There was only one moment when I was interviewing him last week that Mousa Taher broke down and cried. It was a surprising, pivotal moment in the interview.

He had just made it back to Aotearoa New Zealand from Israeli detention. Of course, we covered the ordeal — the beatings, the death threats, the scare tactics with dogs, etc — that he and 430 other Global Sumud activists from 60 countries had been subjected to over four days from their interception in international waters to their release and flight to safety in Tűrkiye.

Near the end of the interview I asked him, “What do you think is going through the minds of our leaders — Christopher Luxon [Prime Minister] and Winston Peters [Foreign Minister] — that they choose to align themselves, not with you and the Palestinians, but with the Israeli regime that is committing genocide?”

• READ MORE: ‘He’s Māori!’ Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the Israeli prison system nightmare
• Gaza freedom flotilla – reluctance of the West to protest Israel’s thuggery enabled the abuse
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

For a moment his head went down and then he said: “Honestly, it’s a bit of a touchy subject for me, Eugene.” And then he cried.

“On my way back I almost mourned the death of my country. I’m a proud Kiwi. My grandfather George Whale, fought for New Zealand in the Second World War. From my Pakeha (non-indigenous Māori) side, you learn about the nuclear-free New Zealand movement, you learn about the anti-Apartheid Springbok Tour protests, you learn about the attack and sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, you learn about New Zealand being the first country to give women the vote.

“You think your country is special, and has a sense of justice, a sense of doing what’s right, and standing up to the giants even if that’s going to cost us.  I just don’t know where that place is anymore.

Mousa’s comment about mourning for our country brought to mind Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton’s 1948 novel about Apartheid South Africa — a country that was fractured along racial and political lines, one where the ruling group had sunk into a moral abyss, resolutely cleaving to an abhorrent vision of the world.  New Zealand, like most Western countries, stood with white South Africa through long decades. We mobilised and eventually changed that.

Endless wars of aggression
New Zealand’s close alignment with both Israel and the US in their endless wars of aggression may sit badly with many New Zealanders but, to date, the pushback has been insufficiently powerful, the mobilisation of citizens too small to effect a fundamental change in the country’s foreign policy settings.

This November’s general election, coming just four days after the US mid-terms, will be instructive and crucial.

Mousa Taher had two gruelling encounters with the Israeli occupation forces in the past month. It speaks to his commitment, his sense of sumud (steadfastness) that he signed up for a second sailing with the flotilla in May.

This was just weeks after being captured by the Israelis in international waters off Crete. That time he got off relatively lightly compared to the severe beating dished out to some of his comrades, including New Zealander Julien Blondel.

The Turkish government laid on flights from Crete for a couple of hundred activists, taking them to Istanbul. New Zealand offered zero support.

“At that point I was kind of done. ‘I’ve done my dash here.  I miss my family, and I think I’m ready to go home’.” But then his friend Bianca, a Kiwi-Australian said she would stay and join the next flotilla attempting to open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza.

“Wow, she’s a soldier, mate.  I just completely changed my mind. I thought: ‘If there’s a chance to go and to finish this mission, I’m in’.”

Hugged the Turkish coast
Mousa, a “backyard” mechanic, spent May working on boats, training and getting everything ready to sail again. Sailing from Marmaris, Tűrkiye, they initially hugged the Turkish coast and were treated to wonderful experiences including a village turning out en masse and preparing a feast for the Sumud activists.

Not long after passing Cyprus, still over 400km from Israeli waters, the flotilla was intercepted and a four-day ordeal began. It was quickly clear the Israelis tactics were hardening, perhaps out of a sense of impunity after governments like New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK turned a blind eye and deaf ears to the mistreatment of their own citizens last time.

Israeli Shayetet 13 commandos, weapons trained on the humanitarian activists, took control of Kasr-i Sadabad, the vessel Mousa was sailing on. He and another activist, also of Palestinian descent, were made to strip to their underpants in front of everyone. “It was kind of weird.”

The crew was then transferred to a prison ship which sailed for Ashdod, Israel.  Without cause, they were tasered.

“They knew me by name this time. They blindfolded all of us, zip-tied all of us. They zip tied my legs, not anybody else’s — and my hands very tightly. ‘Don’t you ever fucking come back here, Mousa.  It’s your second time. We’ve seen the messages you sent to your kids.

“‘You’re saying you’re scared for your life — that means you want to kill yourself, you’re going to suicide bomb. You’re a terrorist!’ They’d stand on my hands, stand on my face, kick me in the face.”

“They were complete sadists. They were enjoying it, mate. When he put his boot on my face, I couldn’t quite see because of the blindfold, but I could feel he was posing. They were laughing and having this conversation, like it wasn’t a serious thing that they were doing.”

More tasers, kicks, punches
After they got to Ashdod, it got worse. More tasers, more kicks, punches, stripping and humiliating, menacing with dogs, stress positions, the craft of sadism.  Later he learnt of the sexual violence the Israelis committed on many comrades, male and female.

All this comes in a week that saw Israel added to the United Nations blacklist of states committing sexual violence in conflict zones.  I have written about the deliberate sexual depravity that is now standard in the Israeli gulag, home to thousands of Palestinian hostages abandoned by our governments.  Some Zionist Israelis openly admit that rape is an Israeli weapon of war.

France, Italy, Türkiye, Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Libya, and several other countries have condemned the violence. Malaysia has announced it is preparing to take a case to the International Court of Justice over the kidnapping and torture of Sumud activists.

Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin has sent a letter to the European Council using the treatment of the Sumud flotilla to demand the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

New Zealand’s PM, as usual, is missing in action.

I spent a long time talking with Mousa Taher.  Like all the many Sumud people I have dealt with, he is the soul of decency and humanity.  And courage.  I won’t recount his full story but Mousa Taher has been through the fires of hell — the Israeli prison system.

His torment was relatively brief — four days — compared to the endless agony of thousands of Palestinian souls caught in the torment that Israel inflicts and which New Zealand, Australia and all the other state sponsors of genocide facilitate every day.

Last word to Alan Paton
I’ll give the last word to Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country. I address it to all the people who have not stepped forward and joined the struggle for Palestine, who have not stepped forward to reshape our foreign policy and move New Zealand towards peace and independence, who have not raised their voices to reject hostile military alliances and America’s endless wars of aggression.

Without necessarily taking the same risks, we all need to be more like Mousa Taher, Hāhona Ormsby, Julien Blondel, Jay O’Connor, Rana Hamida, Samuel Leason, Sean Janssen, and all the wonderful activists of the Global Sumud organisation like my friend Eloiza Montana.

Alan Paton: “To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one’s responsibility as a human being.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz

I interviewed several of the New Zealanders who, as members of the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, were taken hostage by the Israelis in international waters near Cyprus last week and moved to Israel.

The sadism and savagery of their mistreatment — clearly designed to intimidate and stop further attempts to open a humanitarian corridor — gave them a small taste of the network of torture camps that hold thousands of Palestinians in captivity suggestive of Dante’s Inferno.

Their ordeal lasted only four days. Repeatedly kicked, punched, sexually humiliated and beaten unconscious, the cruellest blow was that their own government refused to stand up for them.

• READ MORE: Gaza freedom flotilla – reluctance of the West to protest Israel’s thuggery enabled the abuse
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

Of the 430 activists from 60 countries, there were several who were raped and many who will carry injuries for the rest of their lives.

This is Hāhona Ormsby’s story:
Itamar Ben-Gvir himself spat at Hāhona Ormsby. Many will recall the footage of the Israeli National Security Minister swaggering among the zip-tied Global Sumud activists last week, each of whom was forced face down before him.

Sadists like doing this sort of thing. It recalled the dreadful footage from last year of him intimidating the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti.

Hāhona was being moved through a huge tent. He passed a table where Ben-Gvir was drinking a can of Coke. The minister looked up and saw a man with a facial tattoo. Recognising an Indigenous person, he spat at him!  “It landed on my t-shirt,” Ormsby told me.

“As soon as he spat at me — and I don’t know if the soldier did it to impress Ben-Gvir — but the soldier with me punched me in the back of the head.”

Hāhona Ormsby is Ngāti Maniapoto, a member of a major tribal federation in New Zealand.  He is one of the nicest, most decent people you could possibly meet. His mataora (tattoo) is both sacred and traditional. Earlier that day it had already drawn unwelcome attention.

“He’s a Māori! He’s a Māori!” a female soldier shouted, pointing at Ormsby.  She may have recognised this if she was one of thousands of Israeli soldiers who holiday in New Zealand every year. Our government welcomes them, no questions asked.

Few Palestinian refugees are ever allowed entry.

Personal ‘minder’
As with each activist, Hāhona was provided a personal “minder” soon after he arrived in Ashdod, Israel.

“A soldier came and lifted me up by my zip ties. He pulled down his mask and said, ‘Look into my eyes. I am the craziest motherfucker here. I will hurt you every minute you are with me’.” And that is how the nightmare started.

Throughout the day the New Zealand citizen was intermittently punched, kicked, kneed in the groin, body slammed, stripped naked, and repeatedly hauled up by the plastic zip ties that bound his wrists together.

Several of the captives told me how incredibly tight and painful these zip ties were and how they feared long-term nerve damage.

“The whole time I looked at that soldier I was thinking, ‘I know you kill children, I know you kill women, I know you are that evil,”  Evil. That word has come up several times in my conversations with the activists who got this taste, this small intimate encounter with the genocide.

Hāhona thought of his good friend, fellow Kiwi Julien Blondel who was savagely beaten a couple of weeks earlier. “I felt his wairua (spirit), his brokenness and I now understood that brokenness. That sense of lostness.”

Forced head down for long periods in stress positions, receiving random kicks and body slams throughout the day, he was also menaced by close encounters with dogs. “If you do not stop lying to me, I’m going to lock you in that cell with these dogs!” he was told when an interrogator said he didn’t believe he was a teacher.

Hāhona thought of his whānau, his extended family. He remembered they had urged him to come home after he made it to Türkiye after an earlier interception, an earlier ordeal in April.

“But I thought: my comrades, they were going on and I had to stand with them.”

Beaten unconscious
At one point his “minder” beat him unconscious. The Kiwi citizen was kicked hard in the groin and that night had blood in his urine. “The whole night I thought about the Palestinians and what they are going through. If the Israelis do this to a New Zealander imagine what the Palestinians are going through.”

