Israeli Navy Intercepts Women’s Flotilla Attempting To Breach Gaza Blockade

This fake peace flotilla even included a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate from Northern Ireland.

The city of Aleppo is under siege and these cowards are sailing to Gaza to play pretend. Oddly, with reports of Aleppo being on the brink of starvation while Russia is bombing UN's humanitarian convoys, no Nobel Peace Prize Laureates are rushing to breach that blockade.

TEL AVIV (Breitbart) – The Israeli navy intercepted a women-only flotilla aimed at breaching the security blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Wednesday, about 35 miles off the coast.

A little earlier in the day, the women on board wrote that they were in the clear, tweeting:

#WomenToGaza now 60 nautical miles from the coast of #Gaza
No occupation forces in sight
To Gaza with <3, here we come !

In a first for the IDF, an all-female squad of soldiers took over the boat. The 13 passengers on board the Zaytouna-Olivia did not resist and the boat was redirected to Ashdod port, an Israeli official said.

The Women’s Boat to Gaza, an initiative of the International Freedom Flotilla Coalition, set out from Barcelona along with another boat, the Amal 2. The second boat had to turn back because of a technical malfunction, According to Haaretz, organizers suspect that the boat was sabotaged.

Speaking to AFP by telephone on Tuesday, the group’s spokeswoman Claude Leotic expressed “fear there will be an Israeli attack” to prevent the boat from reaching Gaza’s shores.

A Palestinian activist said on Twitter that an Israeli navy gunboat fired warning shots in the air as the ship approached, but the army refused to confirm the information.

The boat, which set sail under a Dutch flag, had among its passengers several parliamentarians, an Olympic athlete, a retired U.S. army colonel and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland.

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Israel finds and destroys Hamas Tunnel

(Gaza)  Israel today revealed that they have uncovered a attack tunnel,dug by Hamas in which to allow terrorists to sneak into the country and murder as many innocent people as possible. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke on Monday with a warning   that Israel would respond with force to any attempt by Hamas to harm Israeli civilians.

"Israel will respond with force to any attempt by Hamas to attack its soldiers and attack its civilians. I am certain that Hamas understands that well."

The tunnel – about 30-40 metres deep, was lined with concrete equipped with communication lines, air supply and rails for further excavation – was uncovered last week although its existence was confirmed only on Monday.The tunnel entered Israel in an area some distance from Israeli military bases and civilian homes and appears to have been dug since the last set to between Hamas and Israel.  However as the two are supposed to be observing a ceasefire, it does ask the question about how committed Hamas is to peace.

I notice that all these so called human rights orgs which openly berate Israel for not allowing in enough building materials into Gaza in which to rebuild the mini state after it lost a war of its own making , are remaining very silent on how materials which should be used to build homes are being used to build tunnels for war. Tunnels i should add the civilian population are denied to use

ICC won't reopen Gaza flotilla case

JERUSALEM (JTA) — The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has rejected a panel of judges’ request to reconsider her decision not to investigate war crimes allegations in the Mavi Marmara flotilla case.

The office of Fatou Bensouda has appealed to the ICC appeals court regarding its decision on July 16 to order her by a vote of 2-1 to reconsider the decision to close the case “as soon as possible,” the Israeli media reported Monday evening.

In the appeal, Bensouda said the judges did not consider “the unique context of violent resistance aboard the Mavi Marmara,” Israel’s i24 news reported. The ship was trying to evade Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Last November, Bensouda closed a preliminary investigation into the incident in which nine Turkish passengers, including one U.S. citizen, were killed in clashes with Israeli commandos who had boarded the Mavi Marmara. She said at the time that any cases relating to Israel’s boarding of the ship “would not be of sufficient gravity to justify further action by the ICC.”

The judges said earlier this month that the prosecutor made “material errors in her determination of the gravity” of the case. The panel was responding to a request by the Comoros Islands, an ICC member, to investigate the May 2010 incident. The ship was registered to the Comoros.

Why Flotillas Sail to Gaza, Not Syria

(Commentary Magazine) Today, the latest publicity stunt by pro-Palestinian activists ended harmlessly as the Israel Navy intercepted a ship off the coast of Gaza that was attempting to break the blockade of the strip in order to draw attention to what is passengers claim is a humanitarian crisis. But, like previous Gaza flotillas, the effort has little to do with the plight of the people of Gaza and everything to do with the long war being waged to end Israel’s existence. More to the point, the continued focus on Gaza by those calling themselves advocates for human rights at the very moment that a genuine human catastrophe is occurring inside Syria without much of response from the international community tells us all we need to know about the hypocrisy of Israel-bashers.

The fact that it was Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who today pointed out the fact that flotillas aren’t sailing to Syria doesn’t make it any less valid. Hundreds of Syrians have been slaughtered by the Assad regime that is backed by Iran and Hezbollah terrorists with more being killed by its tacit ISIS allies. The carnage has created millions of refugees who are living in squalor inside the country or in camps in neighboring Jordan.

But as Netanyahu knows, there will be no peace activist flotilla to Syria to bring aid to people who really need it. Nor had those on the Swedish-registered Marianne that was diverted by the Israelis gotten lost on their way to help those truly in need. Instead, they were on the way to try and help the Hamas government of Gaza that has been rightly isolated by the international community since the bloody 2007 coup when the Islamist group seized power.

