Active With The Activists: Newmarket Rep. Read Returns From Humanitarian Gaza Flotilla

By ARNIE ALPERT, Active with the Activists, InDepth NH

About six months ago, Rep. Ellen Read, D-Newmarket, chanced upon a video about a planned attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip by sea. Among those who would participate were Irish parliamentarians and Read wondered, “Where are the American ones?”

There have been more than a dozen humanitarian flotillas to Gaza since 2008 and Read couldn’t find an indication that any American elected official had ever been on any of them. Read, a State Representative from Newmarket, applied to be the first, with the belief that her presence could draw attention to the group and its mission.

Gaza has been a humanitarian disaster area since well before the 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks, which provoked Israel’s vicious response. The territory, which has housed more than a million refugees since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, has long been economically isolated by Israeli policies with its economy and population heavily dependent on international assistance.

With only three ports of entry, two controlled by Israel and one by Egypt, and the coast patrolled by the Israeli military, delivery of humanitarian aid has been restricted for decades, with exit or entry by sea prohibited since 2007. That’s what activists call the “blockade.” Israel sees it as necessary to prevent weapons from reaching Hamas or other militant groups.

In 2008, two small boats carrying 44 people from 17 countries sailed through the Israeli blockade, landed in Gaza, and distributed hearing aids and medicine. It was the beginning of what would become the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. Other ships made similar efforts over the years, but most were turned back or attacked by the Israeli Navy, which has often apprehended participants in international waters.

In 2025, with Israel’s assault on Palestinian civilians and its infrastructure of schools, hospitals, and housing causing widespread death and hunger, and with Israel blocking most efforts to deliver aid through normal channels, plans were laid for more attempts to break the blockade by sea.

Read is an active legislator, known for a commitment to affordable housing, animal welfare, and ranked choice voting. She sponsored or co-sponsored 42 bills in 2025 and has her name on 29 for the session that starts on January 7. She works as a bus driver to support her political activities.

Watching videos of Palestinians searching through rubble for missing children, Read knew it was time to do something. Read said that if she were rich, she would make a big donation, and if she had millions of followers on social media, she would reach out to them. She has neither. “All I have is this title,” she said. “That's the only thing I have.” Read was accepted to be part of a group called “A Thousand Madleens.” She would bring her State Representative badge with her on the trip.

The first “Madleen” was a UK-flagged boat which sailed from Sicily on June 1 with the goal of breaking the Israeli blockade of Gaza and delivering humanitarian supplies. According to the Freedom Flotilla’s report, “Israeli forces forcibly boarded and seized the Madleen roughly 100 nautical miles from Palestinian territorial waters, abducting all 12 civilians on board as well as the baby formula, food, medicine and crutches that were destined for Palestinians in Gaza, without providing any lawful justification.” The One Thousand Madleens project soon followed with the goal of organizing 1000 ships. Read joined the first group of nine ships, which left Sicily on September 27.

Read did not return to New Hampshire until November 3. Two dozen people at the Community Church of Durham shouted “welcome home” and cheered as she walked in the door, looking exhausted. We caught up by phone ten days later, and she gave her first public presentation, to NH Peace Action, on November 24.

Read said that after her application was accepted, she had short notice for when she had to be in Sicily, where she joined a group of 60 crew members and 150 supporters for a week of training. The training would emphasize nonviolent communication, but also exposure to tear gas, darkness, incessant noise, and what it’s like to have a hood put over your head. The steady message, she said, was that all of their actions would need to remain nonviolent, despite whatever provocation they would experience. They always expected that the voyage would end with forcible interference from the Israeli navy.

The Gaza flotillas were not the first nonviolent actions aimed at delivering humanitarian aid into a war zone. In 1967, six American pacifists on board the Phoenix risked felony charges and attacks by American and Vietnamese forces to deliver a ton of medical supplies for civilians harmed by U.S. bombing in Vietnam. One of the participants was Harrison Butterworth, who would later move to Hopkinton, where he died in 2004. Bob Eaton, who served as skipper and is now in his 80s, recalls that Butterworth got terribly seasick when they neared shore. “Sea sickness can be life threatening,” Eaton told me. “When the Vietnamese navy blockaded our arrival and threatened to tow Phoenix out to international waters, the crew decided to abandon the ship by jumping overboard rather than be complicit in taking life saving meds away from Vietnam.” (Read more about Butterworth and the Phoenix here.)

Read, who has a captain’s license and maritime experience in New England’s coastal waters, was assigned to the smallest of nine boats, the King Julian. The ship is also known as Alaa Al-Najjar, named for a Palestinian pediatrician whose husband and nine of her ten children were killed in an Israeli airstrike in May. “This boat honors health care workers in Gaza whose ability to care is under constant threat,” Read said. With Read on board, the ship flew an American flag. The small boat carried several boxes of non-perishable food they hoped to deliver, while the larger vessels carried school supplies and medicine.

The Mediterranean seas were rough, rougher than Read expected. Seasick and experiencing hypothermia, Read was removed from her ship eight days after they set sail, as advised by other crew members concerned about her health. She was reluctant to leave but knew that in her condition her presence provided more risk than benefit.

The rest of the crew was apprehended in international waters by Israeli forces three days later and taken to Israeli prisons.

Read was taken back to Italy, where she received medical attention. From there, she flew to Turkey, where she expected her former crewmates to be deported. She remained there until early November.

Looking back on the experience, the whole point, she said, is to break the blockade, which she says was declared illegal by the United Nations when it went into effect seventeen years ago. And not only is the blockade illegal, she said, “Anyone has a right to navigate the high seas. So if you intercept someone on the high seas who's not doing anything wrong, anything dangerous, that's piracy. And taking those people off their ship is kidnapping. So Israel is engaged in kidnapping and piracy.”

Read is convinced that the international attention gained by the flotillas contributed to the Israeli decision to reach a ceasefire agreement, though she also states that residents of Gaza are still under attack. “They’re killing eight Palestinians a day,” she said.

Since the agreement, the flow of aid into Gaza has increased, but conditions remain desperate. A state of famine was declared in parts of Gaza in August and half a million people there are facing catastrophic conditions, according to the UN’s World Food Program. Aid reaching the population is far from enough to meet the needs caused by two years of Israeli bombing.

When she left for the flotilla, Read said she knew, “I might not come back,” but when she thought about what Palestinians endure every day and the aid the United States has provided to the Israeli military, she knew that she had to go.

Prior to the trip, Read was given a leave of absence from her bus driver job. Shortly after her return, she was fired, a move she believes was retaliation for her action rather than anything to do with her performance or credentials. Now, while she looks for a new job, she’s thinking about returning to the Middle East, perhaps with another flotilla or in a nonviolent observer mission. She’s also prepping for the 2026 legislative session, with sixteen bills to sign off on by Friday.

Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace. Officially retired from the American Friends Service Committee since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements. You can reach him at arnie.alpert@indepthnh.org.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.