The Freedom Flotilla Ship’s Mission to Deliver Aid Continues, Despite Drone Attacks

The Conscience, a ship belonging to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was anchored in international waters off the coast of Malta just after midnight on 2 May 2025, as it was awaiting civilian volunteers from 21 countries to join the crew and then chart a course to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid to a people under siege, when the 68-foot-long vessel came under attack.

No nation has claimed responsibility for the two drone attacks that commenced at 21 minutes past midnight last Friday and caused severe structural damage, disabled power and communications, as well as having caused a fire to break out, while four of the 16 crew members and civilians on board were injured, and all braced for more attacks, as the drones continued to circle for some time.

This FFC mission was organised under a media blackout, as an earlier April 2024 publicised attempt to sail from Türkiye to Gaza carrying 5.5 tonnes of aid was blocked, when the nation of Guinea-Bissau bowed to pressure and withdrew its flag from that ship, while last Friday saw the nation of Palau withdraw its flag from the Conscience, and therefore, Malta wouldn’t let it dock post-drone attack.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea requires all ships fly the flag of a nation in international waters, and that country then holds jurisdiction and bears responsibility over the vessel.

But while no nation has accepted responsibility for the attack, the FFC were attempting to disrupt Israel’s genocide and starvation program targeting the Palestinians of Gaza, while flight-tracking website ADS-B Exchange did pick up an Israeli Air Force C-130 Hercules flying low in the vicinity for hours last Thursday.

Israel too is the nation that perpetrated an earlier, and that time deadly, attack upon a similar FFC ship bound for Gaza in 2010.

Humanitarian intervention denied

“I have joined other human rights activists from across the world to try and open a humanitarian corridor to get desperately needed aid to Palestinians in Gaza,” said Australian FFC volunteer Helen O’Sullivan. “We aim to allow desperately needed food, water and medical supplies to reach a population at risk of famine.”

“The attack on human rights and peace activists taking aid to people enduring a forced famine in Gaza no longer shocks us,” O’Sullivan told Sydney Criminal Lawyers from Malta. “It also tells us it is not just our ship the Conscience, which is under attack, it is the world’s conscience that is being eroded by a failure to intervene, to protest and to defend human rights and dignity.”

O’Sullivan left Australia to join the 2024 FFC operation, but she explains the coalition has run multiple missions since 2008, with the Israeli Defence Force having attacked an FFC ship attempting to reach Gaza in 2010, which resulted in nine activists being killed during the operation.

Around 80 human rights and peace activists from around the planet had been waiting to board the Conscience prior to the potentially deadly attack presumed to have been undertaken by the Israeli military upon the unarmed group of crew and civilians upon the vessel last Friday.

Amongst those preparing to literally risk their lives to sail to Gaza to provide basics like clean water, food and medicine to the more than 2 million Palestinians of The Strip was renowned climate activist Greta Thunberg and retired US Army colonel and diplomat Ann Wright.

Helen set off with NSW human rights activists Surya McEwen and Daniel Coward early last year, and McEwen is currently in Malta with the coalition of activists having been waiting to board the Conscience to make the humanitarian dash to Gaza.

“Now is the time for those of us who can, to actively stand up and speak out against the forced starvation and collective punishment of a population of over 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are children,” O’Sullivan made certain.

“Genocide is being livestreamed across the world and our governments are both silent and complicit in these war crimes.”

Israel’s dehumanisation mission

Following the fallout from Hamas winning a huge majority in the 2006 internationally oversighted democratic election in Gaza, Israel, the US and the EU placed sanctions on the region, and then following the political party taking full control of The Strip in June 2007, Israel escalated sanctions to impose a blockade with food supplies halved and fuel imports slashed, which continues until today.

As O’Sullivan explained on Saturday, “As of the 1st of May 2025, it has been 78 years since the genocide in Palestine started, 58 years of total illegal occupation of Palestine, 573 days of the escalation of the genocide, 18 years of the siege on Gaza and 57 days of total blockade on Gaza without a single bottle of water, flour or medical aid getting into Gaza.”

Helen, a Queensland University educator, Surya and the many other FFC volunteers are all putting their entire lives on hold and as well as risking their own mortality, in an attempt to break the forced starvation in Gaza.

Indeed, it has now been about 60 days since any food or water has entered Gaza, but prior to that this same heightened blockade had been underway from early October 2023 right through to late January 2025, when it was paused as part of a so-called “ceasefire agreement”.

Following the blocking of the April 2024 FFC operation to Gaza, O’Sullivan then joined an organisation that bears witness to the human rights abuses transpiring in the West Bank, which is occupied Palestine, and it is where Israeli settler violence is continuing the same genocidal program as in Gaza, just at a much slower pace.

O’Sullivan was in contact with SCL last September, as she’d just witnessed “firsthand the brutality of Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid”, when her “fellow peace activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper”, whilst Helen and the now deceased Turkish American human rights activist had both been hiding behind a tree together.

“It is now impossible for me to do anything but what I am doing right now,” O’Sullivan declared, and she added that “Australia knows only too well the ongoing trauma and suffering caused by colonialism and policies of displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples”, so the “humanitarian crisis we are witnessing demands” a response from her home country too.

We all have a conscience, even if denied

FFC volunteers attempted to reach the damaged Conscience on Saturday, in an attempt to assist the civilians onboard the ship, however the Armed Forces of Malta turned back their boats, demanding that the delegation went through Maltese immigration and customs prior to any such attempt, which was the second time this approach had been taken and failed.

Yet, on Sunday, the FFC announced that the Maltese government had since agreed to allow the ship’s crew and the civilians on board to enter the nation’s territory. Although footage of crew members showed them at Malta’s international airport after arriving on land, and being rushed out of the country, as if it had been them doing the bombing, as one suggested as he was departing.

The message from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition was clear on Sunday, as the volunteers from more than twenty nations remain committed to pressing on with their mission, as “global citizens determined to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza and deliver aid where none has been allowed for over 60 days”.

“It is our Conscience, your conscience, that preserves our humanity and prevents our moral and social decay,” O’Sullivan said following the news of the Maltese assistance on Sunday. “Consuming the relentless news of genocide and decades of apartheid and war crimes in Palestine and across the world has numbed us.”

“The rich and powerful frame these crimes against humanity as self-defence making the real horror of what we are witnessing more digestible for those already blessed with more than they need,” the University of Queensland educator made certain in concluding.

“Let’s emerge from our media-induced slumber and connect with those who will not stay quiet in the face of genocide.”

Photos supplied by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition