Flotilla activists given hero's welcome in Turkey
Hundreds of activists from a Turkish-led aid flotilla landed at Istanbul early yesterday, dazed and shaken after their ordeal but given a hero's welcome by thousands of cheering supporters waiting at the airport.
Three Turkish planes that bore the activists from Tel Aviv to Turkey also carried the simple wooden coffins of the nine killed when Israeli commandos stormed the ships trying to take aid to Gaza.
"We've been scared, frightened, kidnapped and attacked with battleships while we were taking aid to needy people in Gaza," said Mustafa Ahmet, a British citizen of Turkish origin.
Meanwhile, Israel, deflect a UN demand for an international investigation, proposed yesterday an Israeli inquiry with the participation of outside observers into its lethal seizure of a Gaza-bound Turkish ship.
Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, embraced a US suggestion in an effort to calm a global furore over the killing of nine pro-Palestinian activists in Monday's naval commando operation.
Israel wants any probe to focus on the legality and operational details of the commando raid rather than on its four-year-old blockade of Gaza and the humanitarian situation.
Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told Army Radio: "There is a need for an investigation to draw lessons," an apparent reference to the military performance in the operation.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an unrepentant defence of the Gaza blockade, lambasting European and other governments for "hypocrisy" in challenging Israel's efforts to prevent the Iranian-backed Islamists from arming.
The Foreign Ministry dismissed a vote by the United Nations Human Rights Council, a forum Israel says is deeply biased against it, to form an independent fact-finding mission to look into what it called violations of international law.
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