Symposium on the Global Sumud Flotilla: The Legal Architecture of Maritime Abduction – The Global Sumud Flotilla and Israel’s Legal Fictions

[Dr Mustafa Emre Gokmenoglu is a lecturer in public international law at Hacettepe University School of Law]

Israel raided and detained the Global Sumud flotilla activists primarily in two waves: firstly, on 30 April and secondly, on 18 May. The first wave of the raid took place near Crete, 965 km away from Gaza, where Israel maintains a naval blockade under its own interpretation of the San Remo Manual (paragraph 102). In this first wave, roughly 175 activists were apprehended and forcefully embarked on an Israeli vessel. Following worldwide condemnation of the illegal act, the Israeli army personnel released all but two: Thiago Avila and Saif Abu Keshek. The two activists were held under detention for ten days before their release and deportation. 

In the second wave of raids, the boats were intercepted 460 km away from Gaza, and 428 unarmed civilians from more than 40 countries were abducted. The treatment of the second wave was harsher than the previous one, and 428 activists were taken by the Israeli naval commandos to Ashdod port, where the detainees were forced into dehumanising positions. Instead of immediate processing at the port, the majority of the activists were transferred to Ketziot Prison in the southern Negev desert. After being deported under the administrative powers of the Minister of Interior, the activists were transported to Turkey via three chartered Turkish Airlines flights on 21 May.

Israel justified the interception, diversion to Ashdod, and subsequent detention using a combination of international laws of armed conflict at sea and domestic immigration enforcement. For the interception, Israel relies heavily on the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea (1994). Under Paragraphs 67 and 98 of the manual, a belligerent state may intercept, capture, or divert merchant vessels in international waters if there are reasonable grounds to believe they are attempting to breach a legally declared and effectively maintained naval blockade. Relying on this, Israel argues its blockade on Gaza is a lawful security measure to prevent arms smuggling to Hamas. Israel frequently cites the findings of the highly contested 2011 UN Palmer Report. It should be noted that paragraphs 102-104 of the manual declare that the blockade cannot be established to starve the civilian population of basic supplies. Given the transparency and well-documented humanitarian inventory of the global flotilla, the interception is a textbook breach of the San Remo Manual.

Tracking Israel’s Legal Breaches 

The first layer of violations is the act of detention. Detention that lacks proper authorization under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) may contravene the prohibition against (a) unlawful confinement of civilians, a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 147); (b) arbitrary detention as per Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR); and (c) the crime against humanity of imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in breach of fundamental international legal principles when perpetrated as part of a widespread or systematic assault on a civilian population. 

The victims of the first detention of activists this year were Avila and Abu Keshek, who were intercepted near Crete, 1,000 kilometres away from Gaza. They were not charged with comparatively minor infractions like “trespassing” or “breaching a blockade” but faced severe accusations such as a) aiding an enemy in wartime, b) contact with a foreign agent, and c) providing services to a terrorist organization. These high-level charges are delicately engineered to extend detention. Under Section 46 of the 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law, Israel can hold individuals for 96 hours before they see a judge. Avila and Abu Keshek were held for nearly 90 hours before their initial appearance on 3 May 2026. Via Section 31 of this law, the prosecution relied on assumed intent as a legal bridge to transform a humanitarian mission into a felony. The state scours social media, past associations, and public statements to construct a profile of “terrorist affiliation” long before an individual sets foot on a boat, effectively re-coding humanitarian aid as material support for terrorism.

The severe incoherence of the state’s legal framework begins with the compelled relocation of the activists, who were abducted on 18 May 2026. Upon the activists’ forcible arrival in Ashdod Port, the state promptly resorted to a legally manufactured fiction and invoked its domestic legal framework, the Law of Entry into Israel (1952). The legal fiction is based on the fact that the activists did not possess valid visas or entry permits to enter Israel, regardless of whether they intended to do so. Taking this approach allowed Israel to process the activists as illegal aliens; administrative detention was the legal mechanism used for their swift custody at Ketziot Prison pending a formal deportation order.

The secondary aspect of Israel’s violations pertains to the treatment of detainees, specifically in torture in this instance. The prohibition of torture is a jus cogens norm that binds the sovereign at every stage of statecraft; no national security doctrine, counter-terrorism strategy, or emergency legislation can carve out an exception to this absolute prohibition. The medical condition of the detainees after their release, combined with video and photographic evidence shared via official social media channels, provides a prima facie case of non-derogable human rights violations. The detention of Avila and Abu Keshek also occurred incommunicado, isolating them from the world and their respective consular representatives, violating the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (Article 36), which mandates that consular communication for a detained national must be facilitated “without delay”. For other activists, the Israeli foreign ministry took a measure to comply with the Vienna Convention on Consular Rights 1963, Article 36, by posting on X, stating the detainees will be allowed to have contact with the consular representatives of their countries of origin.

Adalah reported that the court refused to share the alleged evidence with the defence team of Avila and Abu Keshek. Upon entering the judicial system, the Evidence Ordinance 5731-1971 permits the exclusion of defence attorneys from accessing the evidence implicating their clients. Furthermore, current emergency regulations permit judges to review “classified files” provided by the Shin Bet (security services) in a closed room without the defence team present. The courts repeatedly extend detentions based on “ongoing investigations” into these secret files. Detainees are compelled to withstand the psychological burden of a procedure in which they cannot confront their accusers or ascertain the precise charges against them.

During the detention of Avila and Abu Keshek, Adalah reported severe physical and psychological abuse, including beatings, prolonged stress positions, facial bruising, and total isolation in windowless cells under 24/7 high-intensity lighting to induce sleep deprivation, continuous blindfolding during transfers and medical exams, death threats and threats of 100-year prison sentences. On their very first appearance at the court, the bruises and scratches were clear on their faces, absent at the time of their apprehension. The Israeli state failed to take any action or interrogate the personnel responsible for the detainees, while the magistrates’ court exhibited indifference to the blatant evidence of torture presented to them.

