ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Activists sailing on dozens of boats attempting to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip to deliver humanitarian aid say Israeli forces intercepted them overnight Wednesday into Thursday, detaining the crews while the flotilla was sailing hundreds of miles (kilometers) from Gaza near the southern Greek island of Crete.
The Global Sumud Flotilla set sail earlier this month from Barcelona. Organizers have said more than 70 boats and 1,000 people from around the world would be participating, with more vessels joining the original boats as the flotilla sailed east across the Mediterranean.
Their attempt comes less than a year after Israeli authorities foiled another effort by the activist group to reach Gaza.
“Israel’s actions … mark a dangerous and unprecedented escalation, the abduction of civilians in the middle of the Mediterranean, over 600 miles from Gaza, in full view of the world,” the group said in a press release. The distance is about 1,000 kilometers from Gaza.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a post on X that it was taking about 175 activists from more than 20 boats participating in the flotilla to Israel. According to the ships' tracker published on the activist group's website, 22 vessels had been intercepted in international waters west of Crete, and 36 others were still sailing by mid-morning Thursday.
Israel and Egypt have imposed varying degrees of a blockade on Gaza since Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007. Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas from importing arms, while critics say it amounts to collective punishment of Gaza’s Palestinian population.
Turkey’s foreign ministry condemned the seizure of the flotilla Thursday as “an act of piracy.”
“By targeting the Global Sumud Flotilla, whose mission is to draw attention to the humanitarian catastrophe faced by the innocent people of Gaza, Israel has also violated humanitarian principles and international law,” the ministry said in a statement.
Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Oncu Keceli wrote on X that Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had discussed the raid over the phone with his Spanish counterpart Jose Manuel Albares Bueno.
Activists in Greece said they planned a protest rally Thursday afternoon outside the Greek foreign ministry in Athens, saying Israel's interception of the boats occurred within the maritime zone that falls under Greece's responsibility for search and rescue operations and that the country's coast guard had not reacted.
A fragile six month-old ceasefire in Gaza has halted the most intense fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas-led militants in the Palestinian enclave. But despite the ceasefire, Israeli attacks have killed more than 790 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry, part of the Hamas-led government, maintains detailed casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts. It does not give a breakdown of civilians and militants.
Overall, the health ministry says 72,300 Palestinians had been killed since the war in Gaza began with the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7, 2023.
Around 2 million Gaza residents are still living in ruins with shortages of food and medicine, and only limited aid entering through a single, Israeli-controlled border post.
Flotilla organizers have said they hope their latest attempt to reach Gaza will help highlight the living conditions endured by Palestinians in the territory, particularly as global attention has shifted its focus to the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran.
The flotilla’s effort to breach the blockade last year saw dozens of boats sailing near Gaza, with one crossing the 12 nautical mile (22-kilometer) line marking the divide from international waters to territorial waters. But all were all ultimately intercepted and seized or turned away.
Those sailing last year included Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Israel arrested, detained and later deported the participants, who claimed Israeli authorities abused them while in detention. Israeli authorities denied the accusations.
Natalie Melzer in Mitzpe Hila, Israel, and Cinar Kiper in Istanbul contributed to this report.
This grab from black and white CCTV footage shows members on flotilla boat with hands in air as Israeli forces intercepted activists who set sail earlier this month from Barcelona attempting to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza, near the southern Greek island of Crete, early Thursday, April 30, 2026. (Global Sumud Flotilla via AP)
Boats carrying activists and humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza reposition in the port during a symbolic send-off as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, in Barcelona, Spain, Sunday, April 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)
Boats carrying activists and humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza reposition in the port during a symbolic send-off as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, in Barcelona, Spain, Sunday, April 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)
The U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority on Wednesday handed Republicans their biggest victory yet in the perpetual battle to control the House of Representatives and statehouses across the country — but it may have come too late to have much of an effect on this year's midterm elections.
The 6-3 ruling effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act's requirement that districts be drawn to give minority voters a chance to elect representatives of their choosing. One practical effect of that requirement was the protection of reliably Democratic-voting majority-minority districts, even in solidly red states where lawmakers could otherwise favor the GOP.
With that mandate now largely gone, Republican lawmakers across the country — and especially in the South — have a freer hand to eliminate Democratic-leaning districts and pad the total number of seats they can win to hold the U.S. House. There are more than a dozen such seats in Republican-controlled states.
Shortly after the ruling, Republicans were urging a review of their congressional maps in Louisiana, Tennessee and elsewhere.
Their immediate challenge is that the ruling came down well after filing deadlines for this year's primary elections — and in some cases, after those primary elections have been held. That means ballots are set and in some states early and absentee voting has already begun.
The timing makes it difficult to tear up maps and draw new ones. In Louisiana, where the mandate to draw a second, Democratic-leaning majority-Black House district led to Tuesday's decision, the primary election for federal offices is set for May 16 — and early voting is scheduled to begin Saturday. Nevertheless, the state's governor, attorney general and legislative leaders were meeting to discuss how the state would respond.
