Thousands of Turkish citizens participated in a mass rally in Istanbul yesterday evening, Tuesday, May 31, 2022, to commemorate the 12th anniversary of the killing of 10 Turks on board the Turkish ship "Mavi Marmara" in 2010.
And "Mavi Marmara" was one of the ships of the Freedom Flotilla, which included a group of ships that carried about 750 human rights and political activists, a number of representatives of the international media, relief materials and humanitarian aid.
"Freedom Fleet 1"
May 29, 2010: The Freedom Flotilla ships sailed to the Gaza Strip with the aim of lifting the siege on it.
The launch of the siege-breaking ships came after six international non-governmental organizations, the most important of which was the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), decided to take an initiative to break the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip, by sending a naval fleet to it.
The Freedom Flotilla was equipped with several ships, including the Turkish "Mavi Marmara", which was carrying more than five hundred activists and solidarity activists, mostly Turks, and three other ships belonging to the European campaign to lift the siege on Gaza.
Among the personalities who participated in the First Freedom Flotilla, Raed Salah, head of the Islamic movement inside the Palestinian territories, Haneen Al-Zoubi, a deputy in the Israeli Knesset, parliamentarians from Ireland, Germany, Yemen and Egypt, artists and writers from Sweden, and media professionals from several countries.
The fleet set out from the ports of southern European countries and Turkey, and it was agreed to meet at a specific point on the coast of the city of Limassol, south of Cyprus, for the fleet to sail in the direction of Gaza.
However, the Mavi Marmara ship, one of the most important ships of the flotilla, was attacked in international waters on May 31, 2010 by commandos of the Israeli Navy, who used live bullets and tear gas, which prevented the fleet from reaching the Gaza Strip.
attack at dawn
- Captain Mahmoud Toral, the captain of the ship, said in press interviews that the Israelis began communicating with the ship’s crew at ten thirty in the evening of May 30, 2010 in the international waters, and the crew told them that they were heading to Gaza and that they were in international waters, and no party had the right to stop Then, contacts between the two sides were soon cut off at around two o'clock in the morning on the 31st.
- Toral denied Israel's claims that it made contact with them after that, until the start of the attack, which began at 4:30 in the morning, with intense firing of live bullets, resulting in dead and wounded, the number of which was unknown at first.
Toral also denied Tel Aviv’s allegations that its forces were forced to defend themselves after they were attacked by the passengers of the ship, explaining that the solidarity with Gaza civilians were not carrying any weapons, but rather had to defend themselves with wooden brooms and the like, in the face of heavily armed soldiers.
- To falsify what happened, the soldiers were keen to storm the ship's kitchens and brought knives inside to try to convince others that they had been attacked with knives, so they had to respond with live bullets.
According to Toral, the ship was medically equipped to enable it to perform surgeries when necessary.
The passengers were handcuffed and imprisoned inside the ship under difficult health and psychological conditions, after the scale of the disaster and the number of dead and wounded became apparent to them.
The captain of the ship Bulent Yildirim, for his part, confirmed that those in solidarity with Gaza suffered difficult conditions during the period of detention, and were forced to eat food and water they suspected, forcing them to conduct medical analyzes immediately after their return to Turkey.
According to the report of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Istanbul, the Israeli attack on the "Mavi Marmara" ship killed 10 people, the youngest of whom was 19 years old.
Ayatollah Tekin, one of those injured in the Israeli attack, said in a press interview that the ship turned into pools of blood with the start of the attack, stressing that the passengers' self-defence by primitive means was met with extreme violence and live bullets by soldiers and helicopters.
May 31, 2011: The dismissed government in Gaza headed by Ismail Haniyeh, took the initiative to honor the ship's dead by inaugurating a memorial on the first anniversary of the attack, and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh confirmed in a speech during the ceremony that "the crime of the Freedom Flotilla 1 revealed the true face of the Zionist occupation." ".
investigations
January 2015: The British Independent newspaper published a report about British activists filing a lawsuit against the soldiers who attacked the Mavi Marmara, stressing that they may be prosecuted in Britain if they enter it in the future.
British police received evidence accusing five Israeli soldiers of committing a war crime in the attack on the ship, and the same newspaper mentioned that a report of the United Nations Human Rights Council showed that one of the 19-year-old victims of the Israeli attack on the Marmara ship was killed by several bullets, one of which was in the face. He is lying on the ground.
Several countries and international human rights and human rights organizations condemned the attack, which sparked a major crisis between Turkey and Israel, and Tel Aviv entered into negotiations with Ankara to close the file by paying compensation to the families of the dead and compensation for the losses sustained by the ship, but without these negotiations achieving significant results.
- Ankara demanded an international investigation into the incident, while Comoros filed a complaint against Israel because the Turkish ship was registered with it.
The lawyer for the families of the victims of the Turkish ship "Mavi Marmara" said that two Jewish businessmen offered them one billion dollars in exchange for waiving international lawsuits against four generals in the Israeli army, but they refused.
November 2014: The International Criminal Court announced that it would not prosecute Israel for its attack on the Mavi Marmara.
December 9, 2016: A court in Istanbul dropped the case against four Israeli officers who were trying in absentia in the case, days after the Public Prosecutor asked the Istanbul Court to drop the case as a result of the bilateral agreement in which Israel agreed to pay compensation to the families of the victims.
2017: Bensouda confirmed her decision after the Criminal Court ordered her to reconsider the case.
- The appellate judges criticized Bensouda in the strongest terms, noting that she "erroneously assumed" that she could disagree with legal expressions drawn up by judges before trial.
The judges added that “the unfortunate language used by the Prosecutor to express her objection shows that her information is completely wrong about what is required of her” but stressed that she has the “final decision” on whether to press charges.
- A Spanish court opened an investigation into the incident based on a lawsuit filed by the European Campaign to Lift the Siege on Gaza, but the court soon closed the investigation on June 11, 2015, and said it closed the case in which Netanyahu and a number of his ministers are accused of committing crimes against humanity.
- The court left the door open to the possibility of reopening the case file again in the event that Israeli officials set foot on Spanish soil, but it did not clarify the steps that would be taken if they did so.
September 2, 2019: For the second time, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has ordered its Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, to reconsider whether Israel should be prosecuted in the case of its attack on the Mavi Marmara, and to decide by December 2019 whether The question of re-examination of the case.
“The plaintiff must reconsider her decision by December 2, 2019,” President of the Court of Appeal Solome Palungi Bosa told the court, adding that the majority of judges supported this decision and two opposed it.