ASKALAN, OCCUPIED PALESTINE – The legal team of the Global Sumud Flotilla has confirmed that Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila will be released in the coming hours. Both will ultimately be transferred to an immigration detention center in Egypt, where they will remain in custody until their deportation is carried out. The GSF legal team is still actively coordinating through diplomatic channels the release of both to happen in the same transport.
We celebrate this news as a victory and a reminder that international mobilization and sustained pressure exerted worldwide has an impact. We ask the world to continue to pressure for their release until Saif and Thiago are safely returned home. We also ask for the same sustained pressure to be applied to the release of our Tunisian friends and the nearly 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners and hostages being held illegally in israeli prisons.
We demand explanations from the European Union, and specifically, Greece, after days of silence and complicity, and we call for immediate sanctions against Israel for this illegal abduction and for the constant violations of international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people.
These detentions are not exceptional. They are an extension of the same system of imprisonment, administrative detention, torture, and impunity imposed on the Palestinian people for decades, now expanded beyond Palestine’s borders into international waters.
We will remain mobilized until all Palestinian political prisoners and hostages are freed; and in the same spirit, until our Tunisian comrades are freed. Free Palestine.