Logan Hollarsmith, shown immediately to the right of the flag, is pictured with his crew from the Ohwayla. He was detained for a second time after trying to break the Gaza blockade this week.
Courtesy of Sidney Hollar
A San Francisco native is headed back to an Israeli prison for again attempting to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza with a boat carrying supplies and humanitarian aid workers.
Logan Hollarsmith is captain of the L’arq, a vessel ferrying about six civilians that was among the 50 boats Israeli troops intercepted this week in the eastern Mediterranean, the activist’s mother said. As of late Wednesday morning, Hollarsmith was being detained in the port city of Ashdod, where he was expected to soon be transferred to a prison nearly a two-hour drive away.
Hollarsmith was previously detained during an attempt to break the blockade in October. He was held for several days at Ketziot, a high-security prison outside of Beersheba, then deported to the U.S. But Hollarsmith’s mother, San Francisco-based criminal defense attorney Sidney Hollar, fears that this time could be different.
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“They’re just trying to send a message,” Hollar said, referencing the Israeli forces. “It’s scary. We have no idea what’s going to happen.”
Video footage from Global Sumud Flotilla, which organized the fleet including Hollarsmith’s boat, appeared to show Israeli soldiers firing on at least two of the vessels. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement that soldiers fired multiple nonlethal rounds — not live ammunition — “as a warning,” and that “no protesters were injured during these events.”
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Hollar hasn’t spoken to her son since she awoke in the middle of the night Monday, checked the flotilla’s online tracker and saw that the boats — carrying around 430 activists from more than 40 countries — had been intercepted. When not receiving updates from the activists’ lawyers, Hollar is now asking local representatives, U.S. senators and the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem to help Hollarsmith and the other activists.
So far, Hollar has only been able to contact Arizona’s two senators, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego. Though born and raised in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood, Hollarsmith, 34, has lived in Tucson for almost a decade.
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When Hollar feels overwhelmed, she finds comfort rereading a copy of a letter the flotilla recently received from the people of Gaza. “You are not only commanding ships, but you are also leading a great humanitarian effort,” the letter reads, in part. “In an era where humanity is being suffocated by silence, fear and interests, you’re the voice of the global conscience.”
Such words remind Hollar why her son decided to captain another Gaza-bound boat. Emboldened by October’s brief prison stay, he spent much of this spring organizing two boats — one filled with doctors, one filled with construction workers — that would sail behind the Global Sumud Flotilla.
Hollar said the plan was simple: If the flotilla finally broke Israel’s 19-year maritime blockade of Gaza, workers and doctors would help improve Palestinians’ quality of life. But after paperwork and mechanical issues scuttled his plans for those two boats, Hollarsmith received a call from a Global Sumud Flotilla organizer in Turkey, who asked him to captain one of the flotilla’s vessels.
Late last month, while Hollarsmith was in Turkey preparing to unite with a group of boats sailing from Barcelona to Gaza, he learned that more than 80 of the flotilla’s boats had been intercepted in international waters near Greece. Undeterred, Hollarsmith set sail from Turkey last week.
By Monday, Israeli forces were intercepting the flotilla’s remaining 50 boats in international waters off Cyprus. A live feed on the Global Sumud Flotilla website showed activists in life vests putting their hands up as armed Israeli soldiers boarded the vessels and destroyed cameras.
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The flotilla has urged governments and world leaders to demand the activists’ “immediate and unconditional release.” It has also warned of “grave and immediate concerns” about the activists’ physical safety after others detained last month described “patterns of torture, severe physical abuse and invasive sexual violence” by Israeli forces.
Israel denies the allegations. In a Tuesday night post on X, the country’s Foreign Ministry called the flotilla “a PR stunt at the service of Hamas,” adding that the activists were “making their way to Israel, where they will be able to meet with their consular representatives.”
This all amounts to perhaps Hollarsmith’s most memorable — and frightening — protest yet.
After attending San Francisco’s Lick-Wilmerding High School, he graduated from Bard College in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies, sailed a tiny boat from New York’s Hudson Valley to New Orleans and joined AmeriCorps to help rebuild homes destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. In August 2017, shortly after moving to Tucson, Hollarsmith was arrested alongside three other volunteers for entering protected lands near the U.S.-Mexico border without a permit to search for missing migrants.
Less than two years later, after the volunteers pleaded guilty to a civil infraction and agreed to each pay a $280 fine, they saw all their criminal charges dropped. Though that legal saga drew some local media attention, it hardly compared to what Hollarsmith experienced this past fall.
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As the captain of a boat called the Ohwayla, part of a massive flotilla trying to reach Gaza, he was among the roughly 470 activists who were arrested more than 40 nautical miles shy of their destination. News of the flotilla’s interception rippled worldwide, triggering huge protests throughout Europe.
Following reports of Hollarsmith’s detainment, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi called on the Israeli government “to immediately grant full consular access, provide transparent evidence of any charges, and guarantee that proper legal rights are extended.” When Hollarsmith landed in the U.S. days later, a crowd of pro-Palestinian activists greeted him at the airport.
But, well more than 24 hours after Hollarsmith’s latest arrest by Israeli authorities, he had yet to receive nearly the same level of attention. Hollar hopes that will soon change.
“The U.S. embassy has been no help,” she said. “I keep asking myself, ‘Why is this? ’ I think it boils down to fear. People fear anyone who supports Palestine.”
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The embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.