The New Statesman: Under siege on the Gaza flotilla

An account of Israel’s capture and abuse of hundreds onboard a human rights mission to Gaza

Once we arrived at the prison, we were repeatedly forced onto our knees while shackled, now in metal handcuffs, and ordered to press our heads against the back of the person in front of us. If anyone raised their head or even turned to look elsewhere, guards slammed it back down. Hāhona Ormsby, a participant from Aotearoa, New Zealand, reported being beaten unconscious as one soldier threatened to taser his genitals before repeatedly kicking him in the same area, causing him to urinate blood.

When the Israeli soldiers commanded us to stand, our heads still lowered, we were made to shuffle forward, constantly stumbling, while gripping the shirt of the person ahead of us, forming a kind of chain gang through the corridors. We slept in restraints under fluorescent lights that never switched off. Any attempt to touch the light switch in the cell was met with threats of tear gas.

My Hebrew gave me access to the casual sadism surrounding us. The guards recognised me from my imprisonment last autumn. “She’s the Jewish one, she’s already been here,” I heard one guard say.

“I’ll give you 100 shekels if you knock her out,” a male guard joked as he handed me off.

“But I have two sons getting married,” a female guard replied, grabbing my arm. “Make it 200.” […]

Some Palestinian prisoners are returned as bodies, unrecognisable to their families, still shackled in death. Images of their corpses are projected on screens in waiting rooms while family members, desperate to pick out some familiar feature, attempt to claim their kin. Palestinians have lost limbs to torture, as well as their eyesight, at the hands of Israeli guards. Cigarette burns, confinement in iron coffins, and long-term exposure to blaring music – which prison guards call “The Disco Room” – are all used, and torture and stress positions are the norm. Skin diseases spread rapidly through overcrowded facilities, and photos of wounds from body lice are regularly circulated.

Under siege on the Gaza flotilla

An account of Israel’s capture and abuse of hundreds onboard a human rights mission to Gaza

By Noa Avishag Schnall

Where do we begin with the myth of universal human rights? I was on my knees, zip-tied, hunched forward, trying to hold, with two fingers, a black plastic bag containing the layers of clothing that had been stripped from me. I managed to shove my passport beneath my forehead, a thin barrier between my skin and the concrete. “Hatikvah”, the Israeli national anthem that I had recited regularly as a child, played on repeat overhead.

“Good dog,” one of the female guards said in English.

This was the second time I had been abducted from international waters and taken to an Israeli prison while reporting aboard a boat bound for Gaza. In my capacity as a journalist, I joined the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s media-and-medics vessel, the Conscience, last autumn, and sailed again this April and May aboard the Adalah, the Arabic word for justice.

Across more than two dozen flotilla missions since 2008 that have attempted to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, only the very first boats successfully reached shore. Between 18 and 19 May, Israel’s naval special forces attacked the most recent mission, which included vessels from the Global Sumud Flotilla, hijacking 50 boats in total, detaining 428 participants from 45 countries, and forcibly transporting everyone aboard – including me – to Ashdod port, north of Gaza. Dozens of broken ribs, fractured bones, taser wounds, a collapsed lung, multiple gunshot wounds, injections with unidentified substances, at least 15 instances of sexual assault, an as yet unclear number of rapes (at least two testimonies have been made public), and countless beatings have been reported. The invisible injuries – the ones that will emerge over months and years – remain impossible to tally.

The two ships onto which we were transported functioned as floating prison camps. Roughly 250 nautical miles from Gaza – after our boats had been damaged and abandoned, or sunk altogether, by the Israeli navy – detainees were forced to climb collapsible ladders from military-grade rigid inflatable boats (Ribs), also known as Zodiacs, onto naval ships pitching violently in the sea under the watch of heavily armed Israeli soldiers.

Each detainee was assigned a number, fitted with a wristband, and stripped of their warm clothing. Many of us were soaked from the journey. We were pushed with hands and rifle butts and ordered to remove our shoes and socks before standing barefoot on the wet metal deck while we were searched for the first time, in full view of multiple soldiers.

Five shipping containers were arranged on the deck in a U-shape with their openings facing inwards. The Israelis used a sixth container to process us, which came to be known as the “torture container”. The prison yard contained overflowing portable toilets. Large bags of pitta bread sat in the heat beside crates of water that were plainly insufficient for the number of detainees being processed.

