Flotilla Legal Team Confirms Release Move

The Global Sumud Flotilla says international pressure has forced movement on the release of Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila — but the delegation warns the fight is not over while they remain in custody and thousands of Palestinians remain imprisoned.

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 centre in Egypt, where they will remain in custody until their deportation is carried out.

Pressure works — but custody is not freedom

The GSF legal team is still actively coordinating through diplomatic channels for both releases to happen in the same transport.

We celebrate this news as a victory and a reminder that international mobilisation and sustained pressure exerted worldwide can have 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.

The flotilla says this is part of a wider system

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 mobilised until all Palestinian political prisoners and hostages are freed; and in the same spirit, until our Tunisian comrades are freed. Free Palestine.