Israel deports Jewish boat activists

ISRAEL: Three Jewish activists who tried to bust Israel’s blockade on Gaza were on their way out of Israel Tuesday night and a fourth was awaiting deportation, their lawyer said.

Israeli warships Tuesday intercepted the boat named “Irene” 20 nautical miles off the coast of the Gaza Strip, and took it the port of Ashdod in southern Israel.

Attorney Smadar Ben-Natan said “two English and an American” were at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport awaiting flights and the other, a woman, was being kept in custody overnight.

“We shall only be able to see her tomorrow,” she told AFP, without identifying the foreigners or saying why one was still being detained.

She said five Israeli nationals who sailed with the four foreigners on the Irene had been released without being charged pending further inquiries.

Organisers Jews for Justice for Palestinians listed on their website Briton Glyn Secker as the vessel’s captain and a member of its executive committee and named US peace activist Lillian Rosengarten as one of the passengers.

Photographer Vish Vishvanath’s nationality is not given but his own website describes him as London-based.

The fourth foreigner is listed as German nurse Edith Lutz..

Ben-Natan said one of the Israelis, former combat pilot Yonatan Shapira, had been subdued with a stun gun as he passively resisted attempts to separate him from his brother Itamar after the Israeli navy boarded the British-flagged catamaran. “An Israeli naval officer gave him an electric shock,” she said. “He wasn’t resisting arrest, (the brothers) were hugging one another so they wouldn’t be separated.”

A statement from the organisers said Yonatan had recovered from the shock and was in good health, as was 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Reuven Moskovitz, an Israeli with a heart condition.

ASHDOD, Wednesday, AFP