There was not enough room for all of us to find shelter. Human bodies were crushed together inside those shipping containers. Those who could not fit walked in circles around the yard throughout the night to avoid sleeping on the wet ground, under the constant watch of the Israeli guards. Those who secured space inside slept body to body beside strangers, unable to stretch our arms or legs. If one of us got up to use the toilet, our place on the floor was often gone by the time we returned.

To protect ourselves from the cold, we tore apart the plastic bags that had carried the pitta bread and used the small pieces as makeshift blankets, able to cover only parts of our bodies. Cardboard from the water crates became bedding against the metal and splintered wooden floors. Bits of bread served as pillows, cushioning our bones and bruised limbs. Nobody wanted to use the food in this way when mere miles away Palestinians were being starved.

The armed guards watched us from elevated platforms behind razor wire. Four anti-piracy water cannons pointed downward at all times while the Israelis rotated shifts overhead. Hours after multiple requests for menstrual products, the guards tossed a plastic bag down into the enclosure. I watched it hit the ground like a grotesque parody of humanitarian aid delivery – a humiliation disguised as provision, dangerously familiar to those in Gaza.

Over the following two days and nights, Israeli guards fired rounds into the enclosure. Mathilda Mallet, the Guadeloupean captain of another boat in our Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was shot from above by a so-called less-lethal beanbag round. It tore through the flesh of her thigh and she would later require surgery in Istanbul. On the third and final morning on the prison ship, a group of armed guards entered our cage, pointed their weapons at us, and commanded everyone to move behind a line painted on the floor. One Belgian detainee screamed at the guards in a futile and foolish attempt to appeal to their humanity. I watched mere metres away as they shot into the crowd at close range, hitting a man behind the loud Belgian. Both were quickly carried away.

We were called, one by one, into the container for the next stage of processing, our heads violently forced down. Some were beaten so severely that we could hear the blows from the prison yard as we waited for our turn, anguished by our inability to intervene. We were then ordered onto our knees, bent forward with our heads lowered and our hands zip-tied, while the Israeli national anthem played on loop. The floor smelled of urine. Some were held in the sun for hours in that stress position.

After an indeterminate period spent prostrate – a position that broke the skin on our knees and strained our muscles and bones – we were fitted with transport shackles linking our wrists to leg irons with short chains that severely restricted movement. Individuals of all ages, including some in their seventies, were required to maintain this position.

From the port, we were taken to Ktzi’ot prison on transport buses fitted with claustrophobic compartments. Palestinians call these buses “moving graves”. As we travelled, I heard someone begging with the guards to loosen the zip ties cutting off the circulation to their hands. I was paired with a young Malaysian doctor, Liyana Farhan, whose hijab had been ripped off during our detention. We kept each other warm, resting against one another and taking turns to lie in each other’s laps, adjusting ourselves against the metal chains to find what little relief we could.

“I’ll give you 100 shekels if you knock her out,” a male guard joked as he handed me off.

“But I have two sons getting married,” a female guard replied, grabbing my arm. “Make it 200.”

Inside the cells, segregated by gender, women continued to plead for their handcuffs to be loosened. One woman, Ämäl Salih, whose hijab had also been ripped from her, was in agony. Her wrist was so severely swollen it appeared fractured. An Iraqi-Turkmen born and raised in Finland, Ämäl would later testify to Turkish authorities about her sexual assault by Israeli guards. From our cell of around 12 women, constantly being rotated, we fought for a diabetic prisoner to receive medication and tried to distract one another from the pain. We were denied toilet paper while being relegated to drink sickness-inducing sink water. Arabic messages were written on the walls, illuminating the lives of Palestinian prisoners held in the same cells a mere month earlier. In some of the writings, prisoners included names and dates of their captivity, as well as messages to their children.

After attempts in English were ignored, our cell collectively decided it was best that I communicate our demands in Hebrew. They were met with indifference or contempt.

To the woman with the wrist injury: “I don’t care.”
To those losing circulation in their hands: “So what?”
To the request for life-saving medication: “Then maybe you shouldn’t have come here.”
To the request for toilet paper: Laughter.

What surprised many flotilla participants was not the abuse itself, but the international reaction to it. We later learned that while we were being chained and beaten, leaked videos of our treatment had sparked outrage across the world. A white activist from Ireland, Catriona Graham, having her head shoved while confronting Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, appeared to provoke more horror than the 50,000 Palestinian children who were killed or injured in Israeli attacks over the past two and a half years. Why had our treatment managed to pierce the manufactured, numbing fog that hangs over mainstream media outlets, obscuring, and thus burying, the daily abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons?