To me, listening to this, I recognised true courage, true humanity, the kind we seldom encounter and should always revere.

Listening to Hāhona Ormsby I recalled my Catholic upbringing and the words of John 15: “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.” Ormsby and all those other activists joined the flotilla not out of hatred for Israel but out of love for suffering humanity, for their brothers and sisters in Palestine. They represent the very best of us.

Another man who professes to be a Christian is the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Christopher Luxon. For me, his variant bends towards Hell and Israel; our government being a stalwart ally of the Israelis.  The Israeli Ambassador is being called in by the ministry of foreign affairs for what, Ormsby says, is likely “a slap with a wet bus ticket” over the state terrorist attack on New Zealand citizens.

Our government offered no material support to the Sumud activists after the recent ordeals our citizens were subjected to. They issued no warnings to the Israelis to respect our citizens, providing the IDF with a free pass to abuse New Zealanders in captivity.

And, my god, they did. The first duty of a leader is to protect citizens. All this comes in a week that saw Israel added to the United Nations blacklist of nations committing sexual violence in conflict zones.

I won’t repeat all the grim details of what Hāhona went through. Let us just say it was a huge relief when, four days after his capture aboard the Al Tira (named, as all the Sumud boats were, after a Palestinian village that had been erased by the Israeli occupation), Hāhona was transferred to the airport where they boarded planes provided by the Turkish government.

Turkish delight!
Ormsby had his first food in four days on that plane — Turkish delight! On the tarmac at Istanbul they were welcomed by top Turkish politicians and Foreign Ministry staff, a crowd of supporters, media and a fleet of buses and ambulances to shuttle those who needed it to hospital, others to medical checks, forensic interviews to record their testimony, psychological evaluations and eventually a banquet and accommodation provided by the government.

It is worth noting that no officials welcomed them when they returned to New Zealand. No media was there to interview them. It reminded me of the similarly shameful way New Zealanders who fought Franco’s Fascists in Spain in the 1930s were treated on their return, prior to the Second World War.

It’s our collective job to make sure this extraordinary story is shared and remembered — and that we draw the necessary lessons from it.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has accused the Israeli army and internal security agency Shin Bet of repeatedly perpetrating inhumane acts against Palestinian journalists from Gaza.

The Paris-based global media freedom monitoring and advocacy movement says it has interviewed five Gazan journalists who were imprisoned in Israel after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.

They described targeted arrests, interrogations related to their work, torture and brutal abuse at the hands of their Israeli captors.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza journalists media freedom reports

The journalists include Alaa al-Sarraj, a cameraman for the Ain Media production company; Diaa al-Kahlout, local bureau chief of the Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed; Shady Abu Sedo, a cameraman with the Palestine Today television channel; and Emad al-Ifranji, the local editor of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds.

The fifth journalist requested anonymity for fear of Israeli army reprisals.

They were all initially imprisoned at Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel, about 30 km from the Gaza Strip, which has been denounced by Israeli and international human rights organisations as a torture camp.

“The facts reported here are damning for the Israeli authorities, including the Israeli army, Shin Bet and judiciary,” said Martin Roux, head of RSF’s Crisis Desk

“They arrested these journalists knowing their profession and, in some cases, because of it.

“The work of these journalists was used as grounds for interrogation amounting to torture, during arbitrary detention legalised by judges. These repeated acts speak to a systematic persecution of journalists in Palestine aimed at preventing media coverage of human rights violations by the Israeli state.

“RSF continues to demand the immediate release of all Palestinian journalists arbitrarily detained by Israel.”

RSF reports:

The time when Palestine Today cameraman Shady Abu Sedo was reporting now seems like a distant memory. In fact, he was last reporting as recently as 18 March 2024. He had gone to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to interview victims of the Israeli bombings, launched five months earlier in retaliation for the attacks by Hamas’s armed wing on 7 October 2023.

Arrested by soldiers after identifying himself as a journalist, he was held for 572 days, initially at the Sde Teiman military base, located 30 kms from the Gaza Strip in the Negev desert, and then in Ofer and Ketziot-Al Naqab prisons.

At the end of these 19 months of torture, deprivation, interrogations and violence, some of it related to his profession, he remains, at 36, scarred by psychological trauma and physical aftereffects that prevent him from returning to work.

“Since you left your camera at Al-Shifa Hospital, I’m going to gouge your eye out,” one of his captors told him, referring to the location of his arrest, before beating him repeatedly in the face.

His right eye has not regained its sight. The scabies he contracted in prison continues to plague him, and he now suffers from epilepsy, insomnia and anorexia.

“After the scenes I have witnessed, I can no longer stay at home within four walls, nor look at the sky without having a fit. If I don’t take sedatives, I suddenly start screaming,” he says.

He was released on 11 October 2025.

None of the five journalists interviewed by RSF was able to resume working as a journalist after their release. When not the result of serious physical and psychological injuries inflicted during their detention, Israeli army destruction has been to blame.

After his release, Shady Abu Sedo did not find his home, which had been hit by Israeli aircraft.

“I lost my house, my car, and all my reporting equipment worth more than $50,000 [about 43,000 euros],” said Alaa al-Sarraj, who was detained for 692 days, from 16 November 2023 to 11 October 2025.

“But I could start again from scratch,” said the 35-year-old employee of the Ain Media production company, whose entire archive of reports was destroyed. Two of its journalists were killed by the Israel army, while another is imprisoned and two have been missing since 7 October 2023.

Waving his press card
Like Shady Abu Sedo, the four other media professionals interviewed by RSF said they explicitly told the Israeli army that they were journalists — whose work must be protected in war zones under international law — at the time of their arrest in the Gaza Strip.

Alaa al-Sarraj was arrested on 16 November 2023 at the Netzarim checkpoint, which the Israeli army set up on Salah al-Din Road to screen the population in the centre of the besieged territory.

“I was interrogated there, I confirmed that I was a journalist, and it was on that basis that I was arrested,” he said.

The following month, Diaa al-Kahlout, then director of the Gaza bureau of the Qatar-based international daily Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (“The New Arab in English”), even brandished his press card while repeatedly stating his profession to the Israeli soldiers who arrested him on 7 December 2023, in Beit Lahya, in the northern Gaza Strip.

“It doesn’t matter,” one of them reportedly told him, before he found himself among a group of several hundred captive men, stripped naked and bound, as evidenced by a video filmed by an Israeli soldier.

Throughout his arrest and subsequent transfer, the journalist, then aged 37, was beaten and interrogated by the soldiers escorting him, as well as by an officer who claimed to belong to Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency.

They questioned him about his articles, his alleged ties to Hamas members, and the owner of his media outlet.

When he tried to explain, a soldier gagged him with tape.

“I lost all hope,” he recalls, at that moment, the last before being “thrown into a truck” and forcibly taken into Israeli territory.

“I know you, you’re a journalist”
Now aged 57, Emad al-Ifranji, the Gaza director of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds, had no need to introduce himself. He was immediately identified by the Israeli soldier who arrested him on the night of 18 March 2024 at Al-Shifa Hospital, where he had gone to get electricity and an internet connection for work.

“I know you, you’re a veteran journalist,” the soldier reportedly told him.

“I replied that it was true,” Emad al-Ifranji said. “He dragged me roughly out of the outpatient clinic building, and that’s when the ordeal began.”

From Sde Teiman to Ofer, Ketziot and Nafah
This descent into Israeli prison hell began inside the barracks at Sde Teiman.

“From there, you lose your name and become just a number,” said Emad al-Ifranji, who, like Shady Abu Sedo, was held for 572 days.

At the mercy of their captors, the journalists reported having been subjected to violence, humiliation and deprivation. Their accounts share a common thread: terror at the random beatings they endured while constantly blindfolded.

The resulting fractures were systematically left untreated, leading to painful and often irreversible complications. The limited food and sleep they were allowed barely kept them alive to endure the blows and insults of gleeful soldiers. Some witnessed fellow prisoners being murdered and one raped by a dog.

After Sde Teiman, four of the journalists interviewed were taken to Ofer prison, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where a military unit has been established for prisoners from Gaza, and to Ketziot-Al Naqab prison, near the Egyptian Sinai, preceded, in Alaa al-Sarraj’s case, by Nafha prison in the southern Negev.

Violations and ill-treatment of prisoners continued to be the norm there. Only Diaa al-Kahlout was released after 33 days of violence and cruel and inhumane treatment endured on the Israeli military base.

Aman and Shin Bet interrogations
Those who emerged from Sde Teiman speak of a machinery designed to “subjugate men,” said one of the five surviving journalists.

The brutal interrogations, which are a crucial part of the torture machine, subject journalists to special treatment. For example, Shady Abu Sedo, before being handed over to the officer who injured his right eye, was tied for hours to the “fridge,” a cell measuring two metres by one metre equipped with air conditioning that “bites you to the bone.”

He said he was then interrogated specifically about his work by an officer with the military intelligence agency Aman: Had he filmed in the northern Gaza Strip? Was he there reporting on 7 October 2023? Did he know any journalists who had covered the attacks by Hamas fighters?

“I killed all the journalists, and those I couldn’t kill, I brought them here,” Shady Abu Sedo quotes his interrogator as saying. He was then imprisoned for several days in the “disco,” a building in Sde Teiman designed to wear prisoners down by means of powerful speakers that continuously blast music.

Another journalist interviewed by RSF was also subjected to this torture.

While almost all the detainees at Sde Teiman underwent such interrogations, particularly regarding the fate of Israeli hostages, reporters were subjected to “technical questions focused on journalistic work in the Gaza Strip,” said Alaa al-Sarraj, who was questioned about his academic background and professional network, including doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital, politicians, political organisations and his colleagues in Gaza.

“They also asked me what you might call strategic questions,” he said.

Emad al-Ifranji and Diaa al-Kahlout, who held positions of responsibility within their media outlets, were subjected to no fewer than four extremely violent interrogations at the hands of Aman and the Shin Bet, a sign of the special attention paid to journalists in an attempt to obtain information deemed tactical by the Israeli authorities in the context of the conflict.

In March 2024, during the first weeks of his imprisonment in Sde Teiman, Emad al-Ifranji was questioned twice, in separate interrogations about 10 days apart, about his interview 13 years before with Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, who was wanted by the Israeli army, which regarded him as the organiser of the 7 October 2023 attacks.  Sinwar was killed for this on 16 October 2024.

