ISTANBUL — A flotilla of ships bound for the Gaza Strip is preparing to sail from Turkey in the coming days, organizers say, on a mission aimed at breaching Israel’s naval blockade and highlighting the lack of aid reaching Palestinians in the besieged enclave.
Washington
Gaza aid flotilla plans to challenge Israeli blockade, organizers say
But the flotilla’s well-traveled route — the Mediterranean — has gained new relevance during the current conflict as governments and relief organizations alike turn to sea deliveries to circumvent what aid groups say is Israel’s persistent obstruction of deliveries to Gaza over land.
The latest flotilla mission, which will include a cargo ship carrying more than 5,000 tons of aid, comes as global attention on Gaza’s worsening humanitarian crisis has waned, shifting to the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran. Apparent Turkish sensitivities over whether to allow the ships to depart has caused organizers to hedge on when exactly the voyage, which was scheduled to begin Sunday, would get underway.
The regional dynamics were “challenging,” Ann Wright, one of the flotilla organizers, said in a phone interview from Istanbul last week, where activists planning to join the maritime convoy were gathering. The mission was also at the “mercy of the port authorities” in Turkey, said Wright, a retired U.S. diplomat and former Army colonel who resigned her State Department position in opposition to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
“The ships are ready,” she said.
At a news conference Friday aboard one of the ships, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American human rights attorney who has joined previous flotillas to Gaza, said “our governments have thus far done nothing but we call on them to start now, to uphold their own obligations under international law, to demand that Israel allow the flotilla safe passage to Gaza.”
“We expect that Turkey will not be bought off and we will indeed sail,” she said. “Anything less than this is collaborating with the illegal siege on Gaza, and we don’t think that is what the Turkish government will do.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the flotilla’s mission. Israeli channel N12 reported Saturday that “security preparations” had begun, including for taking over the flotilla. One of the groups participating in the voyage — a Turkish Islamic charity organization, IHH — is designated as a terrorist group by Israel. The group has denied links to terrorism.
Israel has argued for years that the naval blockade is justified to prevent weapons from reaching Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza — a policy that Arraf said was part of Israel’s “hermetic closure” of the territory that amounted to collective punishment of its population, and a war crime.
A report by a U.N. panel on the May 2010 Israeli raid called the naval blockade a “legitimate security measure,” but said that Israel’s boarding of the vessels “with such substantial force at a great distance from the blockade zone” was “excessive and unreasonable.”
Since October, Israel’s hindrance of aid deliveries by land, as well its attacks on relief organizations, have helped fuel a humanitarian crisis that has caused northern Gaza to slide into famine, according to aid officials and human rights groups.
The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate. In the aftermath, the Biden administration warned Israel to swiftly address civilian suffering in Gaza or risk future U.S. support.
“This is a completely man-made and preventable situation,” Andrea de Domenico, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory, said during a press briefing last week. “I think there has been a lot of effort from our side and the Israeli side to some extent to increase the volume of aid that is going to the north,” he said, while adding that significant obstacles remained.
In a six-day period this month, “41 percent of our requests for operations in the north have been denied,” he said. For Gaza’s residents, “every day is literally a struggle to survive.”
In March, President Biden announced a plan to establish a maritime aid corridor to Gaza, shortly after the United States joined other countries in dropping relief supplies by air on the enclave. Humanitarian officials said that while any additional deliveries were welcome, they were no substitute for aid delivered by trucks.
Wright said the flotilla would include a cargo ship carrying food packages, water, ambulances and medical supplies including anesthesia. “We are trying to stop the starvation,” she said. “It’s not nearly enough. It will make a dent,” she said.
Flotilla participants were conducting nonviolence training last week, in advance of the scheduled departure, she said. “We hope that we can get into Gaza,” Wright said. But they were preparing for the myriad ways they could be turned back.
Many of the governments in the region had participated in stymieing previous Gaza missions, including Greece, which stopped boats from departing in 2011. The United States had warned its citizens not to participate in the missions, and offered “very little assistance” when American activists on the flotillas were detained and then deported by Israel, she said.
If the current mission got underway, they were possibly facing an “armada,” she said, with U.S. warships stationed in the waters off Israel.
Mustafa Ozbek, the media coordinator for IHH, said the organizers had notified the Turkish government, the United Nations and other international institutions about the mission.
Dylan Saba, a 31-year old writer and attorney who was planning to travel with the flotilla, said he was joining in part because “there is an obligation for citizens of the world to act, where governments have failed, and to act in the spirit of international law.”
As a Palestinian, whose father was born in Gaza, there was a “lot of symbolic value in being able to accompany this aid that we are attempting to deliver, not just to my distant family members who are living there, but all of the Palestinians of Gaza,” he said.
“I feel very confident that this is the right thing for me to do,” he said. “But I would be lying to you if I said that I was not scared.”
Alon Rom in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
Bagel shop manager Fernando Mejia was arrested by federal agents just over a year ago in the Port Washington store’s parking lot. Since then, including Monday evening, members of the Port Washington community have kept a weekly vigil to honor Mejia, who they consider one of their own, and bring attention to how his abrupt arrest, and ultimate deportation, left a void in his family, at his workplace and among anyone in town who knew him.