While the situation in Gaza isn’t pleasant, the popular notion of a humanitarian crisis there is a myth. That’s because there is no shortage of food or medicine in the strip since Israel allows daily convoys of such supplies into Gaza every day, including those when Hamas is shooting rockets over the border at cities and towns inside the Jewish state. It is true that there is a shortage of building materials inside Gaza. Given the scale of the destruction wrought by the war Hamas launched against Israel last year, that’s a problem. But the reason why such materials can’t be brought into the strip without restrictions was revealed anew when Hamas showcased a new terror tunnel that it claims reaches into Israel on Iranian TV on Sunday. Most of the concrete that is brought into Gaza is being used for such tunnels or for the construction of elaborate fortifications that will enable Hamas to shield its arsenal and other structures intended to make it harder for Israel to repress rocket fire aimed at civilians.

If Gaza is a mess, it is not because both Israel and Egypt understand that Hamas terrorism must be quarantined. Rather, it is because the international community stood by indifferently as Hamas transformed the congested strip into a terrorist state that believes it has the right to pursue its war on Israel by any means anytime it sees fit. Hamas not only commits war crimes by engaging in terrorism but by using the population of Gaza as human shields behind which its killers and their armaments find shelter.

Those who want to help Gazans need to think of ways to free them from the despotic control of Hamas, which executes its enemies without mercy and represses every kind of free expression as it enforces its ruthless Islamist ideas on the population. The independent Palestinian state in all but name that they govern is an experiment in tyranny that is particularly cruel. Yet somehow those who purport to care about the Palestinians think the real villain is an Israeli government that withdrew every single soldier, settler and settlement in 2005 and simply wishes in vain for quiet along the border.

Activists seek to go to Gaza, however, for one clear reason, and it has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. Arabs who are engaged in conflicts with other Arabs don’t interest them no matter how many people are killed or how much suffering is caused. Even at the height of the fighting last year when hundreds of Palestinian civilians were unfortunately killed as they were caught in fighting provoked by Hamas, the casualties there were dwarfed by what is going on in Syria. But it is only when Jews are involved in defending their state that the human rights community discovers a crisis.

The double standard this sort of behavior illustrates has nothing to do with good works for a suffering people. It is nothing less than anti-Semitism, since it treats Israeli self-defense as inherently illegitimate and bolsters those who commit atrocities as valid forms of “resistance” against the presence of Jews inside the 1967 lines and not just in the West Bank. Those who seek to aid the efforts of Hamas to wage war on Israel and oppress their own people are not humanitarians. They are anti-Semites.

Israeli naval commandos board Gaza-bound pro-jihad flotilla ship, no injuries reported

IDF forces visited & searched vessel attempting to breach maritime blockade of Gaza in int’l waters https://t.co/2YMB3lhadC

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) June 29, 2015

IDF naval fighters board the Swedish Marianne vessel that was attempting to break the blockade on Gaza. No injuries reported.

(INN) IDF naval fighters early on Monday morning boarded the Swedish ship Marianne that was taking part in the latest flotilla trying to violate Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza.

The troops took control of the ship and will take it to the Ashdod Port where its contents will be inspected. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said the takeover process was short and there were no injuries on either side.

“According to the decision of the political echelon, and after exhausting all diplomatic channels to prevent the Marianne vessel from reaching the coast of the Gaza Strip and violating the naval blockade, navy fighters took over the vessel a short time ago before its arrival in Gaza,” the statement said.

“The action was taken after a large number of requests to the passengers on the vessel. Once the passengers clarified that they would not cooperate and proceed to the Ashdod Port, it was decided to take over the vessel and sail it to the Ashdod port.”

The so-called “Freedom Flotilla 3”, which set sail from Crete on Friday, has been backed by the European Campaign to Break the Siege on Gaza. Members of the European Parliament, journalists, athletes, artists, as well as radical leftist Israelis will be on board.

Arutz Sheva has exclusively revealed that the flotilla is indirectly funded by the French government via a pro-Palestinian NGO.

The flotilla was the latest in a series of attempts by activists to break the naval blockade on Gaza, imposed by Israel after Hamas violently took control of Gaza from rival Fatah in 2006.

The most famous of the flotillas was the 2010 one involving the Turkish Mavi Marmara, which claimed to be providing "humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza."

The ship repeatedly defied orders to turn around and dock at the Ashdod port and ignored repeated warnings to change course, forcing IDF troops to board the vessel - only to be attacked by Islamist extremists on board wielding knives and metal bars. The wounded soldiers had no choice but to open fire, resulting in the deaths of ten of Islamists on board.

After an investigation, Israeli authorities discovered the vessel to be carrying no humanitarian aid - in fact, no aid supplies at all - indicating how the true goal of the provocative move was to open Gaza to free naval access, which it has consistently used to smuggle in weapons to be targeted against Israel.

'Despicable' Gaza flotilla is a 'gang of terror supporters'

(JPost) Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid on Saturday denounced those taking part in the flotilla to Gaza as “a gang of supporters of terrorism” and a “despicable flotilla that needs to be stopped.”

The former finance minister spoke to a town hall meeting in Holon. He ridiculed the idea that the flotilla was aimed at highlighting the plight of Gaza and advancing Palestinian human rights.

“This flotilla is a kind of provocation against the State of Israel,” he said. “This is a provocation by people who are anything but defenders of human rights.”