Regarded by Israel’s justice system as ‘unlawful combatants’
Judges at the Beersheva court have given a veneer of legality to the prolonged detention of civilians identified by Israeli intelligence as journalists.

In a series of expedited hearings conducted via videoconference or telephone, and without legal representation, the Southern District Court of Israel — which has jurisdiction under a 2002 law on “illegal combatants,” revised after 7 October 2023 and applicable to the thousands of detainees in Gaza — has repeatedly approved their continued indefinite detention.

“The assumption is that if a detainee meets the definition of a journalist, this fact is brought to the court’s attention; however, we do not hold specific information to that effect,” Israel’s justice ministry said.

As in the case of its use against journalists, this law, based on a term that is “undefined and is therefore open to abuse and inconsistent with the principle of legality,” according to a 2007 UN report, makes it possible to “to justify arresting all these thousands of detainees from Gaza and keeping them based on secret information for indefinite periods,” said a lawyer specialising in the Israeli prison system for Palestinians.

Four soldiers had laser sights trained on Emad al-Ifranji’s face during his initial court hearing, although the Justice Ministry later claimed to have “no knowledge” of this.

The hearing lasted less than five minutes, but he managed to remind the court that he was “protected under international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Addressing a judge in Beersheba via webcam, Shady Abu Sedo asked, “How can I be an illegal fighter? I’m a journalist.”

The judge’s response was categorical: “You belong to the Palestinian terrorist press.”

A few days before their release, these journalists were summoned by Israeli military intelligence, which routinely subjects detainees to a final act of intimidation. Some of them report having been explicitly warned against resuming their work.

Contacted by RSF regarding the accounts of their imprisonment provided by these five journalists, the Israeli army claimed that it “does not intentionally harm journalists” and that, despite the mounting evidence, it “rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees, including journalists.”

Shin Bet did not respond to RSF’s questions.

According to RSF data, 19 Palestinian journalists are currently detained arbitrarily by the Israeli authorities. Two of them, like the sources cited in this article, were captured in the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023.

They are Hani Issa, editor-in-chief of Quds Net, and Amjad Arafat, a reporter for the Ain Media production company.

Ali Samoudi, a leading Palestinian journalist and veteran reporter based in Jenin, in the northern occupied West Bank, was released on 30 April 2026, after a year of wrongful imprisonment.

On the day of his release, he reported that he lost nearly 60 kilos while held, blaming the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of Israeli authorities.

• Israel is ranked 116th and Palestine 156th out of 180 countries surveyed in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable.

This role goes beyond the US State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information; it includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured.

It also includes the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.

• READ MORE: Global Sumud Flotilla urges probe of US complicity in members’ abduction and torture by Israel
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture

The US-funded ‘torture ship’
The vessel at the centre of many severe abuses, including systematic torture and sexual assault, was a converted naval landing craft that participants have come to call the “torture ship”.

The vessel is the INS Nahshon, built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding (a subsidiary of Bollinger Shipyards) and fully financed under the US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programme.

Delivered to the occupation navy in 2023, this ship was used as a floating prison during the illegal April 29 and 30 interceptions off the coast of Crete, where at least 30 participants were injured severely enough that they had to be taken to the hospital.

Brutality inside ‘The beating container’
During the vessel’s deployment, detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container.

Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalised each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” said humanitarian activist Yassine Benjelloun, who was also tasered multiple times.

“What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Megan Marie Dominguez, a US activist, was thrown into the “beating container”, struck with sufficient force to render her nearly unconscious, then passed to a second set of soldiers armed with tasers and what she describes as “other toys to beat people up with.”

Dr Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician on board, described a medical situation unprecedented in her professional experience.

She documented:

• 35 participants with fractures, including broken ribs, shoulder dislocations, and humerus fractures.
• Severe head injuries, concussions, and eye/ear trauma.
• At least two individuals forcibly injected with unidentified substances that left them drowsy and disoriented.
• 14 cases of sexual assault, as well as the systematic, deliberate removal of Muslim women’s hijabs.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” said Dr Jihan. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and the most horrible feeling that I have.

“It was so devastating.”

Dr Jihan: ‘I was punched, kicked and choked” by the Israeli military Video: News Straits Times

American munitions used against civilians
The weapons deployed on board were also American-made. Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI).

These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.

A structural policy of complicity — the weapons.
The ship. The diplomatic silence. None of this was accidental. Former US State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned in protest over US arms transfers to Israel, is unequivocal:

“Under US law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorised by law.

“INS Nahshon’s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms.

“When this sale was authorised, US officials will have asked themselves how Israel might use this platform. The basis on which they should have denied this transfer has been there since at least the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 [in which 10 Turkish people were killed by Israeli forces], but is now more clear than ever, and the lesson here is a simple one: that anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse — whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer, or a boat.”

This is not an isolated incident or the failure of a single administration; it is a structural, bipartisan commitment by the United States government to prioritise its strategic relations above the protection of its own citizens and its own laws.

By using a separately constructed, “broken” vetting process, the State Department routinely circumvents the 1997 Leahy Law, which strictly prohibits US military assistance to foreign units credibly accused of gross human rights violations like torture and rape.

While international law has been flagrantly violated and legal proceedings are now active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault, the US government continues to look away.

Demands to the United States government
The israeli regime continues to commit genocide using US-built ships and US-made weapons.

The torture of US citizens and humanitarian volunteers with American-made tools is not an anomaly. It is the direct outcome of unconditional US support for a regime continuously committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

What Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access.

The Global Sumud Flotilla calls on the United States government to take immediate action:

• Open immediate hearings into the deployment of FMF-funded military assets, including INS Nahshon, against US citizens.
• Suspend all arms transfers to the israeli regime pending that investigation.
• Enforce the Leahy Law without exemption or special processes for the regime.
• Provide a full accounting of every consular and distress request filed by families of detained participants that was dismissed or ignored.
• Investigate the use of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS) munitions, produced under Department of Defense (DOD) contracts, against unarmed civilian humanitarians.
• End unconditional military and diplomatic support for a regime committing genocide.

One of the three New Zealanders on the Global Sumud Flotilla who were among the hundreds kidnapped by the Israeli military illegally on international waters this month and abducted to Israel has described his brutal torture after returning home.

Speaking in a TV3 news report last night, Hāhona Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto), 56, said he was beaten for hours, rammed into a wall until he was unconscious and kicked in the genitals.

He is one of many activists among the 430 Gaza humanitarian flotilla aid crew from more than 40 countries alleging they were abused.

• READ MORE: Gaza flotilla activists allege abuse, sexual assault in Israeli detention
• ‘I could die here’: Kiwi activist alleges violent abuse by Israeli forces
• Flotilla activists recount Israeli violence as they arrive in Turkiye
• Gaza freedom flotilla – reluctance of the West to protest Israel’s thuggery enabled the abuse
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

The other New Zealanders are Mousa Taher, 39, and Julien Blondel, 47.

They were trying to break the 16-year illegal Israeli military blockade of the Palestinian enclave.

Ormsby told reporter Molly Swift “it feels surreal” to be back in Auckland trying to come to terms with “actually being home and being safe” because just last week he was detained
in Israel where he said he was violently beaten at the hands of Israeli soldiers.

It was his first flotilla and as an educator he was hoping to bring school supplies to Palestinian children, the TV3 report said.

“They boarded the boat. We were stripped of all our clothes. We were wearing clothes for the interception to keep warm. We were stripped of shoes,” Ormsby said.

“I left the boat just wearing a pair of shorts and t-shirt. I actually had a gun pointed at me,” he said demonstrating at the back of his head.

“Like I could feel the gun on the back of my head.”

The detainees were taken on a “prison” ship to the Israeli port Ashdod for processing.

“Even there, I was quite overwhelmed at the treatment. Just randomly in the early hours of the morning we had flashbangs thrown into the containers.”

Disturbing account of Gaza flotilla treatment by Israel.      Video: TV3/Stuff

TV3 reports that Israel claims the allegations are “false and entirely without factual basis”. However, documented reports with photographic evidence has been widely published around the world and several governments have announced that that have initiated prosecution investigations against the Israelis.

Cruel treatment against prisoners is explicitly classified as a serious war crime under international humanitarian law.

Eleven Australians were also on the flotilla and have made similar allegations against the Israelis. The New York Times this month published a major report of allegations against Israeli prisons while the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s report “Living Hell” has documented systematic torture of Palestinians.

Professor Stuart Rees, a professor emeritus of the University of Sydney, has blamed Western governments for the “thuggery” of the Israeli government, saying, “If bullies notice that no one intervenes to stop their behaviour, they may interpret such non-intervention as permission to continue bullying.”

Activists freed from Israeli detention following the interception of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla have reported that they were subjected to physical and sexual abuse, say flotilla organisers — with at least 15 reporting sexual assaults, including rape.

“At least 15 cases of sexual assaults, including rape. Shot with rubber bullets at close range. Tens of people’s bones broken,” organisers of the Global Sumud Flotilla posted on Telegram.

“While the world’s eye is trained on the suffering of our participants, we cannot emphasize enough that this is a mere glimpse of the brutality Israel imposes daily on Palestinian hostages,” the statement added.

• READ MORE: ‘It’s worse for Palestinians,’ says Australian flotilla activist about Israeli torture
• Gaza flotilla activists allege abuse, sexual assault in Israeli detention
• Shameen Suleman: Outrage over the flotilla activists but where were they for Palestinians?
• Israel’s $700m Hasbara fiasco – how Ben-Gvir’s flotilla abuse video stirred backlash
• Other Gaza flotilla reports

The reports come after the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) on Wednesday doubled down on its abusive treatment of activists forcibly detained, despite scores of testimonies detailing beatings, interrogation and humiliation as well as rape and sexual abuse.

The IPS responded to a barrage of global criticism after a video showed far-right Israel National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir taunting the flotilla detainees as they were being handcuffed, pushed, dragged and assaulted.

A group of Australian citizens were kidnapped on international waters and beaten senseless on camera by their captors – Israel

The most prominent Israel advocate in Australia – Jillian Segal – has so far said nothing about the welfare of her fellow Australian citizens nor… pic.twitter.com/deibOB3nhC

— RonniSalt-WhoWroteGunnawahYeahThatOne (@RonniSalt) May 23, 2026

“Upon receiving the detainees, the prison guards were required to act to maintain order and security at the site. All actions were carried out in accordance with procedures and professional considerations,” the IPS claimed.

