Written by: Ananda Triaji Pamungkas Expert Staff on Social and Cultural Affairs, Jonathan Jordan Staff of Research and Development, Fathur Rahman President of FKMHII Korwil II, & Tubagus Eko Saputra Vice Head of Strategic Research FKMHII Korwil II

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the emergence and role of the Global Freedom Flotilla as a new form of transnational activism in humanitarian diplomacy in Palestine from 2023 to 2025. Post-October 2023 escalation in violence has engendered an acute humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, which is indicated by repeated displacement, destruction of health services, food insecurity, and the increased risks associated with volunteers. Though an international humanitarian mechanism is available, the response of states and international organisations showcase a substantive failure to ensure stable humanitarian access and protection on the field. The stagnation of multilateral politics, limitations in implementation, and contracted humanitarian room for manoeuvre created a gap between humanitarian norms and operational reality. In such a context, the Global Freedom Flotilla emerged as a transnational civil society actor that attempted to penetrate the blockade and mobilise global solidarity through direct action and high visibility. By using the transnational advocacy network framework, global civil society theory, and spreadable media theory, this article shows the Global Freedom Flotilla functioned as an effective humanitarian advocacy instrument in boosting moral pressure, forming global public opinion, and delegitimising humanitarian restrictions. However, the impact was more significant on the discursive and symbolic environment than on substantive policy changes. This finding showcases the potential of transnational activism as a source of alternative, normative pressure in contemporary humanitarian diplomacy, while also highlighting its limitations in international politics, which is dominated by strategic interests.

Keywords: Global Freedom Flotilla, Transnational activism, Humanitarian diplomacy, Palestine.

Background
Since the post-October 2023 escalation, the Palestine-Israel conflict engendered an acute humanitarian crisis along the Gaza Strip: repetitive displacements, damaged civilian infrastructure, and restriction of health services and humanitarian aid. The Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) recorded an extreme pattern of displacement. On average, locals experience 6, even up to 19 displacements, from October 2023 to October 2024, showing the vulnerability of civil protection and the absence of consistent safe spaces (OCHA, 2025a). At the same time, OCHA also showcased that intensive military operations, evacuation orders, the restrictions of aid, and the shrinking of humanitarian spaces have furthered the severity of the crisis (OCHA, 2024).

This crisis is clear according to the vulnerable group and basic services indicator. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that more than 50.000 children have been killed or wounded since October 2023 (UNICEF, 2025). Moreover, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated medical evacuations have progressed very sluggishly. Approximately 5.383 patients have been evacuated since October 2023, but only 436 people after the encirclement of Rafah even though more than 12.000 victims still need evacuation (WHO, 2025). The food security situation has degraded conditions more. The Integrated Food Classification (IPC) Global Famine Review Committee assessed that the condition in Gaza is very severe and stressed the extreme famine that can spread widely in their worst scenario (IPC Global Famine Review Committee, 2024). The operational risks of aid delivery have also increased. OCHA noted that at least 369 volunteers, including 263 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) staff, have been killed since October 2023 (OCHA, 2025b).

In the midst of such realities, formal actors, such as the state and international organizations, have failed to provide humanitarian access and protection. Amidst the escalation of the crisis, available international mechanisms were proven to be impotent in ensuring the entry of foreign aid consistently and safely. OCHA reported that in 2024, only a handful of the planned international aid convoy was successfully realised according to schedule due to restriction of access, closure of crossings, and unsecure environments. On certain periods, less than half of proposed aid missions were allowed full entry, while the other half were delayed or cancelled entirely, prolonging scarcity of food, medicine, and basic services (OCHA, 2024).

This failure was also reflected in the response of international health institutions. The WHO stated that despite thousands of patients needing medical evacuation, the rate of evacuation remains very limited and unproportional to actual needs. Since the closure of Rafah, only hundreds of patients have been evacuated, while more than 12.000 others were left behind without guarantee of escape, indicating the weak capacity to implement international humanitarian mechanisms under political and security pressures (WHO, 2025). In this context, the dead end in the UN Security Council, including the veto dynamics and failure to pass a binding resolution, not only display formal political stagnation, but also have caused the absence of stable and enforced humanitarian access. As a result, the failure of states and international organisations is substantive, not merely an ineptitude to produce a normative consensus but also a powerlessness to protect civilians and ensure the basic function of humanitarian aid.

