Desperate times require desperate measures:
In August 2007, up to 70 human rights activists from 13 countries will attempt to non-violently break the Israeli and international siege of the densely populated Gaza Strip by sailing a ship into Gazan territorial waters with US$25,000 worth of humanitarian aid to donate to the Palestinian Red Crescent.
Israel has prevented the activists — who include teachers, students, musicians, politicians and holocaust survivors — from carrying out humanitarian work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The campaign aims to raise international awareness about the prison-like closure of the Gaza Strip and to pressure the international community to review its sanctions policy and end its support for continued Israeli occupation….
Also travelling on the ship will be 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, whose parent’s perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Hedy told GLW she received “a wake up call” about Israel and Palestine in 1982 when she learned “about the massacres in the two refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon”.
“I needed to find out what and why it happened; what preceded it, what had taken place since 1948. The more I learned and the more I understood, the more I began to speak out publicly against the policies and practices of the Israeli government and military.”