The IPS also claimed that some of the detainees being shown in widely circulating videos were “not under the responsibility” of the IPS when they were being filmed.

Rights groups say abuse ‘systematic’
However, rights groups have accused Israel of making humiliation, sexual abuse and torture of detainees and prisoners systematic.

Dr Mimi Syed, a US-based physician who volunteered in Gaza amid Israel’s war on the besieged enclave, told The New Arab that Israel’s treatment of those aboard the flotilla is illegal.

“You cannot treat activists and humanitarian workers this way. It’s absolutely outrageous how there’s witnesses saying that people were raped and obvious signs of force being used — I saw some of the photos of the activists which show signs of bruising and fractures, things like that which are absolutely unnecessary,” she said.

“There is video recording of officials deliberately assaulting some of these activists which is just unheard of.

“I’m not surprised as this is something the Israeli government has been doing to civilians in Gaza, so doing to activists in other countries is still right on par with what they have demonstrated to the world in the last two and a half years,” she said.

Several photos and videos shared this week on social media showed flotilla activists being forced to kneel down with their heads on the ground, while Israeli prison officers are surrounding them.

The footage, some of which was shared by minister Ben-Gvir, was condemned by several states, while Poland, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK summoned Israeli ambassadors to “clarify” why their citizens were mistreated.

‘Complete impunity’
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked the country’s foreign ministry if the treatment of the flotilla activists was acceptable, but there was no response.

“When a country has complete impunity to do what they want, nothing really is out of bounds for them,” Dr Syed said.

“They will do what they need to achieve their goal which is a land grab, ethnic cleansing, genocide, the displacement of millions of people. It’s not just in Gaza, it’s in the West Bank and Lebanon.”

Activists aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla, who were taken to Istanbul before returning to their countries, also revealed on Friday that the abuse they faced included rubber bullets being fired at close range, tasers to the face, stun grenades thrown into groups of people, stress positions for hours under bright lights, the forced removal of hijabs and sexual taunting.

They said the sexual violence included strip searches, groping, the pulling of genitals, and rape.

According to organisers, based on testimonies from those released from detention, some of the most horrifying accounts come from those aboard a single vessel, dubbed “torture boat”.

“I can say that all were in many ways abused, not one single person walking with nothing,” Veronica Otero, told reporters.

“Among them there were 36 fractures, many broken ribs, torso, shoulders, and back. People were in agony. People were not breathing [due to the broken ribs].”

Testimonies of abuse, rape
More than 50 boats took part in the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), with 430 people on board from more than 40 countries, and since armed Israeli naval commandos began intercepting the fleet in international waters, many have detailed the abuse they faced.

One Australian activist, Zack Schofield, who had since been deported to Istanbul and has now returned to Australia, said all the members of the flotilla were treated brutally.

“Her hands [and] feet were zip-tied together, and then she was dragged around the rest of the processing centre, before she was taken into a prison bus,” he told reporters, referring to an abused Irish woman who was part of the flotilla group.

“There’s no consistency to the violence. It was really at the whim of whichever guard was in front of you,” he continued, adding that he saw many people receive similar or worse treatment.

Juliet Lamont, a filmmaker from Australia, said Israeli soldiers sexually assaulted and beat her, noting she witnessed others — at least 40 — being left with broken bones, while others were sedated and tasered.

The activists said prison guards restricted access to food and water, and were left to sleep on cold, wet floors for days with no mattress or blankets, in cramped conditions.

We do not need any more examples to know that we are dealing with a terrorist state! There is a long, documented history of systemic violence perpetrated by the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people with absolute impunity. pic.twitter.com/JIPvZf2Rqp

— Thiago Ávila (@thiagoavilabr) May 23, 2026

Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila told The New Arab he was beaten unconscious and Israeli forces threatened to kill him.

Meanwhile, Luca Poggi, an Italian economist who was aboard the flotilla, confirmed the reports of sexual abuse: “We were stripped, thrown to the ground, kicked.

“Many of us were tasered, some were sexually assaulted, and some were denied access to a lawyer,” he told reporters after he was deported to Rome.

Nadda Osman is a British-Egyptian journalist and editor based in London. She holds a degree in English and journalism and reports on the Middle East and North Africa. Republished from The New Arab.

• Australian members of the Gaza flotilla arrived back home today and told news media of their abuse. Two of the three New Zealand members of the flotilla are due to arrive back in Auckland early tomorrow afternoon.

Britain. France. Canada. Italy. Spain. Belgium. The Netherlands. Poland. Australia. New Zealand . . .  The European Union. The United Nations . . .

Suddenly they have found outrage because international activists aboard the flotilla were humiliated, abused and tortured by Israeli war criminals under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s prison system.

Ambassadors are being summoned. Statements are being released. Diplomats are demanding “clarifications”.

But where have these governments been while Palestinians endured this for years?

Palestinian journalist Sami Al-Sa’i described being raped by Israeli prison guards while blindfolded and handcuffed, left bleeding on the floor as guards laughed and discussed filming the assault.

As a reminder once again, this is the report prepared by Nicolas Kristof from The New York Times, in which I was one of the speakers talking about my own experience, having been raped by members of the Israeli Prison Service during my detention… https://t.co/TQiqu8GQI2

— سامي السّاعي (@SamiAssai) May 22, 2026

Other former detainees described rape with objects, attacks involving dogs, electrocution, starvation and repeated torture inside Israeli detention facilities. Human rights organisations, UN experts and former detainees have all warned that this abuse is systematic, organised and protected from accountability.

Where were these governments when Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was abducted, tortured, sexually abused and ultimately murdered in israeli custody, with his body still withheld from his family? Where are they while Dr Hussam Abu Safiya and Palestinian medical workers remain detained, abused and denied proper medical treatment?

And now the world acts shocked because foreign activists were finally subjected to a fraction of what Palestinians have endured for decades.

In 2010, israeli forces attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla trying to break the siege on Gaza, killing nine activists before a tenth later died from his injuries.

The world condemned it, statements were made, outrage came and went, yet Palestinians remained trapped under siege while Israeli war criminals continued receiving arms, protection and political cover from Western governments.

To the people aboard the flotilla who were tortured, humiliated and abused while trying to break the siege on Gaza and deliver aid to starving civilians: may you recover safely and may your courage wake people up.

The world saw what happened to you. Palestinians have been screaming about these crimes for years. Credit to @thiagoavila for continuing to expose what so many tried to ignore.

Warning: distressful content!

Those genocidal maniacs RAPED humanitarian activist trying to take food and medicine to children in Gaza! And the worst is that even this they escalate to much worse forms with the 9000 Palestinians in israeli dungeons (almost 400 children)! pic.twitter.com/a0yuMuilvQ

— Thiago Ávila (@thiagoavilabr) May 21, 2026

Summoning ambassadors is not enough. Condemnations are not enough. Expel them. Sanction them. Stop arming them. Stop protecting Israeli war criminals while criminalising activists who try to stop weapons reaching them.

While Western governments choose silence, the British state chooses to criminalise, arrest and persecute activists, journalists, doctors, teachers and humanitarians for standing with Palestine. @Majstar7, @swilkinsonbc, Junaid Mayet, @KarakDesi and thousands more whose only “crime” was refusing to stay silent while Palestinians were slaughtered, starved and abused in plain sight.

My activism is for people. I oppose dehumanisation, torture, rape, abuse and the killing of civilians, no matter who the victim is.

But Palestinians have been subjected to all of this in plain sight while the world chose silence.

Shameen Suleman is a journalist for MENA Uncensored.

A video posted by Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in which he is seen taunting abducted flotilla activists who sought to break the siege on Gaza, has triggered a backlash and dealt a huge blow to Israel’s multimillion-dollar public relations campaign, known as “Hasbara”.

The footage, posted on the social media platform X, showed Ben-Gvir gloating as activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla — including three New Zealanders — knelt on the floor, blindfolded, with their hands bound at the Port of Ashdod.

Israeli naval forces had intercepted the flotilla’s vessels in international waters off the coast of Cyprus, illegally abducting 430 participants.

• READ MORE: Israel deports hundreds of Gaza aid flotilla activists amid global outcry
• Spanish MEP accuses EU of failure to act over Israeli ‘kidnapping, hijacking’ of Gaza flotilla activists
• Peters condemns Israeli minister over flotilla video as 3 Kiwis detained
• Peace Action demands NZ summon Israeli ambassador over brutal action against activists
• Other Gaza flotilla reports

Among them, at least 87 launched a hunger strike in solidarity with the more than 9500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

The images of activists being dragged across the floor prompted several countries — including Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and Spain — to summon Israeli ambassadors, condemning the “unacceptable” treatment and violation of human dignity.

The collapse of the ‘Hasbara’ illusion
Experts argue that the frantic damage control by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ordered the rapid deportation of the activists, stems not from moral outrage over the abuses, but from the catastrophic damage done to Israel’s global image.

“Netanyahu was dismayed not by Ben Gvir’s actions, but the fact he filmed and broadcasted them to appeal to his electorate ahead of the upcoming elections.

Netanyahu himself, like Ben Gvir, called the members of the Gaza flotilla terrorist supporters. The term terrorist has now… pic.twitter.com/ITdcIRZD2E

— State of Palestine (@Palestine_UN) May 21, 2026

For decades, Israel has relied on “Hasbara” — a Hebrew term translating to “explanation” — a propaganda campaign to justify its policies and military actions against Palestinians to the international community.

Fathi Nimer, a Palestine policy fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, told Al Jazeera that Hasbara is essentially state propaganda designed to “beautify the image of the occupation” by tailoring specific narratives to different global audiences.

“The fundamental assumption of Hasbara is that Israel is always right, but the world simply doesn’t understand,” Nimer said. He noted that due to Israel’s deepening isolation following its war on Gaza, the state’s Hasbara budget is projected to leap from roughly $15 million in 2023 to an unprecedented $700 million by 2026.

Yet, Ben-Gvir’s brazen video dismantled this heavily funded narrative in an instant.

Global outrage over Israeli minister’s treatment of abuse       Video: Al Jazeera

“The Israeli leadership is treating this as a public relations crisis, not a moral one,” Nimer explained. “For Netanyahu, the sin was not the torture or humiliation of the activists; the sin was broadcasting it to the world.

“Ben-Gvir, however, does not care about Israel’s external image; he performs these abuses for his domestic right-wing base, confident that Israel will face no material consequences.”

