> Remembering Mavi Marmara

When a ship sends out a Mayday signal, nearby vessels have a duty to come to its aid. This is a core tenet of maritime law. But on Monday, May 18, when a group of about fifty boats in international waters started radioing out their distress calls, nobody responded. Cyprus, the country nearest and thus responsible for their safety, took no action. Soon armed individuals drew up alongside the boats, boarded, subdued the passengers, and brought them aboard prison ships, where, they later recounted, they were beaten, tased, shot with rubber bullets and pelted with stun grenades, taunted, sexually humiliated, and held in stress positions for hours on end.

This fleet had crossed no invisible line, committed no act of aggression; it was passing through a part of the Mediterranean that yachts and shipping liners regularly traverse. That such violence was permitted to occur becomes plausible only once you consider that the vessels had been on the last leg of their journey toward Gaza, in the hopes of breaking Israel’s total blockade of the strip and bringing supplies to the besieged territory, and were intercepted by the Israeli navy.

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/05/ … -flotilla/