For decades, Palestinians – many held under administrative detention without charge – have described torture so severe that it resists ordinary comprehension. Currently, nearly 10,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli military prisons. It seems that it is only when foreign activists emerge from the same places bearing similar testimonies that political leaders and media institutions suddenly find their outrage.

While the flotilla was still at sea, the New York Times published an investigation documenting testimonies from Palestinian prisoners who described being sexually assaulted by Israeli guards while in detention. One Palestinian told the Times that he had been raped by a dog under the supervision of Israeli guards. The journalist cited additional reports from human rights monitors describing similar abuses involving dogs, as well as a 49-page United Nations report published in 2025, which found that Israel had “systematically” subjected Palestinians to “sexualised torture”, with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership”. From our own cells, we could hear dogs barking.

In the cell next to ours was Max, a trans man who had sailed on the Adalah as well. Before the Israelis boarded the vessel, he had asked me to help draft a note in Hebrew requesting that Israeli guards comply with their own regulations allowing trans detainees the choice of which gender conducts their strip search. According to Max, women searched him while male guards watched. “You’re a good fucking little dog,” one of them told him in English.

During the interrogation at Ashdod port, a French translator reportedly asked him why he had come at all. “You know what they do to people like you in Gaza,” the translator said. “They treat you like animals.”

Guards mocked his body, made noises of disgust, referred to him as a girl, taunted him, and photographed him partially nude, just as I had been photographed. Many other prisoners reported being photographed completely naked. “Next time we see you,” the guards said to Max in English, “we’ll have guns, and it will be more exciting”. In prison, Max was held alone in a cell before another trans prisoner from the flotilla was eventually placed in the cell with him. Throughout the night, we called out to him in the corridor and received a few hushed responses. Petrified of what might happen after dark, our cell kept watch over the corridor in an effort to keep him safe.

The Israeli prison system is designed to destabilise and dehumanise. Every few hours we were moved to different cells and reshuffled with a new group of participants, preventing any sense of continuity or collective organisation. Unlike during my previous detention, I stopped translating every Hebrew threat I overheard from the guards, including the same threats of sexual assault, rape, or an intent to inflict maximum violence. There seemed little value in transmitting every indignity aloud. (The New Statesman reached out to the Israeli prison authorities and the Israel Defense Forces for comment and received no response.)

What we did not know at the time was that negotiations for our early release were already underway. The guards appeared intent on compressing as much intimidation, violence, and degradation as possible into the remaining hours. We were certain that our detention would eventually end, a conviction that sustained us, and one that Palestinian prisoners are denied.

It feels almost petty to dwell too heavily on our suffering. Palestinian prisoners have endured these systems of torture for decades. This violence is not reserved for men. Palestinian women and children – some as young as 13 or 14 – endure the same prison infrastructure. Lina al-Jarbouni spent 15 years in Israeli prison before her release in 2017.

In May, the 59-year-old journalist Ali al-Samoudi, who had previously been shot by the Israeli military alongside journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, was released after being held without charge for approximately a year. He emerged from detention having lost 60 kg – half of his body weight – due to starvation and illness. These accounts describe only the visible injuries.

It would be reasonable to imagine that our torturers saw playthings rather than human suffering. But that is a mental construction – one that any person with a moral compass might make in an attempt to explain the unconscionable reasoning behind atrocities, to find logic where there is none. It ultimately provides no solace or comfort in grief. The more unsettling possibility is that the suffering is fully understood within Israeli society and simply deemed permissible – even fun. This is ultimately a question of whose lives the world considers valuable.

It is impossible to emerge from such institutions untraumatised. Yes, flotilla participants were sexually assaulted and beaten. Reports of rape continue to emerge and will likely increase as survivors process what happened to them. But the moral crisis cannot end with us: how can our hearts bleed for the internationals, for the people I sailed alongside, when those for whom we sailed – Palestinians – are forgotten or disregarded as the “justifiable” collateral of Israeli defence?

During my previous five-day incarceration in Ktzi’ot prison in October 2025, I was repeatedly beaten by multiple male and female guards at once, sustaining a black eye, and two people who sailed on the same boat as me testified to being raped by Israeli guards. Yet the brutality we faced on this most recent mission was far more grotesque.

That October, another flotilla participant, journalist Emily Wilder, was able to translate the writing on a massive banner visible from our cells, adorned with an Arabic phrase. A smaller version of the same poster hung in a corridor of Ktzi’ot during our most recent imprisonment in May 2026, beside an Israeli flag. Against the backdrop of a grey, shattered landscape of rubble were the words: “The New Gaza.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2026/07/gaza-flotilla-israel-detention-0