Mtanes Shehadeh, an academic and expert on Israeli affairs, echoed this assessment. “The core problem for Israel is that this video transmitted its true reality to the entire world,” he told Al Jazeera.

“It provided the globe with live, irrefutable evidence that structural violence and a disregard for human rights are foundational to the current Israeli establishment.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir is not an anomaly in Israeli society. Hell, he’s not even an anomaly in the Israeli cabinet.

Here’s Israeli Transport Minister Miri Regev, also bragging about torturing the activists who tried to bring aid to Gaza.

The entire barrel is rotten to the core. https://t.co/JYahRlhQ0x pic.twitter.com/naNAnvGhzt

— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) May 21, 2026

US double standards and ‘pro-terror’ sanctions
The diplomatic fallout also laid bare the glaring contradictions in United States policy.

Following the video’s release, US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee criticised Ben-Gvir, stating the minister had “betrayed the dignity of his nation”. However, critics were quick to point out that Huckabee’s condemnation rang hollow, as it focused entirely on the indignity of the broadcast rather than the human rights violations committed.

Furthermore, Huckabee’s remarks came just a day after the US Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on four organisers of the Global Sumud Flotilla, labelling the humanitarian mission a “pro-terror flotilla” in support of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

The US sanctions targeted activists from the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad and the Palestinian prisoners’ solidarity network, Samidoun.

Analysts highlight this as a stark double standard. While the US administration quickly moved to sanction humanitarian flotilla organisers, Palestinian civil society groups and International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors, it has consistently shielded far-right Israeli ministers like Ben-Gvir from accountability, even lifting prior sanctions on violent Israeli settlers.

A microcosm of Palestinian suffering
For Palestinians, the humiliation endured by the European and international activists is merely a glimpse into a much darker, systemic reality.

Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, said the bound and blindfolded activists represented a “microcosm” of what Palestinian prisoners endured daily.

“This scene expresses the fascism of the entire Israeli government, not just Ben-Gvir,” Barghouti said. “If the government genuinely opposed these practices, they would have fired him immediately.

“Instead, their audacity has reached the point of pirating ships in international waters.”

Human rights groups estimate that nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 2023, amid widespread reports of starvation, severe beatings and medical neglect.

Luisa Morgantini, former vice president of the European Parliament, said the standard diplomatic response of summoning ambassadors is woefully inadequate.

“It is a shame how our governments have behaved. They are complicit,” Morgantini said, calling on European nations to suspend their association agreements with Israel, halt arms sales, and actively back the ICC’s arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.

The ‘hammer’ and the flotillas
Despite the military interceptions and the US sanctions, activists and analysts agree that the flotilla campaigns, which began in 2009 in response to Israeli land, sea and air blockades, have succeeded in exposing the limits of Israeli force.

Nimer cited the American psychologist Abraham Maslow: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

“This is the only way the Israeli military knows how to act — through brute force and piracy,” Nimer said.

“The role of Hasbara was to rationalise this brutality for global consumption. But as the flotillas continue to challenge the blockade, they accumulate small victories and deeply accelerate Israel’s popular global isolation, proving that the multimillion-dollar propaganda machine can no longer hide the reality on the ground.”

Mohammad Mansour is a special correspondent of the Doha-based Al Jazeera global television network.

Spanish Member of the European Parliament Irene Montero has accused the European Union (EU) of failing to protect European citizens aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla intercepted by Israel, directing sharp criticism at the bloc’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas during a plenary session on the Middle East.

Addressing Kallas in the parliament chamber on Tuesday, the Podemos lawmaker condemned Israel’s actions in the Mediterranean and accused EU leaders of remaining silent, reports Anadolu Ajansi.

“Israel has been in the middle of the Mediterranean for 24 hours, and that is saying something, hijacking ships and kidnapping European citizens,” Montero said.

• READ MORE: Tehran says it is reviewing US response to peace proposal — and global anger over Israeli treatment of Gaza flotilla activists
• Israel begins deporting Gaza aid flotilla activists amid global outcry
• Peters condemns Israeli minister over flotilla video as 3 Kiwis detained
• Peace Action demands NZ summon Israeli ambassador over brutal action against activists
• Other Gaza flotilla reports

“You find that amusing, don’t you? It doesn’t amuse me at all,” she said, asking: “Are you ever going to lift a finger to protect them?”

Montero questioned how the EU would react if another country had carried out similar actions.

“What would you do if it were Iran, if it were Russia standing in the middle of the Mediterranean to kidnap European citizens?” she asked.

“But since it’s Israel, you just smile and look the other way. Shame on you.”

Shared her speech footage
Later on Wednesday, Montero shared footage of her speech in a post on the US social media platform X, accusing the EU of helping “genocidaires.”

“Israel assaults and hijacks ships loaded with aid for Gaza right in the middle of the Mediterranean, and this lady finds it amusing and doesn’t lift a finger to defend the kidnapped people,” she wrote.

“They help the genocidaires without even hiding it.”

❝Ms. Kallas, Israel has spent the last 24 hours, which is no small matter, in the middle of Mediterranean hijacking ships and kidnapping European citizens. You find that amusing, don’t you? It doesn’t amuse me at all❞

Spanish MEP Irene Montero confronted EU foreign policy… pic.twitter.com/YIHm7SZeHI

— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) May 20, 2026

Deportation begins
The Global Sumud humanitarian aid flotilla said Tuesday that all 50 vessels in its aid convoy and about 430 crew and activists had been seized by Israel.

Al Jazeera reports that Israel has begun deporting detained Gaza flotilla activists amid a global outcry over their “appalling” treatment by their Israeli captors. They were being released from the Ktziot detention facility where they were forcibly taken to.

The Adalah legal rights group said it had received confirmation from the Israeli Prison Service and state authorities that all detained members of the Global Sumud Flotilla and Freedom Flotilla Coalition were being transferred for deportation.

According to Adalah, most of the activists are being taken to Ramon Airport to be flown out of the country, while its legal team is monitoring the process to ensure that all activists are safely and fully sent without further delay.

37 MEPs demand ‘accountability’
Meanwhile, Global Sumud Aotearoa reports that while the activists remained detained after their illegal kidnapping, 37 Members of the EU Parliament circulated and co-signed a protest letter.

Although the flotilla are now being released, the demand for accountability in the MEP letter remains the same:

“On 18 May 2026, Israeli naval forces violently abducted the humanitarian workers of the Global Sumud Flotilla in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

“Their abduction constitutes yet another flagrant violation of the rights and principles enshrined in EU law. A previous interception of this same flotilla on 29 April produced documented testimony of systematic torture, severe physical abuse and sexual violence against detained participants.

“The EU–Israel Association Agreement contains binding human rights obligations. Those obligations are being openly and repeatedly violated. Continued inaction by European institutions renders the EU complicit in this pattern of impunity.

“We therefore demand:

• Immediate suspension of the EU–Israel Association Agreement pending compliance with its human rights provisions;
• Immediate and unconditional release of all detained flotilla participants;
• An independent international inquiry into the full scope of EU member state complicity in the abduction, detention, and documented physical and sexual violence inflicted upon flotilla participants by Israeli forces.

“Europe cannot continue to look away. Each failure to act is a signal to Israel that there is no cost to lawlessness. That signal must end now.”

Kiwi Julien Blondel’s face may be bloodied but it is unbowed. So far the New Zealand government has done nothing after Blondel and other New Zealand peace activists were savagely beaten by Israeli soldiers who attacked the Global Sumud flotilla near the Greek Island of Crete on April 30.

The flotilla was Gaza-bound and seeking to open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza to bring humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and apply pressure to the Israelis to halt the genocide.

New Zealanders Jay O’Connor, Mousa Taher, Julien Blondel and Sean Janssen were among 176 people who were captured in international waters, subjected to vicious mistreatment then dropped onto Crete.

• READ MORE: Gaza flotilla organisers subjected to ‘extreme brutality’ in illegal Israeli detention
• Global Sumud Flotilla calls on NZ govt to intervene after Israeli interception
• Former Greek minister slams ‘Western complicity’ over brutal Israeli kidnap of Gaza flotilla leaders
• NZer Rana Hamida reports
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

O’Connor and Blondel were immediately transferred to hospital on arrival in Greece.

Several days after the Israeli attack, I spoke with Samuel Leason, another Kiwi who was on a boat that evaded the Israelis and made it to Crete. He told me that several people were still in hospital.

Our government has so far offered no consular support and the Kiwis, like their comrades, have had to rely on the kindness of strangers and local peace activists.

Samuel said it was really hard to see what Julien Blondel had been through.

‘Brutalised state’
“I spent the last week with him, preparing in Barcelona. He’s just the most lovely man. It was very difficult to see him in such a brutalised state.

“Despite what happened to him, he is steadfast in the movement, and he is steadfast for Palestine. We all are. We’re all fuming. We’re all fuming that our government can let Israel get away with something so blatantly illegal.”

At least four Israeli warships, overhead surveillance planes, drones and sophisticated jamming technology (to shut down the flotilla’s Starlink comms) were deployed against the humanitarian activists.

The Israeli raiders systematically destroyed communications, navigation and other equipment on the ships they captured. They tampered with engines, cut fuel lines and shredded sails.

Once they transferred the abductees onto warships, they abandoned the Sumud vessels in open seas.

Members of the Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation who I talked with today said the beatings of dozens of activists was systematic. It started when flotilla members protested when two of the Steering Committee members, Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila, were isolated and then subjected to violence (they heard their screams).

The IOF soldiers dragged dozens of Sumud members, one after another, into a separate area where they were repeatedly kicked and punched.

Among many beaten
New Zealander Blondel (pictured) was one of many to be savagely beaten. Several were hospitalised when the Israelis, coordinating with allies in the Greek military, transferred them to Crete.

It is worth noting the attack happened within Greece’s Search And Rescue zone and yet the Greek Navy ignored SOS calls from the flotilla.

Such is the loyalty to Israel of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters that there has been no immediate condemnation of either the violence meted out to New Zealand citizens or the fact that this violence was part of an act of piracy in international waters hundreds of kilometres from Israel.

The NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued the standard mumble: “The safety of New Zealanders involved [is] paramount and international law must be upheld.”

Will the Minister of Foreign Affairs haul the Israeli ambassador in for a dressing down? Will the government publicly and forcefully rebuke Israel for its criminal behaviour? Will the government seek reparations for the damage done to the Sumud vessels?

