Israel has deported 131 activists from the intercepted Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge crossing between the kingdom and the West Bank, Jordanian state media reported Tuesday.
The deportation would bring the number of activists still detained in Israel to no more than seven, after at least 472 have been deported since Israel intercepted the flotilla last week.
The activists deported to Jordan included one Jordanian citizen and activists from Bahrain, Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Kuwait, Libya, Pakistan, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, Japan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Serbia, Mexico, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, the UK and the US, said Jordanian foreign ministry spokesman Fuad Al-Majali, according to the AlMamlaka news outlet.
Israel did not immediately comment on the statement, which came during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
Jordanian authorities organized the activists’ transportation to the kingdom in coordination with their home nations, Al-Majali was cited as saying.
According to Al-Majali, three Jordanians were among the 470 Sumud activists that Israel detained from the 42-vessel flotilla on Thursday and Friday. Two of the Jordanians were deported in an earlier flight to Turkey, he said, adding that Jordan’s ambassador to Israel had visited all three in detention.
The announcement came a day after Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and 170 other members from the US and 18 European nations were deported from Israel to Greece and Slovakia. Thunberg and other activists have alleged abuse in Israeli prison, which Israel denies.
Asked about Thunberg’s deportation, US President Donald Trump said, “She’s just a troublemaker.”
“You mean she’s no longer into the environment, now she’s into this?” said Trump.
“She has an anger management problem, I think she should see a doctor,” he added. “She’s so angry, she’s so crazy.”
Trump’s comments renewed his long-running feud with Thunberg, whom he sarcastically called a “very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future,” when she delivered a fiery speech on climate change to UN leaders in 2019, during Trump’s first term.
She later reversed the barb when Trump, saying he “seems like a very happy old man looking forward to a bright and wonderful future,” when he left the White House on January 20, 2021.
The Sumud flotilla, which carried a symbolic amount of humanitarian aid, was the latest attempt by activists to challenge Israel’s years-long naval blockade on Gaza.
The Navy’s interception of the flotilla last week came after organizers rejected the calls to transfer the small amount of aid they had been carrying with them to Israel or international organizations to be taken to the Strip and distributed.
Similar attempts were intercepted in June and July, amid spiking international anger at Israel over the humanitarian crisis in the Strip. Israeli officials have denounced the Sumud and other missions as pro-Hamas stunts.
Israel and Egypt have imposed varying degrees of blockade on Gaza since the Hamas terror group seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007 in a violent coup.
Israel said it was necessary to limit Hamas’s ability to smuggle in arms. Critics of the blockade said it amounted to collective punishment of Gaza’s roughly 2 million Palestinians.
In an August report that Israel has rejected, the UN declared a famine in parts of northern Gaza. Israel, which blocked the entry of aid into Gaza for nearly three months until May, has accused Hamas of systematically looting aid entering the Strip since the war there was sparked when the terror group invaded Israel on October 7, 2023.
Meanwhile, a new nine-boat flotilla organized by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is also expected to approach Gaza soon and be intercepted by the Israeli Navy. The mission, said to include about 100 activists on one of the boats, set sail from Italy some two weeks ago and was traveling north of Egypt’s Alexandria on Tuesday, according to the flotilla’s live-tracker.