Israel Katz, Israel’s minister of defense, has instructed the Israel Defense Forces to refrain from blocking foreign pro-Palestinian protesters seeking to enter the Gaza Strip by sea, but seize their vessels, his office said on Thursday.
According to Israel’s Channel 12, the announcement came in response to intelligence suggesting that protest groups were preparing renewed attempts to breach Jerusalem’s maritime blockade of the enclave.
“Whoever comes to demonstrate on the shores of Gaza, we will send them into Gaza and use the ships to evacuate Gaza residents who are interested in leaving voluntarily,” Katz said in the Thursday statement.
His office added, “The defense minister instructed the IDF to allow the protest flotillas to reach Gaza’s coast, disembark the protesters in Gaza, and seize the ships and transfer them to Ashdod Port so that they can be used to evacuate Gaza residents who are interested in leaving Gaza.”
Israel in recent weeks has drawn up plans to allow Palestinians to leave Gaza in accordance with U.S. President Donald Trump’s Feb. 4 proposal to resettle the Strip’s population in Egypt, Jordan and other countries.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition—an umbrella group of global anti-Israel and Islamic NGOs—announced three months ago that, “in 2025, we are determined to take to the seas to break the siege of Gaza” as it vowed to “continue acquiring vessels and securing crew and participants.”
The umbrella group includes several Turkish NGOs, among them the Humanitarian Relief Foundation and the Mavi Marmara Association, responsible for the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, in which nine violent activists were killed by Israeli soldiers while attempting to reach Gaza.
The deaths of the Turkish activists sparked a three-year diplomatic crisis with Ankara, which was resolved when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an apology in 2013 over “operational mistakes.”
