JERUSALEM: Israeli soldiers boarded a ship carrying aid to Gaza in international waters on Saturday, five days after its troops killed nine people on a Turkish aid ship while enforcing a blockade Washington has called unsustainable.
The Israeli Navy, whose actions on Monday triggered an international outcry, took control of the Rachel Corrie and sailed it to the port of Ashdod where it docked in the evening.
The takeover prompted a furious response from the Dublin-based Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. "For the second time in less then a week, Israeli forces stormed and hijacked an unarmed aid ship, kidnapping its passengers and forcing the ship toward Ashdod port," it said.
The cargo vessel had ignored the navy's orders to divert and allow its cargo to be unloaded and inspected before delivery to Gaza.
The Israeli military said in a statement: "Nineteen people were on board the boat including eight crew, all of whom will be transferred to the appropriate authorities in the Interior Ministry." The army said the ship had been boarded "with the full compliance of the crew and without incident."
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said all 19 people would be deported within hours.
Carrying Irish and other activists, the Rachel Corrie — named after a pro-Palestinian activist bulldozed to death by an Israeli demolition squad in Gaza in 2003 — was the latest attempt to break the four-year old blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza. "Israel will continue to exercise its right to self-defense," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
The boat was carrying around 1,000 tons of aid and supplies, half of which was reportedly cement — a substance barred by Israel to prevent reconstruction of houses destroyed in the war of 2008-2009.
Friends and foes alike have heaped criticism on Israel this week over the blockade.
While the United States, Israel's main ally, has expressed more sympathy than most for its security concerns, it has also spoken of the need for Palestinians in Gaza to receive adequate supplies and signaled that the embargo could not continue in its present form.
"We are working urgently with Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and other international partners to develop new procedures for delivering more goods and assistance to Gaza," a spokesman for the White House National Security Council said. "The current arrangements are unsustainable and must be changed. For now, we call on all parties to join us in encouraging responsible decisions by all sides to avoid any unnecessary confrontations," he added in a statement.
A British newspaper reported that autopsy results found 30 bullets in the bodies of the activists killed in the raid on the vessel Mavi Marmara this week. They were all Turks, including one with US citizenship. Ankara's already strained ties with Israel, once an ally, are at an all-time low.
Turkish media reports said Saturday that prosecutors have launched an investigation against top Israeli leaders over Monday's raid. If the prosecutor's office in Bakirkoy, Istanbul, compiles enough evidence, it will press charges against Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, the English-language Today's Zaman said.
The charges would include murder, injury, attacking Turkish citizens on the open seas and piracy, it added.
The UN human rights chief also said Saturday that Israel could face prosecution for a deadly raid on the aid flotilla and that she was following requests for a referral to the International Criminal Court. "The Security Council is the only body in the UN system that has an enforcement mechanism and it has done so by way of sanctions and and by the referral of Darfur" to the ICC, Navi Pillay, the high commissioner for human rights, told journalists.
"I am following very closely the very many calls that come particularly from civil society and from all the people who are suffering in Palestine for that kind of action to be taken," she said in Kampala, where she attended the court's ongoing review conference.
Israel, like Sudan, is not an ICC member, but the court's prosecutor could investigate the Jewish state following a Security Council directive, as happened in the Darfur case.
Pillay, who for four years served as an ICC judge, said she believed Israel's blockade of Gaza violates international law. "I feel that in the current climate I should address the issue of the legality of such a blockade because it is being claimed by Israel that it's legal and they have powerful support for this position, unfortunately," she said.
"International humanitarian law prohibits starvation of civilians as a method of warfare ... It is also prohibited to impose collective punishment on the civilian population, so it is (for those reasons) that I have consistently reported to member states that the blockade is illegal and must be lifted."
She added that Israel's attack Monday on the aid flotilla might also constitute a prosecutable offense. "Even if it is demonstrated that the blockade is legal under international law Israel's current military operations against the flotilla must be analyzed from the perspective of its obligation to allow humanitarian aid to be brought into the Gaza strip," she argued.
Israel continued to face world anger over the killing of aid activists. Vietnam postponed Saturday a visit by Israeli President Shimon Peres after condemning Israel for the bloody storming of the aid flotilla. Peres had been due in Vietnam on June 11 on a three-day visit.
"We have decided to postpone this visit due to the complex current situation," a Vietnamese Foreign Ministry source said, adding that a new date had not been decided. Vietnam "strongly" condemned the raid earlier, adding: "Such action has constituted a violation of international laws and escalated tension in the region."
In Gaza City, where residents massed at the port for the ship's arrival, a senior Hamas official said the Israeli blockade was on the verge of collapse. "We are in the last 15 minutes of the siege," Ahmed Yussef said. "There will be a lot of ships sent to Gaza by international solidarity organizations in the next few weeks in the name of justice and human rights."