Republicans have been scrambling to comply with President Donald Trump's directive to redraw maps to add more winnable House seats to stave off losses in the midterms. In a sign of the pressure for Republicans to take advantage of the opportunity, multiple hopefuls running for governor in GOP primaries called for immediate redraws.
“There is no time to waste," Rick Jackson, a businessman and GOP governor candidate in Georgia, said in urging a redraw there even as voting is underway for the May 19 primary. "Georgia must act now to ensure secure elections in Georgia and counter the Democrats’ national assault on our elections.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, running for the GOP nomination for governor in Tennessee, called for redrawing that state's congressional map to replace its lone, majority-Black Democratic congressional seat with one more winnable for Republicans — even though that state's deadline for candidates to get on the ballot was March 10.
In a social media post, Trump praised the opinion by “brilliant Justice Samuel Alito” for returning “the Voting Rights Act to its Original Intent, which was to protect against intentional Racial Discrimination.”
Democrats have managed to largely counter Republicans' push to draw more winnable seats in the round of mid-decade redistricting that started last year, but there is no clear way they could match the GOP's potential gains from the effective loss of the Voting Rights Act.
“It should not be lost on anyone that the Roberts court makes this decision at a time when Republican leaders across the country are foaming at the mouth to draw the American people out of a meaningful say in our elections,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement, referring to the court's Republican-nominated chief justice, John Roberts. "They want to retain illegitimately obtained power through the use of, among other things, now Supreme Court-sanctioned racial and partisan gerrymandering.”
Only one Republican state has a relatively clear path to gaining seats from the decision in time for the midterms — Florida. GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has called a special session to adopt his map that could give his party four new winnable House seats. DeSantis had been counting on the Supreme Court ruling as it did Wednesday, and his state's primary is not until August.
The Florida Legislature approved the new congressional map Wednesday.
Other states have to confront the unprecedented possibility of revising maps even as voters are casting ballots or the legal process of declaring intent to run for office has concluded.
“I don’t know what the implications are going be for the fall. It's pretty late,” said Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
He said any redistricting decisions in the weeks ahead would be up to governors and legislatures.
In the longer term, the ruling clears the way for a drastic reshaping of the nation's political geography, at least by the time of the next presidential election year in 2028.
“The Voting Rights Act as a means to protect minority voters from vote dilution is essentially dead,” said Jonathan Cervas, a political scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has worked as the court-appointed special master and mapmaker in multiple Voting Rights Act cases. “It's hard to imagine how this decision does not lead to additional GOP districts into the future.”
Cervas noted the Voting Rights Act isn't necessarily a partisan benefit for Democrats. Its most frequent use comes in local, nonpartisan races for offices such as school board or city council. But Republicans have long complained that Democrats have used the law to get winnable districts for their Black voters in red states that Republican-leaning white voters could never receive in blue states.
“For decades the left has spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeking to divide Americans along racial lines in a cynical pursuit of partisan power masquerading as civil rights,” Adam Kincaid, the National Republican Redistricting Trust’s executive director, said in a statement. “Today’s decision rebukes that divisive and unconstitutional effort.”
While the Voting Rights Act has helped preserve Democratic-leaning districts, those voters don't vanish just because of Wednesday's ruling. Republicans in some states cannot just eliminate all those districts without spreading enough Democratic voters around to jeopardize their own incumbents.
Likewise, the requirement that Democratic-leaning minority voters be concentrated in certain districts has occasionally hurt Democrats in states such as Michigan, lowering the number of swing districts they might win. The party could partly counter Republican gains by spreading minority voters wider in states it controls.
But there will be political pressure against that from some Black and Hispanic Democrats who want to ensure their communities still command the majority in certain districts. Democratic-controlled states also are more likely to have nonpartisan redistricting commissions that make their congressional maps less partisan and increasingly have adopted state-level versions of the Voting Rights Act to protect sometimes marginalized communities.
That will take time, but it all points to a far less regulated environment for mapmaking in the years to come.
That worries Thomas Johnson, a Black voter in New Orleans who was at the state Capitol to lobby on unrelated legislation Wednesday when the Supreme Court ruling came down. The majority-Black congressional district in which he lives can now be diced up by that state's Republican legislature.
“We are going to do all we can and continue fighting so our voices are heard,” Johnson said. “That’s all we want, to be heard.”
Associated Press writers Jeff Amy in Atlanta, Lisa Mascaro in Washington, Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee, and Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, contributed to this report.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and members of the Congressional Black Caucus speak to reporters in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling to strike down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, April 29, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks on fair elections and the Supreme Court's ruling to strike down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, April 29, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - The U.S. Supreme Court is seen in Washington, Friday, April 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)