The lack of success of states and international organisations brought about a social movement dubbed the Global Freedom Flotilla as an alternative actor in the arena of transnational politics. This movement was initiated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and other civil society groups in 2025 with the intention to penetrate the Israeli blockade of Gaza and to bring humanitarian aid directly via sea. Historically, maritime solidarity efforts to Gaza can be tracked to as early as 2008 through the Free Gaza Movement that later developed into a cross-campaign civil society coalition known as the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (Free Gaza Movement, 2008; Freedom Flotilla Coalition, n.d.; Al Jazeera, 2025).

In 2023–2025, revitalisation of the flotilla was visible through the involvement of civil society organisations, cross-border activists, public figures, and broad media coverage. The Associated Press reported the departure of Madleen, one of the Flotilla’s ships, from Italy on June 1, 2025 and Israel’s statement on June 8, 2025 that the vessel would be prevented from going to Gaza (Associated Press, 2025a, 2025b). Other media also highlighted the attack against Conscience, another one of the Flotilla’s ships, in international waters near Malta in May 2025 (The Guardian, 2025). On the normative side, UN human rights experts called for a safe course for the Flotilla Coalition’s vessels and urged urgent humanitarian aid (OHCHR, 2025).

Theoretical Framework
From the transnational advocacy network (TAN) perspective, the Global Freedom Flotilla can be understood as a cross-border advocacy network united by a common value in regards to human rights and humanitarian justice. Keck and Sikkink (1998) postulated that such a network takes advantage of information and symbolic politics to frame an issue normatively, with leverage politics being used to pressure states and international organisations. When access to formal diplomatic channels are powerless, this movement exploits the boomerang pattern, which is a global solidarity mobilisation to influence decision makers from outside of the domestic environment.

The global civil society (GCS) framework adds on to that analysis by placing the Flotilla as a part of global social space outside of states and markets. GCS works as a normative arena, where civil society actors build structures to collective actions (Keane, 2003). In this context, the Global Freedom Flotilla not only becomes a symbolic humanitarian action, but also represents a global civil resistance against international power asymmetry.

To strengthen the effectiveness of this activism, the role of spreadable media is needed. Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) emphasised that advocacy messages in the digital era spread through active public participation, not just passive virality. Narratives, visual documentaries, and testimonies from the Global Freedom Flotilla reached far and wide through digital platforms, allowing the formation of global public opinion that contributes to moral-based diplomatic pressure. With the synthesis of those three theoretical concepts, this article results in an analysis that the Global Freedom Flotilla represents a new form of humanitarian diplomacy that combines international advocacy networks, global civil society space, and digital media circulation in the struggle for the Palestinian issue, especially after October 7, 2023.

The Global Freedom Flotilla as a Face for Transnational Activism
The Global Freedom Flotilla represents a new form of transnational activism that merge humanitarian solidarity with high salience actions. The uniqueness of the Global Freedom Flotilla lies in its ability to incorporate cross-border physical actions with the production of global discourse simultaneously and expediently post-genocide in Gaza that started in 2023. In contrast to advocacy campaigns that are maintained by limited lobbying or normative statements, the Global Flotilla utilised a maritime voyage to an area of conflict as a symbolic political strategy that aimed to expose the Gaza blockade. The movement anticipated repression as part of a political message, and at the same time mobilised attention as well as empathy from the international public through the circulation of cross-platform narratives and visualisations.

As a form of cross-border activism, the Global Freedom Flotilla was composed of heterogeneous actors. International non-government organisations acted in its planning and normative legitimisation, transnational activists mobilised grassroots solidarity, and independent and citizen journalists worked as main facilitators between field action and the global public (Pallas & Uhlin, 2014). The combination of actors created a flexible international solidarity network, which is not bound to any state structure and able to adapt to many political contexts. Such a network reinforced mobilisation capacity to prevail despite facing state repression or delegitimisation.

From the TAN perspective, the Global Freedom Flotilla can be comprehended as an advocacy praxis that works through three main mechanisms. First, cross-border network mobilisation permitted the coordination of actors from many states to engage in an integrated, collective action (Irfan et al., 2025). Second, the production of narratives was undertaken via humanitarian framing that highlights civilians’ sufferings, violations of international humanitarian law, and moral responsibilities of the global community (Risse, Ropp, & Sikkink, 2013). Third, the cross-border distribution was performed by means of digital media and independent journalism, which allowed the Global Flotilla’s message to be distributed beyond the control of states and mainstream media (Tarrow, 2021). For those reasons, the ships in the Flotilla became a symbol that the Palestinian issue is not purely a geopolitical problem, but also a crisis that demands a response from the international community (Bob, 2019).

