Emma Graham-Harrison

Not new in terms of what Palestinians have been subjected to in Israeli prisons and detention centres, but new in that level of violence and mistreatment of foreigners arrested on these fertility lists, because there have been several of them.

There's nominally a ceasefire in place.

That came into force in October.

Hundreds of people have been killed by Israeli attacks since then.

Hunger is still widespread.

There are high levels of malnutrition.

There's shortages of medical supplies.

There's a really serious lack of access to clean water and sanitation, which exacerbates all the other problems.

Doctors describe a revolving door of people coming to hospitals with intestinal problems.

They're cured, discharged, go back to places where they can't find clean water and are back again.

Everything that you could possibly need, food, water, medicines, is in short supply.

So really, the situation is horrific.

And I think it's worth, you know, when you consider these flotillas, of course, the amount of aid that they're going to take in or attempting to take in would be symbolic when you look at the scale of the needs in Gaza, where there's over two million people.

But as a form of activism and protest to remind the world that Gaza is cut off, that its people are still suffering an extreme level of deprivation, it's actually very effective.

There was a really interesting article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz this morning saying, why is Israel so afraid of these small boats?

And this article made the point that the Israeli government isn't afraid of large amounts of aid reaching Gaza.

There's not even large amounts of aid on the ship.

What they're concerned about really is that these activists draw the attention of the world back to a humanitarian catastrophe that...

they would be happy to see Slide slide out of the headlines and, you know, perhaps many of their allies as well.

That is one of the very disturbing things about this video that, you know, what has horrified people around the world will be received with enthusiasm by some of the voters who Ben-Gavir is trying to appeal to, or at least that's his view of it.