JERUSALEM, June 4, (Agencies): Israel vowed Friday to keep an Irish aid ship from breaching its blockade of the Gaza Strip, setting the stage for another maritime showdown as the vessel made its way toward the impoverished Palestinian territory.
Concern about more violence loomed large as Israel stood fast by its blockade, despite rising pressure to lift it following Monday’s raid against another aid ship that left nine activists dead.
Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan, who was on the ship with other activists, said they were determined to press on but would offer no resistance if Israeli forces came aboard.
“We will sit down,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the ship. “They will probably arrest us ... But there will be no resistance.”
A spokeswoman for the Free Gaza Movement, Greta Berlin, said Friday evening that the ship, the 1,200-ton Rachel Corrie, was 110 miles (177 kms) from Gaza and was expected to reach the seaside strip by Saturday morning.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Thursday night that the boat would not reach the territory. On Friday, Israel’s foreign ministry said the policy had not changed.
“There is a maritime blockade on Gaza,” ministry director Yossi Gal told reporters in Jerusalem.
The new effort to break the blockade will test Israel’s resolve as it faces a wave of international outrage following Monday’s botched raid, in which Israeli commandos clashed with activists after rappelling onto a ship from helicopters. Eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent were killed and hundreds of others on the ship were arrested and later deported.
The fallout has increased pressure to end the embargo that has plunged Gaza’s 1.5 million residents deeper into poverty and sharply raised Mideast tensions at a time the US is making a new push for regional peace.
Israel has urged the activists to bring the ship to the southern Israeli port of Ashdod and promised to transfer all cargo save any weapons or weapons components. The activists rejected the Israeli offer.
Netanyahu has instructed the Israeli military to avoid harming the passengers on board the Rachel Corrie, a participant at Thursday night’s Cabinet meeting said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was closed.
Gal said Israel has “no desire to board the ship. If the ship decides to sail to the (southern Israeli) port of Ashdod, then we will ensure its safe arrival and will not board it.”
In Washington, the State Department said US officials had been in touch with “multiple” countries, including the Israeli and Irish governments, about the latest effort.
“Everyone wants to avoid a repetition of this tragic incident,” spokesman P.J. Crowley said. He added that the US had been in contact numerous times with Israeli authorities in recent weeks. “We urged caution and restraint,” he said.
International condemnation continued Friday, with protests in Syria, Greece, Bahrain and Malaysia, where some demonstrators burned Israeli flags and carried mock coffins. In Norway, the military canceled a seminar scheduled for later this month because an Israeli army officer was to have lectured.
Israel has allowed ships through five times, but has blocked them from entering Gaza waters since a three-week military offensive against Gaza’s Hamas rulers in January 2009.
Israeli claims the activists ambushed the commandos after they descended onto the board from helicopters on Monday, and the military and Turkish TV have released videotape that backs up that claim. Returning activists admitted fighting with the Israeli commandos but insisted their actions were in self-defense because the ships were being boarded in international waters by a military force.
Status quo
US President Barack Obama said Thursday that the Gaza flotilla “tragedy” showed that the Middle East “status quo is unsustainable,” and that “piecemeal” attempts to make peace would not work.
Obama, seeking to ensure that his effort to promote indirect “proximity” talks between Israel and the Palestinians is not derailed by the furor over the raid, also noted “legitimate” Israeli security concerns.
“What’s important right now is that we break out of the current impasse, use this tragedy as an opportunity so that we figure out, how can we meet Israel’s security concerns,” Obama said in an interview with CNN’s “Larry King Live.”
But at the same time, new opportunities must be opened up for the Palestinians, said Obama, who has pledged to make securing a Palestinian state a priority of his presidency.
Asked whether it was “premature” to condemn Israel over the raid, as many of America’s closest allies have done, Obama said, “I think that we need to know what all the facts are.”
“But it’s not premature to say to the Israelis and to say to the Palestinians, and to say to all the parties in the region that the status quo is unsustainable.
“We have been trying to do this piecemeal for decades now. It just doesn’t work.”
Earlier, in Bethlehem, Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell also warned that the Gaza flotilla drama should not be allowed to hamper peace talks.
“The tragedy... cannot be allowed to spiral out of control and undermine the limited but real progress that has been made,” he said, referring to the raid, in which nine activists died on Monday.
Resistance
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday he did not view radical Palestinian group Hamas, Israel’s arch-foe, as a terrorist organisation.
“Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land. They have won an election,” Erdogan said in a public speech in the central city of Konya, broadcast live on television.
“I have told this to US officials... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organisation. I think the same today. They are defending their land,” he said.
The United States and the European Union blacklist Hamas as a terrorist group despite its victory in Palestinian elections in 2006.
Erdogan made the remarks in an angry tirade against Israel after Monday’s raid on a flotilla carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, which claimed the lives of nine Turks and plunged already strained ties between the once-close allies into deep crisis.
He lashed out at Western powers for denying Hamas a chance to shift to a democratic platform.
“Why didn’t you give them an opportunity? Let them wage a democratic struggle,” he said, his speech often interrupted by a cheering crowd of party supporters.
Erdogan renewed criticism of Israel’s raid on the aid flotilla, whose main organisers included a Turkish Islamist charity, with the bulk of its passengers Turks.
“Our problem is not with the Israeli or the Jewish people. Our problem is with the oppressive Israeli administration which commits state terror,” he said.
“If peace is going to come to the world, this world should be built on justice,” he said.
The Israeli government, he said, is “hypocritical,” “paranoid” and a “lier.”
Ankara has previously insisted that peace cannot be achieved in the Middle East if Hamas was excluded from the process.
Erdogan, accused Israel on Friday of breaking biblical commandments against killing and said it could cut ties with its one-time ally to a minimum after nine Turkish activists died in a raid on a ship bound for Gaza.
“I am speaking to them in their own language. The sixth commandment says ‘thou shalt not kill’. Did you not understand?” Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said in his harshest words yet since Israeli commandos raided the Mavi Marmara on Monday. “I’ll say again. I say in English ‘you shall not kill’. Did you still not understand?. So I’ll say to you in your own language. I say in Hebrew ‘Lo Tirtzakh’,” he said in a televised speech to supporters of his Islamist-leaning AK Party.
As relations plunged to their worst since the two countries forged a strategic relationship in the 1990s, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc also said military and economic agreements with Israel were now on the table for discussion.
“We are serious about this subject,” Arinc told the Turkish NTV news channel in an interview.
“We may plan to reduce our relations with Israel to a minimum, but to assume everything involving another country is stopped in an instant, to say we have crossed you out of our address book, is not the custom of our state,” he said.
Turkey, Israel’s only Muslim ally, had already recalled its ambassador and cancelled joint military exercises after the nine activists were killed while trying to break a blockade on Gaza.