Just over a week ago, the Israeli Occupation Forces intercepted and detained the crews of over twenty boats sailing to break the siege of Gaza. After entering international waters, Israeli forces kidnapped over a hundred crew in Greece’s search-and-rescue zone.
Israeli forces handed detainees over to the Greek Coast Guard, who then transferred them to the island of Crete. It raises questions about how far Greece – already diplomatically, militarily, and logistically complicit in the Gaza genocide – collaborated in the interception.
To those who’ve monitored the Eastern Mediterranean for the last few years, such potential collaboration in illegal interception comes as no surprise. This sea has become a place where states act lawlessly to deliver an impossible promise: to keep people in their “right” place.
Greece has a long and deadly history of illegal intervention at sea. Just over a year ago, CPT reported from Lesvos on a lethal shipwreck off the island’s eastern coastline. This week, an internal investigation by Frontex – the EU’s border agency – confirmed what those on the ground suspected all along: the Coast Guard’s dangerous and aggressive maneuvering likely caused the shipwreck and “violated the right to life”.
At the time, the Greek authorities tried to pin the blame on a passenger who’d lost his own wife and child in the shipwreck. CPT Aegean Migrant Solidarity, together with legal partners on the ground, supported him through his criminal trial until he was acquitted.
In 2002, the poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote from Ramallah:
We have brothers and sisters overseas,
kind sisters, who love us,
who look our way and weep.
And secretly they say
“I wish that siege was here, so that I could…”
But they cannot finish the sentence.
This morning another fleet set sail towards Gaza from the Greek island of Syros. They aim to restore the Mediterranean Sea as a place of passage, interconnection, and a bearer of messages. They propose a different ending to the sentence.