Widespread and severe acts of physical abuse during the mid-May detentions were heavily documented, ironically facilitated by the public bravado and perceived impunity of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. His social media posts displayed the impunity they entertain for the unlawful treatment of detainees. There is footage of the inhumane treatment of Catriona Graham. Under the Israeli Penal Law 5737-1977, security personnel who administer physical or psychological torture can be directly prosecuted under Section 277 for oppression by a public servant or face aggravated assault and bodily harm charges. The 1999 Supreme Court of Israel ruling (HCJ 5100/94) explicitly outlawed routine physical interrogation methods and denied the state the authority to issue advance legal guidelines for the use of physical pressure. However, the Supreme Court noted that individual investigators could still claim the post-factum “necessity defence” (Section 34L) if acting ad hoc in an unpredictable “ticking time bomb” scenario to save immediate lives. However, the circumstances faced by activists diverge significantly from a familiar scenario in which a ticking bomb compels security services to employ torture to ascertain its location. Using Section 34L for humanitarian aid workers would be a fundamental distortion of the doctrine, which requires an imminent, concrete threat to human life, not an abstract political challenge. Israel categorically dismissed these evidence-based assertions.

The Entry Fiction 

Faced with the logistical and diplomatic friction of processing 428 foreign nationals from over forty countries, the Israeli state pivoted away from traditional criminal prosecution. Due to the high numbers of activists (428), the power of their passports, and international political attention over the incident, Israel preferred to avoid criminal proceedings, opting instead for the administrative discretionary power to deport, authorised by the Entry into Israel Law 5712-1952. According to Section 13 of the deportation law, the authority to issue deportation orders and designate detention locations resides with the minister of the interior; thus, it is solely an administrative procedure. However, the legal paradox lies in the fact that the detainees never intended to enter Israel, and the Israeli security personnel forcefully took them to Israeli territory. 

Under the Entry into Israel Law, unlawful entries are primarily channelled through administrative mechanisms rather than criminal prosecution, guided by principles of state sovereignty and resource efficiency. Consequently, instead of initiating protracted and costly criminal proceedings under Section 12, the state defaulted to Section 13, issuing administrative deportation orders and temporary custody mandates to expedite removal. The penal sanctions of Section 12 are thus reserved as an exceptional measure, applied almost exclusively to repeat offenders or cases involving compounded domestic crimes. 

Still, the legal fiction of illegal entry is a crime malum prohibitum. According to Penal Law 5737-1977 of Israel, section 31 criminalises any individual who contributes in any manner to the establishment of conditions conducive to the commission of the offence. Yet the Israeli Supreme Court refused to incriminate the Israeli military personnel even when they killed nine civilians in the Mavi Marmara incident by stating in 2010 that:

“the public, political and security interests outweigh the interests of criminal enforcement.”

The Dual-Track Trial

A notable legal subplot arose concerning the activist Zohar Regev, who possesses Israeli citizenship. As an Israeli citizen, she could not be charged with violating the Entry into Israel law 5712-1952, since Human Dignity and Liberty (5752-1992) Section 6(b) explicitly affirms:

“Every Israeli national has the right of entry into Israel from abroad.”

While foreign nationals could be swiftly expelled via standard administrative deportation routes under immigration laws, Israeli citizens could not be legally “deported” from their own country. Instead, the state had to fabricate formal criminal charges before the Ashkelon Magistrate’s Court, charging her with attempting to violate a “lawful” naval blockade and unlawful association, highlighting the split legal tracks Israel used to maintain custody of the participants. Initially, the state representative accused her of “infiltration” under the Law for the Prevention of Infiltration. However, on 21 May 2026, the state recognized the absurdity of charging an individual detained in international waters with infiltration and subsequently altered the accusation to “attempted infiltration”. 

During her remand hearing, the state representative conceded that the police arrest request contained flaws regarding the accurate location and classification of the alleged offense. In response to the arguments of the defence, Judge Talmor Peres admonished the investigating unit for its procedural imprecision, noting that the prosecution’s main argument should have focused on the detainee’s alleged dangerousness rather than a risk of obstructing the investigation. Furthermore, the court clarified a critical jurisdictional issue, ruling that its legal authority to adjudicate the matter derived from the territorial location of the investigating unit, rather than the location where the maritime interception occurred. Consequently, evaluating the deficiencies in the state’s filing, the court ordered the less stringent bail conditions requested by the police and Regev’s conditional release. On May 21 2026, the Ashkelon Magistrate’s Court released activist Zohar Chamberlain Regev from an unlawful detention with a NIS 5,000 (1,750 USD) self-guarantee bond and a 60-day ban on entering the Gaza Strip.

Conclusion

When confronted with powerful passports that it could neither accuse at will nor punish even if it did, Israel demonstrated that its security apparatus is not bound by the rule of law. Inconsistencies in prosecution and shaping the legal strategy in accordance with political strategy highlight Israel’s departure from a rule-based order. This executive apparatus, accustomed to feeling unconstrained by the law, is a phenomenon frequently observed in states that have failed to establish a democratic constitutional order. Neither international law nor the texts of Israeli domestic law have attained the power to impose any boundaries on the security apparatus’s human rights violations. The boundaries were drawn not by the consciences of state officials who feel bound by the law, but by the diplomatic leverage of the detainees’ passports and their countries of nationality. We have witnessed for decades that Palestinians, who lack these diplomatic protections, are subjected not merely to worse treatment but directly to genocide—the most odious act one group of people can perpetrate against another.

Photo attribution: by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash