French Police prevented two boats, which were planning to join a flotilla to the Gaza Strip, from docking along the Seine River in Paris, as it began its journey toward the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave in an attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade. Leaders of the French Communist Party and representatives of the Greens joined dozens of demonstrators waiving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israeli slogans, as they gathered by the Seine to greet two of the four flotilla boats as they passed through Paris escorted by French river police. After blocking the flotilla, which a French official dubbed as “a charade of provocation,” demonstrators accused French authorities of collaborating with the crimes they claim that Israel had committed in Gaza. “It (the flotilla) spent hours over there (blocked outside of Paris) before being able to leave and now it can’t dock, not even symbolically. Unfortunately, once again, regarding the Israeli-Palestinian, the French government has actually showed it’s support to Netanyahu’s government, even though it flouts all U.N. resolutions by settling Palestine and even massacring civilians as it has for some months. So it’s incomprehensible but to say it all it’s revolting, I’m revolted,” France Unbowed far left Faction Eric Coquerel said.
Meanwhile in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Islamists vowed to continue to use incendiary kites and balloons as part of what they termed “the resistance against the Zionist entity.” Over the course of the last 24 hours, more than 20 fires were caused by incendiary kites, burning large swathes of territory next to Israeli communities, before fire-fighters were able to contain the flames. While Israeli Defense officials confirmed to TV7 that the IDF has indeed changed its policy in the Gaza Strip, in which it has received a green light to target Hamas installations in response to the use of incendiary kites – the officials noted that it was clear that a conflagration between Israel and Hamas was only a matter of time.
The warning of an imminent escalation in Gaza was also voiced by UN Secretary General António Guterres who said that the Gaza Strip was on the verge of war and had witnessed the most serious escalation since 2014. Guterres gave a report to the UN Security Council in which he condemned moves by both Israel and the Palestinian, attributing responsibility to both sides for what he termed “the dangerous situation.”