Haroon Siddique just spoke to the Guardian's Jack Shenker

Haroon Siddique just spoke to the Guardian's Jack Shenker, who is on the Greek island of Corfu ready to sail to Gaza on the Freedom Flotilla. The Greek authorities have announced a ban on flotilla vessels leaving their ports but there is still hope that at least some of the boats may be able to leave. Jack said:

We are waiting on a series of legal and bureaucratic moves made by the activists and their lawyers against the Greek authorities.
The activists ... [are] arguing that Greece doesn't have the power to stop the boats entering international waters. There are also some of the boats that just tried to make a run for it. The American ship, The Audacity of Hope, made a break for it on Friday and was stopped by Greek coastguards who overtook it and, according to activists pointed machine guns at passengers and on board and forced them to turn around.
I am with a boat in Corfu. There's a belief among some of the activists here that there is more political support on the island of Corfu for the ideas of this freedom flotilla and support for actions against the siege and that that might work in their favour in terms of them trying to leave.

Jack said that it still looks more likely than not that the boats won't sail but that doesn't mean the organisers will look at the mission as a failure:

The activists have different perspectives on what constitutes success. There's been a lot of talk in the international press about the humanitarian aid that this convoy is carrying and the Greek authorities have said: "We are happy to take the humanitarian aid and deliver it ourselves" ... but that's not really the idea of the flotilla ...
The real aim was to get this issue on the table, get people talking about it and, in the activists' own words, delegitimise the Israeli siege, and some of them feel: "Look, well, we've done that already. Even if we're not able to set sail, we have got people talking about this, we've got the international press covering this. We've exposed the fact Israel's blockade of Gaza has been outsourced to countries including Greece." The fact that Greece is preventing peaceful ships ... carrying humanitarian goods from leaving its ports for international waters is, they say, an outrage, a contravention of international maritime law.

The Greek government has also faced a domestic backlash because of its stance, Jack says:

Some Greeks, and we've seen this in the Greek press today, have been speculating that the government has essentially cut a deal for economic and political support from Israel and that's what forced it to take this really quite surprising move. Again, whatever, your political perspective on the flotilla is, it's quite remarkable that a European Union state would prevent ships that, to all other intents and purposes are completely legal and legal vessels from leaving their port and moving towards international waters ... it's a relatively unprecedented move.