A group of international humanitarian activists traveling with a Gaza aid mission has been taken into custody by forces loyal to prominent eastern Libyan military leader Khalifa Haftar in the coastal city of Sirte, according to announcements from the aid organizing group. The Global Sumud Convoy, the coordinating body behind the mission, confirmed via a post on its official Instagram page that the last communication with the detained volunteers was logged at 3:22 p.m. local time on Tuesday. Among those held are civilian volunteers from eight nations across Europe, the Americas, North Africa and the Middle East: Spain, Poland, the United States, Argentina, Uruguay, Portugal, Tunisia and Italy. Most of the detainees work as medical professionals or veteran human rights advocates, who joined the mission voluntarily to deliver critical humanitarian assistance to residents of the Gaza Strip and express solidarity with the Palestinian people. The convoy organizers explained that the group entered the 5+5 Joint Military Commission security zone – a buffer area established under the October 2020 Libyan national ceasefire agreement that remains one of the country’s most contested territorial spaces – to coordinate and negotiate safe passage for the convoy onward to Gaza. Following the detention, the group confirmed that the activists are being held by the Government of National Stability (GNS), the eastern Libyan authority aligned with Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF). The Global Sumud Convoy has issued an urgent call, asking citizens of the home countries of the detained activists to reach out to their respective national embassies in Libya and pressure diplomatic missions to secure the immediate release of the volunteers. Since the outbreak of large-scale conflict in Gaza in October 2023, grassroots activist groups have organized dozens of independent humanitarian missions to deliver aid to the besieged enclave, where widespread food, medicine and clean water shortages have pushed the population into a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Most attempts to reach Gaza by sea have been intercepted early by Israeli naval forces, while overland missions aiming to cross through the Egyptian border with Gaza have repeatedly encountered a cascade of legal barriers and security disruptions that block their progress. According to reporting from Italy’s independent news agency Nova, Haftar’s security forces have already moved the two Italian citizens detained in the operation to the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, where local authorities plan to classify the pair as potential irregular migrants rather than detained humanitarian volunteers. As of Thursday, Libyan security institutions operating under eastern Libyan control have not released any public statement explaining the motivation for the arrests, nor have they provided any update on the legal process or current status of the detained activists. The incident unfolds against a backdrop of more than a decade of prolonged political division across Libya, a split that followed the 2011 NATO-backed military intervention that ousted and killed longtime Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Today, the country is split between two competing governing blocs: the UN-backed interim Government of National Unity that controls western Libya, including the capital Tripoli, and the GNS led by Haftar, which controls most of eastern Libya and receives open military and political backing from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.