For 52 consecutive Mondays, they have flocked to the Main Street side of the Port Washington Long Island Rail Road station as a tribute to Mejia and their other immigrant neighbors who have been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and never returned home. The weekly 7 p.m. effort, dubbed the “Port Shines a Light in a Sea of Darkness” vigil by organizers, began a few weeks after Mejia’s June 12 arrest and has continued, even after he agreed to self deport and return to family in his native El Salvador.
Vigil co-organizer Jeff Seigel, 68, told the crowd of about 75 people — many toting handwritten protest signs — that Mejia was “doing well, although well is a relative term.”
Mejia is unable come back to Port Washington to see his teenage daughter, who stood in the crowd Monday evening and who Seigel said flies to El Salvador for visits.
Fernando Mejia was arrested by federal agents on June 12, 2025 outside the Port Washington bagel shop he managed. Credit: Courtesy: Lauren Wax
“He came here when he was about 20 years old, and here in the United States is where he became a man,” Seigel, 68, said. “He worked very hard, always. And it is here in the United States where he became a father. … After five months in detention, he could no longer wait to see if the immigration court would rule in his favor.”
Mejia, the former manager of Schmear Bagel & Cafe on Main Street, one block west of where each vigil is held, was one of about 3,000 Long Islanders arrested by federal immigration agents through March 10 as part of President Donald Trump’s ramped-up deportation push since his return to power, Newsday previously reported.
Mejia had just started his car in the bagel shop’s parking lot about 6:30 a.m. on June 12 to make a delivery when federal agents converged and placed him under arrest. Over the months that followed, Mejia bounced from facility-to-facility — first in Manhattan, then in Newark, Louisiana and Miami. He does not have a criminal record, his attorney, Bryan Richard Pu-Folkes, previously told Newsday. Pu-Folkes said at the time Mejia was likely detained due to a January 2006 deportation order from the Executive Office for Immigration Review for unlawful presence in the country.
Pu-Folkes did not immediately return a phone message Monday seeking comment. Mejia could not be immediately reached for comment.
The weekly efforts help community organizers raise awareness and funds for legal fees and even food for immigrants in the community. Another goal, said Stan Lacy, also a vigil organizer, is distributing whistles throughout the community. As Lacy and other members of Port Washington’s Rapid Response Network drive around Port Washington and encounter ICE agents, they blow whistles to alert immigrants of their presence.
After a trio of arrests “a little over a month ago,” ICE’s presence has been “relatively quiet,” he said.
Fellow organizer Stacey Mellus told Newsday the weekly vigils sometimes draw immigrants thankful for the community support, but not so much “when more ICE activity is in the area, when the climate gets a little more hot.”
“I witnessed one of those abductions here, you’re never going to get over something like that,” Mellus, 50, of Port Washington, said. “I’m never going to get over seeing people separated from their families, people yelling ‘don’t take my husband.’ “
Washington
Supreme Court rules states can count late-arriving mailed ballots, rejecting Trump-led challenge
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states should be allowed to count ballots that are mailed on time but arrive after Election Day.
In a 5-4 decision, the high court rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day. The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
The decision, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is a defeat for President Donald Trump who has repeatedly claimed mail-in voting encourages fraud, an assertion not backed up by evidence. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also joined the court’s three liberals in the ruling.
The question before the court was whether Mississippi was acting legally when it permitted ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrived within five business days of the election.
“The federal election-day statutes do not preempt Mississippi’s law because the defining element of an ‘election’ has always been the electorate’s choice of candidate,” the decision said.
A voter’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received, it said.
Thirteen other states have grace periods for ballots cast by mail. Another 15 have longer deadlines for military and overseas voters.
Last year, Trump signed an executive order that would require votes to be “cast and received” by Election Day, but it has been blocked by court challenges.
Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart noted during arguments before the Supreme Court in March that the Trump administration had failed to produce a single case of fraud due to mail ballots that arrived after Election Day.
Among the state with deadlines after Election Day are California, Texas, New York and Illinois. Rural areas of Alaska also allow post-Election Day ballots.
The Associated Press reported that four states dominated by Republican lawmakers, Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio and Utah, dropped their grace periods last year. That’s according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and Voting Rights Lab.
President Donald Trump said he voted by mail in a Florida election due to scheduling conflicts, explaining he could not be there in person. The remarks come as Palm Beach County records show Trump cast a mail ballot in an upcoming special election, despite his public criticism of the voting method as fraudulent.
During arguments, some of the conservative justices seemed skeptical of late-arriving mail ballots. Justice Samuel Alito for example asked about the appearance of fraud if ballots that arrived after Election Day flipped an election.
The liberal justices on the other hand indicated they would uphold the state laws and noted that federal law allows states to set their own regulations governing elections. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the states and Congress should decide the issue, not the courts.
Federal law sets Election Day as “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.”
Mississippi passed its election law during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was challenged by the Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party and others.
An appellate court, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, struck down Mississippi’s grace period. Judge Andrew Oldham wrote that the state law allowing the late-arriving ballots to be counted violated federal law.
The three judges who decided Mississippi’s law was unconstitutional were all appointed by Trump during his first term.
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