Unlikely, as it was revealed last week that the New Zealand prime minister wanted to even more strongly support the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran but was blocked by the minister of foreign affairs. (Imagine if Luxon had been our prime minister when the Rainbow Warrior was sunk).

With leaders like these across the Western world the Israelis have learnt that they can act with impunity.

‘Imagine the Palestinian hostages’
Eloiza Montana, comms lead for the Global Sumud Aotearoa delegation said: “What our people suffered is terrible but it is tiny compared to what Palestinians go through.

“Imagine: if the Israelis are allowed to do this to international activists who are sailing in the middle of the Mediterranean — imagine what is going on inside Israeli prisons to the Palestinian hostages.”

I have written a series of articles over the past few years highlighting the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners. I have had the grim experience of watching footage of the rape-murder of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli soliders at Sde Teiman prison and seen one of the perpetrators blessed a few days later on-camera by Netanyahu’s rabbi, who praised him for his work.

The only person punished for these sordid events was Israel’s top military prosecutor Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi who, disgusted by the impunity, leaked the footage.

Israel’s outstanding human rights organisation B’tselem has done the world a great service by documenting the physical, sexual and psychological abuse that is standard practice within Israel’s prison system. For those who can handle the truth, I highly recommend B’tselem’s site “Welcome to Hell – The Israeli Prison Camps as a network of Torture Camps.”

New Zealand has maintained virtually total silence over this criminality in order to provide assistance to its close friend and ally Israel.

Our leaders tell us we share values with the Israelis. The New Zealand government may; I do not.

Speaking from Türkiye, Rana Hamida from Sumud’s Aotearoa New Zealand delegation told me: “We need to hold the criminals accountable, so we can move to restorative justice. Free Saif. Free Thiago. Free yourself!”

Olivia Coote, also a member of the delegation said: “Palestine activated for me a realisation that the society I was a part of is an absolute farce and that we are not the good guys.”

Last word on the attack
I’ll give the last word to Samuel Leason who told me from his ship moored off Crete this week:

“What this attack reveals is the true nature of the Israeli Occupation Force. There are 70 different nationalities on these boats — we represent the international community. For them to be able to come out here, brutalise us, steal our things and imprison us for days and then take some of our comrades to be questioned and tortured back in Israel just shows how much regard they have for people around the world.

“It shows how little regard they have for international law, and just how morally messed up they are.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region and is a frequent contributor to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz

Israeli soldiers beat and tortured flotilla organisers Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila after abducting them in international waters near Greece in the early hours of Thursday morning, allege lawyers and diplomats.

After illegally intercepting 22 boats and kidnapping around 200 activists hundreds of miles from Gaza, Israel transferred the majority to Greek authorities, but refused to release Abukeshek and Avila.

Instead, it transported them back to an Israeli desert prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured.

• READ MORE: Global Sumud Flotilla calls on NZ govt to intervene after Israeli interception
• Freedom Flotilla Coalition calls for the immediate release of Global Sumud Flotilla organisers
• NZer in flotilla intercepted by Israel has concussion and possible broken rib, says wife
• Former Greek minister slams ‘Western complicity’ over brutal Israeli kidnap of Gaza flotilla leaders
• Israeli forces raid Global Sumud Flotilla boats in international waters
• NZer Rana Hamida reports
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

Brazilian activist Ávila was dragged face down across the floor and beaten so badly he passed out twice, lawyers said, after they were finally able to visit him on Saturday.

His wife, Lara Souza, said in a video that a Brazilian embassy official told her he had been temporarily blinded by his injuries, with his left eye remaining swollen shut, but he was being denied medical treatment.

Why Israel’s interception of the Gaza flotilla is illegal          Video: TRT News

In a brief visit, where he was separated from the consul by a glass screen and not able to speak freely, he reported pain all over his body, especially in his hand and shoulder. He said soldiers had threatened to throw him overboard and target his wife and two-year-old daughter.

Abukeshek, who had been sailing on an observer boat and did not intend to go to Gaza, was “in shock”, his wife Sally Issa said. He was forced to lie face-down on the floor of an Israeli warship for two days, lawyers said, blindfolded and with his hands bound behind his back.

Spain demands Abukeshek release
Spain has demanded Israel release Abukeshek, who is Palestinian but has Spanish and Swedish citizenship.

On Friday, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he had been “illegally abducted by the Netanyahu government”.

Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares later told a radio station the arrest was made “outside the jurisdiction of Israel”.

“Of course, it is a kidnapping,” he said.

Hannah Smith, who runs the Global Sumud Flotilla’s media operation, said in a video that Abukeshek had Palestinian identity documents, “putting him in a legal context that we’ve never seen with participants before”.

“We do not know how the Israeli regime will handle his case,” she said. “They can try him just as they would any Palestinian.”

Adalah, the law firm supporting the two men, said they had reported being interrogated by Israel’s Shin Bet security service.

Interrogation by Mossad
Ávila said he had been told he would also be interrogated by Mossad, on suspicion of “affiliation with a terrorist organisation”.

On Sunday, both activists appeared in Ashkelon Magistrates’ Court, where a judge extended their detention by a further two days.

Adalah said the Israeli state attorney presented a list of suspected offences, including “assisting the enemy during wartime, contact with a foreign agent, membership in and providing services to a terrorist organisation, and the transfer of property for a terrorist organisation”.

No formal charges have yet been filed against either Ávila or Abukeshek, and Adalah said Israeli authorities had refused to provide details of any of the offences they are being interrogated over.

Lawyers demanded both men be immediately and unconditionally released, telling the court the entire process was “fundamentally flawed and illegal”, and describing Israel’s actions as a “retaliatory measure against humanitarian activist leaders”.

They challenged the state’s jurisdiction, arguing that there is “no legal basis for the extraterritorial application of offences to the actions of foreign nationals in international waters”.

In a statement, Adalah said: “The treatment of the two activists, including the use of isolation, prolonged blindfolding, and physical beatings, constitutes a grave violation of international law.”

Call for mobilisation
Meanwhile, Smith, who was on one of the boats that was intercepted on Wednesday night, urged people to “mobilise” for Ávila and Abukeshek.

“As someone who was thrown around, who was threatened to be killed, as someone who has seen two of my best friends taken, I ask the world: what kind of world do you want to live in?” she said.

“And if you want to live in a better one than this one, you need to act, you need to mobilise.”

Ávila and Abukeshek have now been transferred back to solitary confinement in Shikma prison, where they are being held in windowless cells.

Both are on hunger strike, with Avila saying he will not accept release without Abukeshek.

Republished from Novara Media. Charlotte England is a journalist and director of Novara Media.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. Israel is also on trial for genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa supported by other countries.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: An Israeli court has closed an investigation into the death of Walid Ahmad, a 17-year-old from the occupied West Bank who died in an Israeli jail six months after he was arrested, held without charges and accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.

An autopsy showed Ahmad likely starved to death after suffering extreme weight loss, muscle wasting and untreated scabies. Human rights groups say nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli jails since October 2023.

Meanwhile, local and international media outlets report Israeli forces recently tortured a Palestinian toddler in Gaza to coerce a confession from his father.

• READ MORE: Trump talks up deal with Tehran as Iranian missile, drone attacks continue
• Other US-Israeli attacks on Iran, Palestine genocide

According to reports from Palestine TV, Al Jazeera and others, the child’s father, Osama Abu Nassar, was detained near the al-Maghazi refugee camp after he came under fire from Israeli soldiers.

He was forced to approach an Israeli checkpoint, where he was separated from his 18-month-old son, stripped naked and forced to watch as soldiers used a cigarette to burn one of the toddler’s legs while using a nail to puncture the other.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as a new UN report warns Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent”.The report, titled “Torture and Genocide”, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

In July, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on her over her report naming dozens of companies she says are profiting from Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International blasted the sanctions as a “shameless and transparent attack on the fundamental principles of international justice”. Francesca Albanese’s new book is When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.

Francesca, thank you so much for being with us. Why don’t you lay out what you found in your new report, “Torture and Genocide,” that you just presented at the U.N. Human Rights Council?

Torture and Genocide — a new UN report.     Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Thank you. Thank you, Amy and Nermeen.

I’ve been investigating genocide for over two years now. So, five out of eight reports I’ve produced for the United Nations focus on genocide, acts of genocide, the context in which a genocide happens, why the genocide is not stopped, the layers of complicity from states and private companies, which is the reason why also I’m sanctioned by the United States, against which now my 13-year-old daughter, who’s an American citizen, is the only one to take action suing the Trump administration.

But of all the investigations I’ve carried out, this has been absolutely the most excruciating, that led me to say that Israel uses torture in a systematic and widespread fashion, intentionally and sadistically, to break the spirit of the Palestinians, not just as individuals, but as a people, considering the scale and intensity of torture.

And I monitored torture behind bars, collecting hundreds, hundreds of testimonies, directly and from Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, but also analyzing what experts call torturous environment, meaning the cumulative impact of all the practices, of all the crimes that Israel has massively inflicted on the Palestinians — again, beyond the torture, sodomisation, raping in jail, the enforced disappearance, which is touching 4000 people.

This is new. This is a new crime, including for Israel, toward the Palestinians. But also starvation, constant forced displacement, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and home demolition, the fear of being always threatened with death or other crimes, it creates a torturous environment for the Palestinians, which is an essential element of genocide.

And it is genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Francesca, if you could elaborate on this point that you’ve just made and that you make in the report, namely, that torture has effectively become state policy for Israel since October 2023? So, what are the kinds of transformations you’ve seen, both in terms of Israeli security personnel, as well as settlers, against the Palestinians?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, I have to say that what I’ve investigated is something on which even the United Nations Committee Against Torture and the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Israel/Palestine had shed light already, the fact that Israel, after October 7, has massively used torture to punish the Palestinians vindictively.

In fact, the concept of torture has become a state policy is something that the Committee Against Torture found out recently.

I have zoomed in: What does it mean, and where does it come from? Surely, one of the main engineers or architects of this, what’s been called — what he has called the “prison revolution,” is Itamar Ben-Gvir, was — immediately after October 7, has declared that the Palestinians in jail will not be afforded luxury treatment or five-star treatment anymore, as if it was a five-star hotel, what the Israeli prison system afforded Palestinians before October 7.

By the way, in 2023, in July 2023, I produced a report showing how widespread and systemic was the arbitrary treatment of Palestinian detainees, so, just to give a context.

