In April of this year, I joined the crew of the Handala for the first leg of her voyage as she set sail from Oslo, Norway. The Handala is an 18-meter former fishing vessel from Norway. It is part of the International Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) that has been sailing ships to challenge Israel’s illegal and inhuman blockade of Gaza with successive voyages since 2010. As Handala began sailing For the Children of Gaza in April 2023, this is the second year of this campaign. The aims of our present voyage were two-fold. The intended final destination was the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip – presently under near-constant bombardment as Israel continues its barbaric, genocidal atrocities against a captive civilian population. The little boat and her small crew aimed high – to challenge and indeed to break the siege of Gaza. Palestinians residing there have been denied all their human rights and have been forced to live under dangerous, inhumane conditions for far too long by a racist, domineering colonial regime. It is time these abhorrent, illegal, dehumanizing conditions come to an end. What our governments refused to do, the crew of our ship to Gaza was intent on accomplishing.
Along the way, sailing to numerous European ports, the second chief goal of our voyage was for the crew to communicate the message that justice and human rights must be upheld for the people of Palestine – especially during this time of great pain, sorrow, and trauma. We demanded an immediate, permanent ceasefire and voiced loud and clearly the obvious imperative to stop the genocide. With these goals in mind, we took part in press conferences, made presentations, and participated in large-scale demonstrations in all the cities we visited.
As children comprise nearly half the population of Gaza, and who because of their fragile, developing minds and bodies are especially vulnerable to suffering life-altering physical and psychological scars from the massive political violence they are endlessly subjected to, the Handala centered its focus on the urgent need to protect Palestinian children. For this reason, the mission for the Handala was named “For the Children of Gaza.” Our aims, broadly speaking were thus to facilitate much-needed social and political change by both public education about the plight of children in Gaza and to insist that our governments uphold their obligations under international law and demand that Israel end its siege on Gaza.