These Californians Are Setting Sail for Gaza to Show They’re Anything but Powerless

Early last Wednesday, it was Gabriel Korty’s turn to take watch while sailing across the Balearic Sea.

He rose at dawn to look out from the deck of an eight-person wooden sailboat named Al Quds, an Arabic name for Jerusalem, as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a civilian aid fleet destined for Gaza.

Back home, the Point Reyes artist said he often struggled to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza with those around him.

“Some people just don’t have the capacity to talk about it,” Korty, 36, said of his community in the foggy, rural beach town an hour north of San Francisco. “I think maybe because they feel that they can’t do anything about it.”

So, he set out to prove that regular people can do something. Today, he’s cruising around the coast of Sicily along with a fleet carrying over 1,000 people from more than 100 countries, and at least six people with ties to California.

It’s significantly larger than a previous mission in September 2025, which included 42 boats and 462 participants, but has the same aim: to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza and remind the world of the enclave’s plight, Korty said.

“It really feels like people were forgetting that this genocide was still happening,” Korty said. “I wanted to be here so people in my community had some sort of connection to this flotilla and maybe would pay Gaza the attention it deserves.”

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. It is around two-thirds the size of San José, with twice the population. More than half of its residents are children.

In 2007, after Hamas took control of Gaza’s governance from the Palestinian Authority, Israel began a blockade of the strip by air, land and sea, effectively caging in its 2 million Palestinians. Following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and the start of an Israeli military campaign that leveled entire cities and killed, by some estimates, around 75,000 Palestinians, the stranglehold on humanitarian food, medicine and aid intensified. By April 2025, the blockade pushed parts of Gaza into famine, according to the United Nations.

As part of a ceasefire declared Oct. 10, 2025, Israel promised to freely allow aid to pass into Gaza. However, analysis by Al Jazeera found that aid deliveries in the weeks that followed faced major delays, if allowed in at all. Israel’s military and Hamas, meanwhile, have continued to trade attacks.

“Israel controls all inflow and outflow of personnel and aid on the borders of Gaza,” said Dr. Mohammad Subeh, an emergency room physician based in Saratoga. “Anything that is going to enter, whether it be on trucks or otherwise, has to be vetted.”

Subeh, who is assisting the flotilla as part of the medical coordination team before heading to Lebanon for an aid mission, has traveled to Gaza multiple times, mainly to set up American-style field hospitals to evaluate and treat civilians.

There, he experienced firsthand the challenges of providing lifesaving medical care under siege.

Medications that contain ingredients like glycerin, which can be found in Children’s Tylenol, are rejected by the Israeli authorities as “dual-use” because they could be used for military purposes, Subeh said. Physicians have also reported that Israel has limited the bringing in of stethoscopes, a tool that is practically synonymous with the practice of medicine.

“You’re going through this constant struggle to try to justify all the things that you are bringing in to treat patients,” said Subeh, 41.

Subeh traveled to Sicily to help train boat medics before another round of ships departs Saturday for the journey across the Mediterranean. Medics will also train in how to provide care in detention, in case the fleet is intercepted.

International activists have tried to reach Gaza’s shores multiple times since Israel’s blockade started. None of the attempts has made it past the naval blockade, which has closed Gaza’s coast to maritime traffic.

While no international law prohibits civilian vessels from reaching Gaza by boat, Israel said its naval blockade is legal and necessary for self-defense, as an attempt to stop the illegal transport of weapons.

Many flotilla participants, deemed a security threat, are banned for life from entering Palestinian territories. But Subeh said that’s a risk faced by anyone who provides aid. After being denied entry to Gaza twice, Subeh said he took his case to an Israeli high court.

“The question we should be asking is, what right does the state of Israel have of banning folks from going to Palestine?” said Subeh, who is Palestinian and grew up in Kuwait and Los Angeles as a refugee. “Everybody’s silence plays a huge role.”

Chad Ashby, a ship electrician from Los Angeles, considered joining the Freedom Flotilla, a precursor to the Global Sumud Flotilla, last year and interviewed with organizers at the time. A longtime activist who lived on boats in Bay Area marinas for a decade, Ashby said he’s made more than a dozen humanitarian trips to the Mediterranean with Sea-Watch, a German organization that rescues refugees off the Libyan coast and ferries them to boats bound for Europe.

With Sea-Watch, Ashby, 41, has come face to face with Libyan Coast Guard vessels, with machine guns mounted on their bows, as his crew worked to rescue people from sinking rubber boats and life rafts. He said he still remembers how his heart pounded for hours after his first encounter with Libya’s fleet, which is known for firing on migrants and activists.

“Doing this type of work, your comfort level starts to change, and you just start to become more comfortable with doing things that seem a bit more risky,” Ashby said.

Last year, though, Ashby backed out of joining the Freedom Flotilla. In his research, he learned about an Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara, a passenger ferry headed to Gaza in 2010, that killed nine Turkish activists, including one Turkish American. The attack was condemned globally, and Israel eventually agreed to pay Turkey $20 million in compensation.

“Hearing that story gave me great hesitation,” Ashby said. “It made me [think] I’m not sure if I’m really willing to die for this right now.”

Some of Ashby’s friends from the Sea-Watch community were on a Freedom Flotilla ship called the Conscience that was anchored off the coast of Malta last May when it was hit twice by drones in the middle of the night, ripping open the ship’s hull. No one claimed responsibility for the attack.

In the months after, more ships embarked for Gaza, carrying activists including Greta Thunberg and Amazon labor organizer Chris Smalls. That voyage made international news when Israel detained more than 400 participants 70 nautical miles off Gaza’s coast. California lawmakers and people around the world called for the immediate release of the detained activists.

“Hearing about that mission changed a lot of minds for activists, because people before that thought that this is like a death sentence,” Ashby said. “Even though they were not able to deliver the aid, they were able to get the message out.”

Last week, Ashby packed a small bag, including his electrical equipment and his documents. He also brought his violin, he said, not only to keep up his daily practice but also as a form of meditation.

Then, he traveled to Sicily’s eastern coast to join the crew of the Shireen, a sailboat named for Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank while reporting in 2022.

Immediately, the crew got to work on a list of maintenance tasks needed before the boat could leave port. In the evenings, after working, the crew and others in the marina joined together to play music and livestreamed it as a radio show.

“It’s impressive how many people have come together to try to make an effort to put a stop to the genocide,” Ashby said. “I love to see all of the organization and the passion.”

The Shireen doesn’t plan to reach Gaza and will stay in international waters for the duration of the voyage. As a legal support boat, it carries a handful of legal observers as well as a small group of people with the skills to fix other ships’ broken navigational systems, lights and whatever else they need to make it across the sea.

“We’re just inundated with this horrible information and feeling so bad for what was happening and feeling very powerless,” Ashby said. “And it seemed like a way that I could use my skill to be able to help out.”