The organizers of the GSF, which tried last year to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza before being intercepted by Israel, announced this Thursday in South Africa their plans for a new mission, maritime and land, with “thousands” of people which would begin on March 29.
The new flotilla will begin its journey from Barcelona on March 29, before gradually expanding to other ports in the Mediterranean Sea, something that will be combined with a land convoy, all with the aim of creating a humanitarian corridor with Gaza.
Thus, on March 29, “a unified maritime flotilla and a land humanitarian convoy” will depart simultaneously, mobilizing thousands of people from more than 100 countries, in “a coordinated and non-violent response to the genocide, the siege, the mass famine and the destruction of civilian life in Gaza.”
Next March’s mission would include more than a thousand doctors, nurses and health workers, in addition to educators, engineers, reconstruction teams and investigators of war crimes and “ecocide”, the organizers detailed, among whom was Mandla Mandela, grandson of the late former South African president Nelson Mandela, in Johannesburg this Thursday.
The GSF already announced last December in a statement its intention to launch a new mission in the spring of 2026 and noted that it would have 100 humanitarian aid ships and more than 3,000 participants from more than one hundred countries.
Then, the Flotilla estimated the capacity of this new mission to more than double compared to that of 2025 and stressed that its objective would not only be the “simple delivery of humanitarian aid”, but also a “sustained and specialized civilian presence” in the Palestinian territories to rebuild “the basic civil infrastructure destroyed by two years of genocide.
A journey that ended in deportations
began his first journey with 20 boats from Barcelona on September 1 to Gaza to transport humanitarian aid and challenge the Israeli blockade on the Palestinian enclave.
Between October 2 and 3, Israel intercepted more than forty ships and detained a total of 473 crew members who were transferred to the Saharonim prison, in the Negev desert, southern Israel, something that activists denounced as an “illegal detention.”
A week later, Israel confiscated the nine ships – one ship and eight sailboats – that made up a second flotilla, known as Liberty-Thousand Madleens, and arrested around 145 activists who were on board.
The activists arrested were deported to their countries of origin over the weeks following their arrest by the Israeli Navy.
