Humanitarian Defiance Amid a Manufactured Famine
Suchitra Vijayan
On June 1, 2025, the Madleen departed from Catania, Sicily. Its destination: Gaza.
Named after Gaza’s first fisherwoman, the vessel carries urgent supplies—flour, baby formula, water desalination kits, children’s prosthetics, and sanitary products—that have become contraband under siege.
Since March 2, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza: no food, no water, no fuel, no medicine. Over 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people now face acute food insecurity. One in five is already nearing famine. At least 100 Palestinians have been killed at aid distribution points in just the past eight days. Children are not only dying from bombs, but also from hunger.
On board are twelve activists and human rights defenders from around the world:
Greta Thunberg (Sweden)
Rima Hassan (France–Palestine)
Yasemin Acar (Germany)
Baptiste André (France)
Thiago Ávila (Brazil)
Omar Faiad (France)
Pascal Mauriéras (France)
Yanis Mhamdi (France)
Suayb Ordu (Türkiye)
Sergio Toribio (Spain)
Marco van Rennes (Netherlands)
Reva Viard (France)
The Madleen is tracked in real time through a partnership between the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and Forensic Architecture. This is more than a navigational tool, transforming a solitary vessel into a globally witnessed journey. In a region where flotillas have faced sabotage and airstrikes, broadcasting the ship’s location serves as a deterrent and a record. It invites legal observers, journalists, and citizens to participate in active protection. It flips the logic of surveillance, weaponised by states, into a mechanism of accountability. The ship sails just one month after Israeli drones bombed Conscience, another Freedom Flotilla ship, in international waters off Malta.
Meanwhile, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, launched with US backing and designed by the Boston Consulting Group, has collapsed. Aid lines have become ambush zones. Eyewitnesses report Palestinians being lured with food, only to be gunned down. Aid is militarised, and relief, criminalised.
Israel’s blockade, in place since 2007, has long turned Gaza into an open-air prison. Using starvation as a weapon is a textbook war crime. Under international law, collective punishment is illegal. Starving civilians as a method of warfare violates Article 8 of the Rome Statute. Obstructing humanitarian relief breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention.
On June 2, ten UN Special Rapporteurs issued a joint statement demanding safe passage for the Madleen, calling the mission “a powerful act of solidarity” and warning Israel against further attacks. They affirmed Gaza’s right to receive humanitarian aid and the ship’s right to safe navigation under international law.
The signatories included experts on food, health, education, housing, water, and the rights of women, displaced persons, and human rights defenders—Michael Fakhri, Francesca Albanese, Tlaleng Mofokeng, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Farida Shaheed, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, Paula Gaviria, Mary Lawlor, George Katrougalos, and Reem Alsalem. They pointed to the ICC’s arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for the war crime of starvation and the ICJ’s recognition of famine in Gaza as a possible act of genocide. “This is not a failure of coordination,” they wrote. “It is the deliberate weaponization of humanitarian aid.”
Late Monday night, a surveillance drone was spotted hovering above the Madleen, 68 kilometres off Greek territorial waters. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition identified it as an Israeli-made Heron drone operated by the Greek Coast Guard. As Harsha Walia noted: “Fortress Europe & Zionist genocide are reinforcing violences.”
The Heron drone was first field-tested during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (2008–2009), where it was used in surveillance and targeting operations that resulted in the deaths of civilians, including children. Marketed as “combat-proven,” the Heron became one of Israel’s major defence exports, sold or leased to countries including Germany, India, Brazil, France, Australia, and Greece. Technologies once tested on Palestinians were sold to Europe for border control, and now they are used to surveil acts of solidarity. These convergences are not incidental; they form the core of a global regime where occupation, racial surveillance, and counterinsurgency circulate freely, enforcing a seamless system of repression by air, land, and sea.
The Polis Project documents communities in resistance. From Kashmir to Ferguson, Bastar to Gaza, we have seen this before: siege, starvation, silence. The Madleen cuts through that silence. It carries defiance, solidarity, and truth.
We call on civil society, journalists, and human rights defenders to:
Stand with Gaza—not as a crisis, but as a resistance
Demand safe passage for the Madleen
Track and amplify its journey via Forensic Architecture
Name the blockade for what it is: collective punishment
Recognize humanitarian resistance as a protected act under international law.
c. Polis Project