Those mechanisms culminated in the production of moral pressure against states and international organisations. This pressure does not always result in a direct policy change, but functions to erode the legitimacy of states’ actions, influence the global public opinion, and open a room of normative accountability in international politics (Deitelhoff & Zimmermann, 2020). The first mechanism is of a leverage politics kind, the second of an informational politics type, and the third is typical of symbolic politics. Therefore, the Global Freedom Flotilla was not just a symbolic solidarity action. Rather, it was a transnational advocacy instrument that strategically made use of networks, visibility, and global norms in order to spurn structural injustices.

Framing in the Global Freedom Flotilla: The Role of the Epistemic Community, Journalism, and Visual Politics
The growth of Flotilla’s campaign was not separate from the circulation of narratives and visualisations. Those were not only reported but also distributed voluntarily by cross-platform and border audiences. The media and journalism served as the infrastructure of the movement, providing public testimonies, widening reach, and normalizing humanitarian discourse on Gaza in the international arena. In accordance to the TAN logic, such an information stream is a sine qua non for cross-border moral pressure. Information is gathered, framed, and then spread to ensure that it became an arrant attention for the public and formal actors.

As a transnational advocacy movement, the Global Freedom Flotilla mobilised resources, especially epistemic wealth to support the accuracy and credibility for their claims. The factual foundations lied on reports by humanitarian groups and other civil society organisations that documented the crisis systematically. OCHA’s warning about the shrinking of humanitarian space, the WHO’s alarm of medical evacuation, and the IPC’s review of extreme food insecurity gives consistent empirical context for reporting (IPC Famine Review Committee, 2024; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2024, 2025; World Health Organization, 2025). The Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)’s account bolstered the image of the breakdown of services and the consequences for civilians (MSF, 2024).

Above such a foundation, the mass media has constructed four interlocking frames of reality, which are victim-perpetrator, humanitarian urgency, human rights, and political accountability. The four of them work as a bridge that translates the complex crisis into understandable narratives for the global public at the grassroots. At the same, this narrative does not downplay the innumerable sufferings of the Gaza people as a cynosure of discussions.

First, the framing of victim-perpetrator highlights the civilians of Gaza (refugees, children, and patients) as the most vulnerable group and then connects them to the structure of violence and the internationally controversial restriction of access. Second, the framing of humanitarian urgency affirms the pressing need for immediate action, with widespread famine, crisis of health services, and the critical need for aid, which are shown by the frequent reports by OCHA, WHO, and IPC as well as impact indicators on children (IPC Famine Review Committee, 2024). Third, the framing of human rights anchors civilians’ hardships with the language of normative responsibility and the protection of civilians, including the call from UN human rights experts for a safe journey for the Flotilla Coalition (OHCHR [Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights], 2025). Furthermore, there is the fourth framing, which is accountability politics, that promote the question of “who is responsible?” for the restriction of access, interception, and humanitarian consequences that is shown in credible media that emphasise political decisions and responses by states on the Flotilla (Amnesty International, 2025).

Those framings were amplified through visual politics. Photos and videos of refugees, aid convoys, destroyed hospitals, or excerpts of emotional testimonies from the victims of war abridge gaps of emotional distance and construct cross-border moral identification (Bleiker, 2018). In the framework of GCS, visual effects such as those assists in forming solidarity and a public sense of responsibility. This sentiment is beyond sympathy because sufferings are presented as a live experience in front of viewers (Kaldor, 2003; MSF, 2024). This became the fundamentals for raising sentiment and collective actions by civil societies in relation to the Palestinian issue.

This is where the spreadable media theory needs to be stressed. Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) conveyed that the influence of communication is not only determined by groups that broadcast, but also by the capability of content circulation through participatory cultural praxis. Audiences choose, cut, recontextualise, translate, and then share to other networks. In this case, media consumers are not passive actors, rather a group that also possess agency in deciding the direction of narrative interpretation. The Flotilla’s action supplied a story unit that is easily transposed cross-platform, with the route, aid symbol, interception, and response from international institutions so that its spreadability went beyond policy communities.

Coverage by credible media then provided a readily-circulated format, such as live blogs and explainers, which were rapidly compressed into slices of narratives, as well as historical contexts that caused the global public to understand the issue’s continuity (Al Jazeera, 2025). When UN or civil society references and media coverage collided in the participatory circulation, journalistic diplomacy operated. Coverage became a means to build movement legitimacy, resist dominant narratives, and strengthen moral pressure that became fuel for transnational advocacy (Gilboa, 2005; Jenkins et al., 2013; Keck & Sikkink, 1998).

