Handala - Freedom Flotilla to Gaza
What even is international law anymore? We have the Geneva Conventions, customary international laws... pages and pages of solemn agreements meant to protect civilians, ensure freedom of navigation, and uphold human dignity. And yet, a peaceful aid ship like Handala, full of volunteers and baby formula, gets boarded in international waters... and the world just watches?
What is the point of UNCLOS if any state can just ignore it the moment it feels like it? Freedom of navigation? Safe passage? A joke. Humanitarian protections? A joke. Why even bother pretending there's an international rules-based order when those breaking the rules face no consequences and those following them get seized, starved, or silenced?
Handala sailed under the UK flag. Carried aid for children who are starving. Committed no crime. And yet it's intercepted, its volunteers taken away. Abducted.
If this doesn't violate international law, then international law is either dead or it was never really alive to begin with. If Handala is a crime, then humanity itself is on trial. And international law has already chosen its side.
Because, as Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” These laws were built to appear just, while maintaining control. They will never liberate those they are designed to contain. These laws were never meant to protect the oppressed, they were designed to protect the illusion of order while preserving power. They perform justice in elite chambers, but avert their eyes from the blood-soaked soil of Gaza, where children waste away in silence. The famine is real: kids are dying from starvation, their bodies shrinking before the eyes of parents who can do nothing. But to the architects of these “rules,” that suffering is abstract. Remote. Reduced to footnotes in briefings and polite statements of “concern.” The law won’t save them... not because it can’t, but because it was never meant to.