Gaza flotilla activists deported as witnesses accuse Israel
JERUSALEM — Israel on Wednesday was deporting more than 600 foreign activists whose accounts of a deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla contradicted Israeli reports that its soldiers acted in self-defense. As a new standoff with another aid ship loomed, British Prime Minister David Cameron took a tough stand against Monday’s pre-dawn Israeli raid, which killed nine activists, terming it “completely unacceptable.” The hundreds of activists detained on the boats and diverted to Israel have all been released for deportation, prisons authority spokesman Yron Zamir said. They were all taken to Tel Aviv airport or the Jordanian border. Authorities said 682 persons from 42 countries, with Turks the most numerous, were on board the six ships that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas. Under widespread international condemnation over the bloodshed, Israel retorted that the violence had been initiated by the activists, forcing its soldiers to use live fire in self-defense. The Israelis “defended themselves from a lynching,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday. The military said on Wednesday no weapons were found aboard the ships aside from knives, wooden batons and metal rods it says the activists used to ambush the commandos that stormed one of the ships, wounding six of them. On their return home, some accused the Israelis of having opened fire without warning. “Israeli commandos started shooting from the air without warning,” Kuwaiti lawyer Mubarak al-Mutawa, who was on the main vessel, the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, told reporters in Kuwait City. Source: The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100604com5.html |
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