Israel holds two Gaza flotilla spokespersons and releases the rest of the participants in Greece

BarcelonaIsrael released most of the participants of the Flotilla on Friday that the army detained in Wednesday's assault, but is holding two spokespeople for the movement: the Palestinian-Catalan Saif Abukeshek and the Brazilian Thiago Ávila. Around 170 sailors, including about twenty Catalans, have been handed over to the Greek authorities and have disembarked on the island of Crete, but as the organization has reported, Abukehsek and Ávila have been held on the Israeli frigate where they were transferred after the assault.

In an interview with ARA on April 15The rest of the boats, about thirty, continued sailing until they entered Greek territorial waters and are now on the coast of Crete, where they will decide whether to continue the mission or not after the storm affecting the area today passes. It is not clear whether the activists who have been released in Greece will be able to rejoin them or if they will be repatriated.

Abukeshek, born in Nablus, in the West Bank, and a resident of Spain for over twenty years, with a Spanish passport, is a Palestinian activist who has three young Catalan children. Eduard Lucas, a member of the Intersindical Alternativa de Catalunya (IAC) and head of international relations for the Union, has denounced to ARA the "act of piracy by the Zionist government" and the "kidnapping" of two members of the Flotilla to "make political mockery" in Israel and "blackmail" the rest of the participants into abandoning the mission. The union calls on the Spanish government to do everything possible for their release in the face of a genocidal state and denounces that Abukeshek has been detained "for being Palestinian." It also highlights that the governments of Madrid and Brasilia have distinguished themselves by their criticism of Netanyahu's policies, which may have influenced Tel Aviv's decision to continue holding these two spokespeople specifically. "This could even mean a life sentence," warns Lucas, considering how Israel's judicial system works with the Palestinian population. "Palestinians who enter Israeli prisons either die there or emerge aged. It is a system sustained by hatred, death, and revenge," denounces the unionist.

Ávila is a Brazilian climate activist who had been a deputy for PSOL, a splinter group of President Lula da Silva's Workers' Party, and has a young daughter. In an interview with ARA on April 15, when he set sail from Barcelona, Ávila stated: "We cannot give up on the world that Trump and Netanyahu want".