Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday participants in an aid flotilla planning to challenge an Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip were seeking "confrontation and blood".Pro-Palestinian activists have said around a dozen ships carrying aid to Gaza, territory controlled by Hamas Islamists, could depart from European ports in the coming days. A year ago, nine Turkish activists, including a dual U.S.-Turkish national, were killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers who raided a Gaza-bound convoy in the eastern Mediterranean.
Israel has said it will prevent the new flotilla from reaching the coastal enclave, and Lieberman repeated its offer to the activists to deliver aid via the Israeli port of Ashdodor through Egypt or the United Nations.
"They are clearly there to create a provocation, looking for confrontation and blood and for many pictures on television screens," Lieberman told Israel Radio, adding that there was a "hard core of terror activists" among the participants.
On their website, U.S. participants in the flotilla said their intentions were peaceful and they would set sail "without weapons protection or threat of force".
At a news conference in Athens on Monday, a group of some 400 activists that included European MPs, a former CIA analyst and a 75-year Holocaust survivor, professors and authors complained that Greece was bowing to pressure from Israel and using bureaucratic tactics to try to block their departure.
Israel says its blockade of the Gaza Strip is aimed at stopping weaponry from reaching Hamas, which is shunned by the West because of its refusal to recognise the Jewish state, renounce violence and accept existing peace deals.
Palestinians say the blockade is illegal and is helping to strangle Gaza's underdeveloped economy.
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