“All the passengers of the ‘selfie yacht’ are safe and unharmed. They were provided with sandwiches and water. The show is over,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry posted on X. The images of Israeli commandos handing out packets of sandwiches and bottles of water to the 12 activists on board the Madleen was prominent on social media. But the activists were not starving, unlike the Palestinian people under siege and genocide in Gaza.

If Israel intended this purportedly humanitarian gesture to strike a chord, it did, albeit not in the way the settler-colonial entity expected. Israel’s accomplishment was to consolidate global attention on depriving Palestinians of humanitarian aid in Gaza.

The Madleen, Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated, had “less than a single truckload of aid”, while Israel allowed “more than 1,200 aid trucks” to pass into........

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