Peacefully, what a surprise

Dina Kraft has the story in The New York Times about Gaza and Israel:

Israeli navy commandos peacefully commandeered a catamaran sailed by an international group of Jewish activists trying to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza. The ten activists, from Israel, the United States, Britain, and Germany, including an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, responded defiantly to the Israeli navy when it hailed to them from a frigate demanding they identify themselves and give their destination. “We are going to Gaza,” the group responded from the deck of the thirty-foot catamaran, Irene, festooned with peace flags and carrying humanitarian aid, according to its website.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the vessel was boarded without incident, and that “no violence of any kind was used by neither the passengers onboard nor the Israel naval forces.” The military nicknamed the boat, the Provocation Yacht.
The boat’s voyage from Cyprus was another attempt to thwart the blockade, after an Israeli assault on a Gaza-bound aid boat on 31 May in which Israeli commando forces opened fire, killing nine Islamic activists, all Turks, on board and setting off an international dispute.
Israel maintains its forces operated in self-defense after they said they came under attack by a group of passengers. Last week a United Nations Human Rights Council investigation concluded that Israel violated international law in the raid. Israel dismissed the report as biased.
The Jewish activists, whose cellphones were confiscated when the boat was seized, according to an Israel-based spokesman for the group, were being taken by the Navy to the southern port of Ashdod. A well-known Israeli passenger was Rami Elhanan, a peace activist whose daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber.
The one American on board was Lillian Rosengarten, 75, a practicing psychotherapist from Cold Spring, New York, who fled the Nazis as a child in Frankfurt. “I was very reluctant to see her go out of my own anxiety, but I find myself increasingly impressed with her bravery,” her daughter, Lydia Rosengarten, 46, said in a telephone interview from Cold Spring.
Yonatan Shapira, 38, a former air force pilot, was part of the crew. Mr. Shapira is now an activist with Combatants for Peace, an Israeli-Palestinian peace group, along with his brother Itamar, 30. Their mother, Tzvia Shapira, 68, waiting for them at the Ashdod port, said in a telephone interview she was relieved the army had not used force. “That was my fear,” Ms. Shapira said. “Yonatan and Itamar are against any violence. Itamar was a combat soldier and now he is opposed to wars.” The group’s goal had been to try to reach Gaza and unload aid cargo in what the group said in a statement was a “nonviolent, symbolic act of solidarity and protest and a call for the siege to be lifted to enable free passage of goods and people to and from the Gaza Strip.”
In the wake of the massive condemnation that followed May’s deadly flotilla raid, Israel partly eased its land blockade on Gaza, which it imposed three years ago after the militant Hamas seized power of the sandy coastal strip. Its naval blockade, however, remains in place, Israeli officials say, in an attempt to prevent the smuggling of weapons. “The IDF regrets that it must divert the Israel navy’s attention from its regular operational activity defending Israel and its citizens because of acts of provocation such as this,” the army statement said of the episode at sea.