But the conditions have become more and more brutal, and intentionally so. What does it mean? Palestinians have routinely been abducted — I mean, detained without charge or trial. They’ve been arrested, because Palestinians, if they were specific professionals, like journalists and doctors or headed medical personnel, all the more.

Seventeen hundred Palestinian healthcare personnel have been killed. Hundreds remain in jail. And they have been shackled, blindfolded, beaten, humiliated, stripped naked, photographed, filmed, exposed to Israeli civilians, including settlers, coming in to document and to film, to participate into this orgy of depravity, of how a person can be humiliated.

But the most painful, excruciating thing — and I’ve read some of the testimonies — is how Palestinian women and men have been sodomised, have been raped, with bottles, with knives, with metal rods. Even the prisoner who was sodomised through — was raped with a knife, brought to the hospital.

Five Israeli officials were identified and pressed charged against, and now the charges have been dropped. And the person who leaked the video from within the military apparatus is under house arrest on top of it.

So, not only that I’ve documented the vindictiveness toward the Palestinians, the humiliation, the continuous abuses against them in jail, really to break their spirit once and for all as a people, but also the fact that there has been almost something celebratory against the mistreatment of Palestinians in jail among the society.

The legislative power, the Knesset, has been discussing the right to rape Palestinians, and so other members of the executive. The judiciary has not looked into it. And as I said, even those who were found, caught on video, committing this crime were released.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesca, in this last 30 seconds, what are you calling for?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Oh, for justice. Justice. Israel must be stopped, because, Amy, I can’t even use the past tense. As we speak, there are still over 9000 Palestinian hostages, hostages to an unlawful occupation in Israeli jail.

The only thing this — International Court of Justice has spoken. Israel must withdraw the occupation, the troops, the colonies. And the exploitation of Palestinian resources must end.

Meanwhile, the settlers continue to terrorise people. Very few Israelis are engaged against this. So member states must intervene, cut ties and stop weapons transfers to Israel once and for all, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesco Albanese, we thank you so much for being with us, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. We’ll link to your report, “Torture and Genocide,” and have you back on to talk about your book.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Israeli military prosecution has controversially cancelled the indictment of five soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman prison in southern Israel, reports Anadolu Ajansi.

“In light of significant developments that have occurred since the indictment was filed in the Yemen Field case, the military prosecution has decided today to cancel the indictment,” the Israeli army said in a statement yesterday.

The torture case dates back to July 2025, when Israeli soldiers tortured and sexually assaulted a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention facility, causing serious injuries and a tear in the rectum.

• READ MORE: Khamenei demands closure of US bases as Trump says war going ‘very well’
• Four possible outcomes with the war on Iran – but only one viable
• Other Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners reports

Earlier, Israeli news media outlets, including the public broadcaster KAN, claimed that Israel released the tortured detainee on October 13, 2025, to the Gaza Strip as part of a group of prisoners released under the exchange deal with the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

Sde Teiman, which literally means “Yemen Field” in Arabic, is an Israeli military base in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.

Interrogators there have become notorious for physical and sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees from Gaza to the extent that it has been dubbed “Israel’s Guantanamo” in reference to the infamous US detention facility in Iraq.

The Sde Teiman prison has witnessed widespread violations against Palestinian detainees, including severe beatings, prolonged restraint, and medical neglect, which have killed people, according to Palestinian and Israeli media and human rights reports.

Palestinian journalist Ahmed Abdel Aal remembers the moment the ear-splitting music started. For five days, he said, he was held blindfolded in a room in an Israeli detention site, stripped and beaten, while loud Hebrew and English songs played at an unrelenting volume, says a special report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Every time he drifted into unconsciousness, an electric shock or a blow jolted him awake.

Another journalist, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, described similar treatment inside what detainees refer to as the “disco room”.

• READ MORE: The full CPJ special report: ‘We returned from hell’: Palestinian journalists recount torture in Israeli prisons
• Other Gaza journalist reports

He said soldiers bound his genitals with zip ties and beat him until the injuries made it impossible to urinate without blood.

“They told me that I would no longer be a man,” he said.

Their accounts are among 59 in-depth testimonies collected by the Committee to Protect Journalists from Palestinian journalists released from Israeli custody since October 7, 2023.

These interviews revealed that 58 — all but one of those released — reported being subjected to what they described as torture, abuse, or other forms of violence since the onset of what human rights groups agree is a genocide.

Documented detention
CPJ has documented the detention of at least 94 Palestinian journalists and one media worker in that period – 32 journalists and one media worker from Gaza, 60 from the West Bank, and two in Israel.

Thirty remained in custody, as of February 19, 2026. CPJ’s 2025 Prison Census found that Israel has been listed as a top jailer of journalists since 2023

The Committee to Protect Journalists attempted to contact all 65 journalists released from Israeli custody since October 7, 2023. One, Ismail al-Ghoul, was killed in an Israeli air strike, and the five others declined to speak.

CPJ could not independently verify each allegation, but the reports align with findings by human rights organisations documenting similar treatment of Palestinians in Israeli detentions, which Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has described as a “network of torture camps”.

Republished by Pacific Media Watch from the CPJ website via Creative Commons.

• Download the full CPJ pdf report here

Israeli prison guards punish the prisoners “by breaking their thumbs” said a released detainee as lawyers speak out about torture, abuse, rape, starving and killings in a notorious underground Israeli prison facility where detainees are held without sunlight, brutalised.

And nobody in New Zealand says a word.

Scores of detainees from Gaza have also been held in a notorious Israeli military detention camp known as Sde Teiman, where reports of killings, torture and sexual violence, including rape, have been rife since the Gaza war began in October 2023.

• READ MORE: More details emerge of Israel’s ‘brutal’ treatment of Palestinian detainees
• Inside the attempted cover-up of Israel’s Sde Teiman scandal
• Other Gaza reports

There’s about 9200 Palestinians being held in detention by Israel but there’s no word from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon about them like there was over 20 Israeli hostages.

And Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has not said anything about a new law that Israel just voted for that would impose the death penalty for so-called “terrorism” offences based on “racist” motives against Israelis.

That’s a law exclusively aimed at Palestinians while Israeli settlers are exempt.

Go ahead, terrorise the people living there.

Winston Peters is silent on behalf of you and me. He’s representing us on the world stage.

We not only do not condemn this, we don’t even mention it. New Zealand doesn’t care.

They are not us, they are not “we”.

Gerard Otto is a digital creator, satirist and independent commentator on politics and the media through his G News column and video reports. This article is an excerpt from a G News commentary and republished with permission.

Israel and the West pretend they want a real peace in Israel-Palestine yet the Israelis have beaten unconscious the man most likely to help realise a sustainable end to the conflict: Marwan Barghouti.

The ethnocentrism of Western culture is such that 20 Israeli hostages received vastly more coverage than thousands of Palestinian hostages, nearly 2000 of whom were released as part of the recent exchange.

These prisoners, physically emaciated, most emotionally shattered, many children, most having never been charged, some held for decades, emerged from the Dantesque Inferno of the Israeli prison system. Most had some kind of disease, commonly scabies, due to the infested and infected conditions of the gulag.

• READ MORE: Eugene Doyle: Saving Palestine’s Marwan Barghouti is our duty
• ‘We fear for my father’s life’: Marwan Barghouti’s son to Al Jazeera

Five Palestinian detainees released and exiled to Egypt brought with them terrible news: the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti — the person most likely to lead a free Palestine — had recently been beaten unconscious by his captors.

According to the Times of Israel, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who oversees the Israeli Prison System says he is “proud that Barghouti’s conditions have changed drastically”.

What Nelson Mandela would say about the beating of Marwan
Marwan Barghouti — Palestine’s most loved and revered leader, a living symbol of the resistance — was beaten unconscious by 8 Israeli guards, according to the testimony of fellow prisoners on arrival in Cairo. The attack left the 66-year-old with broken ribs and head injuries.

When called on to demand his protection, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Western leaders yawned and looked the other way. That response defined the depths that the Western world has reached in its permissiveness of violence towards Palestinian prisoners.

Marwan Barghouti is commonly referred to as the Palestinian Mandela, a man who has the attributes to not only unite the many Palestinian factions but also negotiate a lasting peace, if given the opportunity.

Mandela couldn’t have been “Mandela” without him surviving and being released — which is a tribute to the ANC and other fighters for freedom, as well as to the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns that finally convinced the regime to negotiate.

The same was true of the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland which saw the release of prisoners that one side considered terrorists. The British also came to accept that negotiation with leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of the IRA was essential precisely because they had the street credibility to deliver peace.

It is worth pointing out that Mandela said he was not personally beaten during his 27 years of captivity by the racist South African apartheid regime.

Barghouti, who has spent the last 23 years in prisons has had at least four beatings by the Israelis in the past three years alone. The Israelis have shown nothing but contempt for the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, Red Cross requests, or any benchmark of human decency.

They are our “friends and allies” with whom we share values.

‘He has been in a struggle for 50 years’.           Video: TRT News

Rules on prisoner treatment
After leaving Robben Island to eventually become South Africa’s first black President, the convicted terrorist and revolutionary Prisoner 46664 helped author the Nelson Mandela Rules on prisoner treatment, adopted by the United Nations in 2015. He had seen the mistreatment of many of his comrades by racist white South Africa, a close ally of most of our governments.

The scale of what is being done by Israel in its mass torture centres would be beyond anything Mandela could have imagined. Unlike morally repellent leaders like New Zealand’s Luxon, UK’s Starmer, France’s Macron or Germany’s Merz, he would never have failed to act.

A central tenet of the Mandela Rules is that people behind bars are not beyond human rights. Countries — and, yes, that includes Israel — must adhere to minimum standards such as, “No prisoner shall be subjected to, and all prisoners shall be protected from, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, for which no circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification.”

Recently released Palestinians, most in shocking physical condition, talked of having to drink toilet water, beatings, being denied medical treatment, constant humiliations, including sexual violence, committed by the Israelis.

This kind of behaviour has long been documented by international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — and largely ignored by the mainstream media.

The Israelis, never forget, are our close friends, with whom we share “values”.

I have written a number of articles about Marwan and, to avoid repetition, I recommend those unfamiliar with his astonishing story to read them. My last article, Saving Marwan Barghouti is our duty, in August, was part of a global push to prevent Marwan facing further mistreatment. I was shocked at the time to see the video that Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir posted to show the power he personally had over Marwan whose physical condition had obviously deteriorated to a terrible extent. Now he has been beaten, for the fourth time.

