Irish Nobel laureate aboard Gaza-bound ship says group won’t resist if Israel storms vessel

Nobel laureate on aid ship: we won’t resist Israel

JERUSALEM — Israel insisted Friday that it won’t let an Irish aid ship breach its blockade of the Gaza Strip, setting the stage for another maritime showdown with pro-Palestinian activists undaunted by a deadly raid earlier this week.

The fear of more violence loomed large as Israel stood fast by its blockade despite growing pressure to lift it after an outpouring of international outrage over Monday’s raid, which left nine activists dead.

An Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate on the ship, Mairead McGuire, said activists 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.”

The Free Gaza Movement said on its Web site that the ship, the 1,200 ton Rachel Corrie, would reach Gaza 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.

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.

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.”

Israel has been stung by the wave of international outrage the deadly raid has provoked, and 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.

Israel has not allowed activists’ aid ships to crack its Gaza blockade since a military operation in the territory more than a year ago. On Monday, it sent naval commandos to board a flotilla of six Gaza-bound ships after failing to persuade it to dock in Israel. Activists on one ship scuffled with the commandos, who opened fire, killing eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent.

Israeli claims the activists ambushed the commandos after they descended onto the board from helicopters, 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.

All of the violence took place on the lead boat, the Mavi Marmara, which was carrying hundreds of activists sponsored by an Islamic aid group from Turkey, the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom and Humanitarian Relief. Israel outlawed the group, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, in 2008 because of alleged ties to Hamas.

Israel earlier this week deported the nearly 700 activists it rounded up from all six ships. It also offered to transfer some of the aid from the ships to Gaza, but Hamas refused entry. The Islamic militant group demanded the lifting of the blockade in full.

Activists said immediately after the raid that the violence would not deter them from sending more ships, and the Rachel Corrie continued on course for Gaza, carrying hundreds of tons of aid, including wheelchairs, medical supplies and concrete. Eleven passengers were on board, including McGuire and the former head of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, Denis Halliday.

McGuire said Friday afternoon the ship was 134 miles (215 kilometers) off the Gaza coast and was expected to reach Israel’s 20-mile exclusion zone Saturday morning.

The Irish vessel is named for an American college student who was crushed to death in 2003 by a bulldozer while protesting Israeli house demolitions in Gaza.

Greta Berlin, a spokesman for the Free Gaza group, said in Nicosia that the cargo ship was headed directly to Gaza and would not stop in any port on the way.

Israel imposed the blockade on Gaza three years ago after Hamas militants overran the territory. Israel insists the blockade is necessary to keep weapons and weapons components out of Gaza, but arms and commercial goods have made their way into the territory through a network of hundreds of tunnels built under the Gaza-Egypt border.

Activists say Israel sabotaged the previous aid flotilla, and Israeli defense officials said Friday only that unspecified “actions” were taken when the boats were still far from Gaza that delayed the flotilla. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was classified.

The Turkish activists’ deaths on the aid ship increased tensions in the Mideast, especially with Turkey, whose once-close alliance with Israel had already been strained badly by last year’s Gaza war.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called Israel’s actions “a historic mistake,” and Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc announced on Friday that Turkey was downsizing its economic and defense cooperation with Israel.

“We are serious on this issue. New cooperation will not start and relations with Israel will be reduced,” Arinc said.

In Istanbul on Friday, 20,000 people waved Turkish, Palestinian and Hezbollah flags in a memorial service for an American-born IHH member who activists say was killed while taking pictures of the Israeli commando raid.

Nineteen-year-old Furkan Dogan was the youngest of the nine activists killed. His funeral Friday in his family’s hometown in Kayseri in central Turkey drew an additional 10,000 people, some chanting, “Down with Israel.”

“Neither I nor his mother or brother have any grief,” his father, Ahmet Dogan, told the AP as he arranged flowers on his son’s coffin before prayers started. “We believe he became a martyr and God accepts martyrs to paradise.”

The other eight slain activists were buried on Thursday.

Associated Press Writers Sarah El Deeb in Cairo, Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Matti Friedman in Jerusalem, Selcan Hacaoglu in Istanbul and Burhan Ozbilici in Kayseri contributed to this report.