEACE PLAN, I’M HOPING TO
BREAK ISRAEL’S BLOCKADE
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I’m Sailing Hoping to Break Israel’s Blockade
September 30, 2025
The Guardian
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_ It’s not likely we will reach Gaza. But until Palestine is free,
we will show what solidarity we can from our vessel _
The Thousand Madleens flotilla of boats leaves the port of San
Giovanni Li Cuti in Catania, Sicily., Orietta Scardino/EPA
My first task on the boat is to ease a red rope from the cockpit while
a Danish participant opposite me tautens a white one. Between us, we
hoist the sail. The coastline of Augusta, Sicily, fades behind us.
There are seven people on board: three French, two Irish, one Dane and
one Irish-Danish for good measure.
Ours is the fastest boat of the Thousand Madleens flotilla sailing to
Gaza [[link removed]] just behind the Global
Sumud ships. My boat was the last to depart; we saw off eight other
ships at the port, having just shared a week of intensive training
with those on board. All participants have been sleeping on our boats
since we arrived, so we know their layouts well. I have found a space
for each of my possessions to “live” in a cramped environment
where everything must be kept in lockers.
If successful, we will deliver aid for Palestinians in Gaza. The boat
is loaded with medicine, baby formula, prosthetic limbs for the many
amputees that Israeli bullets have created. For the several weeks
ahead of us, the organisers told us to bring a personal rucksack no
larger than an aircraft carry-on bag. Every available crevice of the
boat has been crammed with emergency supplies for Palestinians.
We are not sailing simply to deliver our cargo, but to pressure our
countries to stop arming and funding Israel. All of our governments
– French, Danish, Irish – participate in the genocide through
maintaining ties with its perpetrator. We’re not even protesting
inaction, but the active sabotage of Palestinian self-determination.
We didn’t want to have to send a flotilla, and Palestinians in Gaza
didn’t want to rely on our doing so. But until Palestine
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we will show what solidarity we can from our boat.
Initially, our boat was named Algol – a “demon star”,
apparently. We rechristened it Milad after Milad Walid Daqqa, the
daughter of a long-term imprisoned Palestinian politician and writer.
Just before we set sail, I painted the new name in green on the side
of the boat from a dinghy.
Our sailors have a reassuringly firm sense of how everything should be
run. They sailed the Milad across the Atlantic themselves before
recommending the flotilla organisers buy it for the journey to Gaza.
It shows plenty of wear – indelible stains on the kitchen counter,
temperamental lights and sockets – but in terms of seaworthiness, it
has amply proven its chops.
The sailors have devised a rota of tasks – sailing, cooking,
cleaning, night watch – but they stress the importance of
proactively solving any problems we encounter. “The boat can never
be too clean,” one of them tells me as I kneel down from the deck to
scrub the boat’s exterior with a giant sponge. I loosen the dirt,
then he washes it off by tossing a bucket of sea water over it. “You
must never let sea water inside the boat,” he says. “The salt
attracts humidity and nothing dries.”
I have done everything I can to ward off sea sickness: wristbands,
under-ear patches and pills to be taken twice daily. Otherwise, it’s
best to stay outside and look at the horizon. My new open-air writing
study consists of a 30cm-deep patch of sitting space near the
starboard; the only barrier between me and the water a metre in front
is two thin lines of metal rope. Everything is grey-blue today – the
water, the sky. I didn’t bring a laptop – too impractical to use
on the deck – so I write in a notepad and on my phone.
Israel has intercepted or attacked every flotilla to Gaza since 2010
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always in international waters – the flotilla routes never enter
Israel. The Sumud boats ahead of us have already faced two rounds of
drone strikes, one while docked in Tunisia
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Greek waters
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Israel has not commented on the attacks. Flotilla participants are not
the true target of these aggressions: they stem from Israel’s
relentless campaign to block the means of life from Palestinians. If
we were delivering aid to anyone else, we would be left alone.
Although attacks on the flotilla are illegal and highly dangerous,
everyone on my boat is more concerned about the far worse atrocities
Israel routinely commits in Palestine and particularly in Gaza.
It can feel hopelessly insignificant to fold towels and untangle deck
cables while Israel ethnically cleanses and obliterates an entire
people. But I think of it this way: the urgency in Gaza is precisely
why our mission needs to be well run, down to every last detail. Our
desire isn’t merely to do something, anything; it’s for it to be
effective.
[Activists wave palestinian flags as a flotilla leaves carrying
humanitarian aid and activists vowing to try ‘to break the siege of
Gaza’.]
Activists wave palestinian flags as a flotilla leaves the harbour.
Photograph: Pascal Pochard-Casabianca/AFP/Getty Images
The Italian and Spanish navy ships that have been dispatched to
accompany us
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will hopefully increase our odds of safe passage and delivery. If this
serves Palestinians by helping to get aid to them, it is at least some
form of practical support. These countries, and Europe as a whole,
still urgently need to fully sanction Israel. The Italian prime
minister, Giorgia Meloni, recently described our mission as
“gratuitous, dangerous and irresponsible”. What about a country
that, according to doctor testimonies
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shoots children dead with a single targeted bullet to the head or
chest?
The US and UK are hardly more credible as state actors, having sown
chaos in the region for many decades. Yet Donald Trump and Tony Blair
are key voices in the new proposed peace plan
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that has left Palestinians sceptical. Watching this development from
the flotilla are ordinary Americans and Brits. They sail with the rest
of us as conscientious objectors to their countries’ many misdeeds.
We’re still in Italian waters now; we’ve been told the voyage to
Gaza will take two to three weeks, depending on weather and on how
events unfold. It’s only rational to be prepared for scenarios
besides the ideal one of safely delivering our aid in Gaza. But in
highlighting the lengths Israel goes to in order to starve
Palestinians, and in pressurising our governments back home, we hope
to accomplish something regardless.
===
Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer and the author of Exciting Times
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Happy Couple
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* Freedom Flotilla; Aid to Gaza;
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