Text featured alongside video release on INDYMEDIA CHICAGO website:
Chicagoan Fatima Mohammadi, a passenger aboard the Mavi Marmara, gives a chilling eyewitness account of the May 31 Israeli assault on the Gaza aid flotilla, which left 9 dead, scores injured and six unaccounted for. The Youtube video combines Fatima's testimony with recently released video smuggled off the Mavi Marmara - the only tape currently available from activists on board the flotilla. Dozens of hours of additional video and thousands of still photos remain in Israeli hands, and the Israeli government has refused to release this material to the world. The Mavi Marmara was attacked by Israeli commandos from the air by helicopter and by sea from Zodiacs before dawn on May 31, as the ship, which was in international waters, turned even more sharply west away from the coast of Palestine. Israel imprisoned those passengers that it did not kill or disappear for days after the murderous assault, in an attempt to spin it's violence and illegality to the advantage of the apartheid state. But eyewitness accounts, and video smuggled from the besieged ship by Cultures of Resistance, increasingly put the lie to Israeli distortions.