Impact on International Public Opinion: Symbolic vs. Policy
The Global Freedom Flotilla showed that the main impact of contemporary transnational activism on international public opinion is stronger on the discursive and symbolic sector than any formal change in policies. Through participatory cross-platform and state narrative and visual circulation, the Global Freedom Flotilla successfully formed a global discourse that portrays the Gaza crisis as an issue of human rights, justice, and international responsibility (Arafat, 2025). Based on the report from its official site, the success of the Global Freedom Flotilla can be seen from the rising engagement of the movement. Previously, there were 2 million netizens that accessed the website but post-mobilisation, that number increased to more than 3,5 million (Reuters, 2025). The massive increase also happened on demonstration movements, including in Genoa and Milan, post-repressive actions conducted by the Zionist armed forces to the humanitarian voyage. Five thousand people gathered in an attempt to blockade supplies to Israel (Al Jazeera, 2025).

Based on polling data done by SWG Radar, 62% of the global society supported the mission with 26% viewing the armada as an important act to resist Israel’s action in Gaza, while 25% value it as an important humanitarian gesture despite the possibility of interception. As much as 11% of the others believe that this movement will alleviate the hardships of Palestinians (SWG Radar, 2025). Those numbers showcase that the response of the global public on the Global Freedom Flotilla was by and large receptive. From the same polling, only 38% expressed animadversion against the mission with 19% regarding the mission as useless, 10% opining that the mission exploits the Gaza tragedy, and 9% claiming that the mission is serving Hamas’ interests.

A recent study also argues that international media coverage on the Global Freedom Flotilla consistently frames the action as a global solidarity expression and moral resistance against humanitarian restrictions, resulting in an expanding global public consciousness regarding the sufferings of civilians in Gaza (Saleem, 2025). The impact is the vitalisation of cross-border solidarity, increased frequency of public demonstration, and symbolic delegitimisation against policies that limit humanitarian access. On the discursive level, the Flotilla functions as the catalyst for the formation of a relatively cohesive normative discourse. Repeated reference to humanitarian organisations and the UN gave a factual foundation that bolstered the humanitarian claim in media coverage and public advocacy (IPC Famine Review Committee, 2024). Pursuant to the TAN logic, this cross-border information flow is a stipulation for global moral pressure because information is gathered, framed, and shared so that it is difficult to be ignored by the international public or formal actors (Keck & Sikkink).

However, when moving from the sector of public opinion to policies, the effectiveness of the Global Freedom Flotilla was more or less stagnant. Some studies affirmed that despite growing moral and reputational pressures, policy responses by states and international organisations are often limited by strategic interests, security concerns, institutional procedures, and gatekeeping in decision making (Saleem, 2025). States and formal institutions can absorb discursive pressure without having to change substantive policy. As a result, formal responses that are given were only limited to concerns, normative commitments, or symbolic protests against actions in Gaza without any structural steps to follow up. As an example, despite a few of them having reproved Israel’s operation in Gaza, 59 states have agreed to send soldiers to Gaza as part of the ISF (International Stabilisation Force) proposed by Donald Trump (Mada, 2025). That plan has been criticised by some because it would further the national interest of Israel. Under the framework of ISF, Hamas would be disarmed. This shows that the normative concern expressed by some states is not continued by concrete action, rather by a contradiction.

This dynamic exhibits that the Global Freedom Flotilla is effective in constructing a moral or reputational cost to states and international organisations. This cost operates through public opinion pressure, symbolic delegitimisation, and continued global media exposure. However, transformation from symbolic pressure to changing policy necessitates an institutional bridge, such as the strengthening of UN mechanisms, bolstering of international law, or the availability of a coalition to internalise the pressure from the Global Freedom Flotilla. Without such a bridge, the Flotilla will remain a transnational advocacy instrument that is strong only symbolically, without producing meaningful, concrete, and sustained impact on policies.

Conclusion
The Global Freedom Flotilla was a response by international civil societies regarding the inhumane condition in Gaza in the form of a cross-border advocacy network. Through the TAN, GCS, and spreadable media framework, this article identifies three main mechanisms that sustained the Global Freedom Flotilla’s advocacy, which are cross-border network mobilisation, narration product, and cross-state distribution. Apart from that, the role of mass media is also not absent to understand the transnational phenomena. By framing the conflict in Gaza into four narratives, which are victim-perpetrator relation, humanitarian urgency, human rights violation, and question of political accountability, the mass media increased the Global Freedom Flotilla’s effectiveness amongst the global public via a more comprehensible coverage. However, the effectiveness of the Global Freedom Flotilla is only symbolic and discursive. The impact on policy change by states remains very limited due to the consideration of national interests by apparatchiks against the anathema in Gaza. As a result, transnational activism networks must be integrated into institutional advocacy projects so that the humanitarian agenda gains more attention, rather than merely a symbolic process of opinion formation. 

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