“It is a clear declaration that they are threatening my father’s life,” his son Arab Barghouti said this week.

Prisons are ‘Israeli sadism in a nutshell’
One person who watched the release of the prisoners last week was veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass, correspondent on the Occupied Palestinian Territories for Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz.

“It was a kind of parade of skeletons,” Hass said. “These last two years, it’s like the Israeli prisons have become Israeli sadism in a nutshell,” she told Democracy Now!.

“The way that prisoners were treated during these two years is unprecedented in Israel. They didn’t only come out emaciated; they came out ill, sick. Some of them have lost limbs. It’s indescribable.”

Hass’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, her mother surviving nine months in the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Now, along with all of us, she is witness to genocide.

She makes the fine observation that people aren’t born cruel; they become so. I would add: we in the West helped the Israelis become so depraved by ignoring their abuses for so long. Former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is a case in point.

In the UK Parliament on October 14, Green MP Ellie Chowns asked Starmer:

“Can I ask the Prime Minister what recent representation his government has made in the last few days to secure the immediate release of Mr Barghouti, given his widespread popularity as a unifying voice for Palestinian rights, dignity and freedom, and therefore his potential crucial role in securing a meaningful and lasting peace in the region?”

Starmer is an avatar for the West: complicit in genocide and disturbingly detached from the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Starmer, who has less human decency in his entire being than Nelson Mandela had in one nostril hair, refused to even mention Barghouti by name. His lawyerly reply:

“Thank you for raising the individual case. We offer to provide such further information as we can, as soon as we can, in relation to that particular case.”

Western leaders, including in my own country, have refused to even reply to requests that petitions/insistences be made to the Israelis to save the great Palestinian leader. They have shown more empathy for the remains of deceased Israeli hostages crushed under the rubble of buildings bombed by the Israelis, hypocritically blaming Hamas for not releasing the remains fast enough!

Such is the moral calibre of our leaders.

None of them, it should be pointed out, had anything to say when footage appeared of Israeli soldiers committing gang rape at Sde Temein Prison last year. Not only were the men not punished but by week’s end they had been blessed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s spiritual mentor Rabbi Meir Mazuz who assured one of the rapists that he had done “no wrong” and “In another country they would have given him an award”.

Never forget, the Israelis are our close friends and allies with whom, our leaders tell us, we share values.

‘Israel doesn’t want peace – they want ethnic cleansing’
Such is Marwan Barghouti’s standing that he is respected by all Palestinian factions and acknowledged as a unifying figure, a peacemaker and someone who should be leading Palestine not getting his head punched by Israeli thugs.

“That’s why they see him as a danger,” says his son, Arab Barghouti. “Because he wants to bring stability, he wants to end the cycle of violence.

“He wants a unifying Palestinian vision that is accepted by everyone, and the international community as well. But they’re [Israelis] not interested in any political settlement; they’re only interested in ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.”

True words, those — and they demolish the fake narrative peddled by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.

The Israelis have killed so many Palestinian negotiators, so many Palestinians leaders that the opposite is now clear: the Israelis and the West are the true enemies of peace.

I’ll give the last word to another Palestinian. I dedicate it to Keir Starmer, Christopher Luxon, Anthony Albanese and all those other leaders who stand deaf, dumb and blind to Marwan Barghouti and the thousands of Palestinian souls still suffering in Israeli captivity:

“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’

– Matthew 25, King James Bible

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

A national advocacy and protest group has demanded that Foreign Minister Winston Peters condemn Israeli torture of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti and failure to abide by the Gaza ceasefire.

Co-chair John Minto of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) said Barghouti was Palestine’s equivalent to South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, jailed by the minority white regime for 27 years but who was elected president in 1994.

As nationwide protests against Israeli genocide across New Zealand continued this weekend into the third year, Minto said in a statement Barghouti had been held by Israel in prison since 2002.

• READ MORE: ‘We fear for my father’s life’: Marwan Barghouti’s son to Al Jazeera
• Palestinian bodies returned by Israel show sign of execution, torture
• ‘We died a thousand times’: Freed Palestinian detainees describe horrific torture
• Gaza aid deliveries still face Israeli roadblocks a week into ceasefire

“He is revered as the most likely Palestinian to lead Palestinians out of occupation and apartheid. Though not affiliated to Hamas, he was top of their list of prisoners for Israel to release,” Minto said.

“Israel refused. Instead, his jailers have kicked him unconscious and smashed his ribs.”

Minto says this was the clearest message to the world that Israel had no interest in allowing anybody like Nelson Mandela to ever emerge as a Palestinian leader to “bring real peace and justice”.

“Peters should be condemning this torture in the strongest terms.

“He loudly complained that the protest movement in this country didn’t congratulate [US President Donald] Trump with his plan to outsource the occupation of Gaza to Tony Blair, Egyptian secret police and Turkish soldiers.

“But now, when Israel continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza every day, Peters is silent.

‘We fear for my father’s life’: Marwan Barghouti’s son to Al Jazeera   Video: AJ+

“Israeli snipers shot 35 Palestinians dead last Friday alone. Israel has also activated its al-Qaeda gangster gangs in Gaza to try to start of civil war.

“There is no ceasefire.”

Minto said that if Peters was to “atone for his completely mistaken optimism” about Trump’s peace plan, then he ought to be “hauling in the Israeli ambassador today for an official rebuke and then send the ambassador packing”.

“Peters has been quick to impose sanctions on Iran. But, as usual, no action on Israel.”

Seeing video evidence this week of the physical and psychological mistreatment of the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti sickened me. I have written a number of articles about Marwan.

Researching and writing builds knowledge and empathy and I am one of those who believes, given the opportunity, he really could be the Palestinian Mandela. How should you and I respond to this criminality by the Israeli state?

A video clip posted by the Israeli “Security” Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on August 15 showed the bully taunting and intimidating a frail Marwan Barghouti. It sparked international condemnation.

• READ MORE:  Recognise Palestine? Then free Marwan Barghouti
• Other Marwan Barghouti articles

His own wife did not recognise him

Marwan’s wife and human rights activist Fadwa Barghouti, was shocked to see the heavy toll the Israelis had inflicted on a man legendary for his indomitable spirit.

“I didn’t recognise you or your features, and maybe part of me doesn’t want to admit everything your face and body express about what you and the prisoners have endured,” she wrote in a public message to her husband.

“They are still, Marwan, chasing you and pursuing you even after 23 years in prison and in the solitary cell you’ve been living in for two years.”

She added: “I know that the only thing that hurts you is the inability to protect Palestinian children.”

NEW: Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir filmed threatening Marwan Barghouti, the most prominent Palestinian prisoner, during a prison visit.
“Whoever murders our children… we will obliterate them.”

First time Barghouti seen publicly in years — frail, gaunt, unrecognisable.… pic.twitter.com/CbkOO25pak

— Khaled Shalaby (@KShalabyNews) August 14, 2025

International protocols on prisoner treatment
The mistreatment of prisoners like Marwan Barghouti is a crime under international law; the relevant international protocols include: Geneva Convention IV (1949) — Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War; Common Article 3 (minimum protections including bans on torture, cruel treatment, and “outrages upon personal dignity”); UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandela Rules).

These establish prohibitions against torture, degrading treatment, and requirements for humane conditions of detention. Look at Marwan Barghouti and weep that we support Israel, a state that has defecated on the Geneva Convention, the Genocide Convention and every memorial to the victims of the Shoah.

The Israelis, “our allies”, have committed rape-murders of prisoners (documented in their own posted videos), killed countless Palestinian leaders and hold thousands of hostages in gruesome captivity — even as they commit ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and forced starvation in Gaza.

Barghouti, who would win any free and fair elections in Palestine in a landslide, has since 2023, according to human rights organisations, been repeatedly assaulted and subjected to Abu Ghraib-style treatment, had joints dislocated and other forms of torture while our governments turn a blind eye and work day and night to provide the Israelis with the political cover needed to pursue the Greater Israel project.

Terrible news from Yousef Aljamal
I also received terrible news this week that my friend Yousef Aljamal had suffered yet another horror at the hands of the Israelis: his sister Somaiya, 35; her husband Anas, 35; and their daughters Hoor, 13, and Sham, 9, had been killed in an Israeli missile attack earlier this month as they slept.

A third daughter, Noor, 14, was injured and is now the family’s sole survivor.

I interviewed Yousef in my home in Wellington a few weeks ago; it was a privilege and an education to spend time with the distinguished Palestinian writer. As I said in the subsequent article, the encounter made visceral for me that word genocide.

Sitting opposite me in my study in my serene Wellington coastal suburb, Yousef told me of the 40 members of his family who had been murdered by the Israelis. Now four more members of his family have been taken.

These are people like us, with feelings like us. They are not the Hated Others so long painted by our mainstream media as unworthy of naming, unworthy of human dignity.

The collective West is responsible under law
The Israelis have turned Gaza into a hellscape that would shock Dante Alighieri. Over two million people are being tortured in the cruellest way every day and our governments refuse to intervene in powerful and meaningful ways.

According to whistleblower US Green Beret Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Anthony Aguilar, the Israelis and the American GHF contractors use pepper spray and gunfire instead of signs to direct the human traffic. Waves of suffering humanity are tossed hither and thither on a sea of diabolical inhumanity. Nearly 2000 starving innocents have been gunned down while seeking food.

To be blunt: If the Israelis don’t want to be likened to the Nazis, they should stop acting like Nazis.

The responsibility to prevent and punish
This evil is supported to astonishing lengths by the morally empty governments of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and, of course, the great arsenals of genocide the US, UK and Germany. The leaders of the powerful Western countries are fully aware of what is being done and allow it to continue — and therefore represent the moral nadir of our species.

Leaders like Anthony Albanese, Christopher Luxon and Keir Starmer make corporeal the term Banality of Evil. They calculate, they mumble and equivocate, then they comply with the Americans. “Genocide enabler” should be their sole epitaph.

Our countries are signatories to the Genocide Convention, the first Article of which states: “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”

Prevent and punish. Legal scholars and the ICJ’s opinions affirm that states providing military, financial, or political support with knowledge of likely genocidal acts risk being found complicit.

Our governments have failed to reach the lowest bar of human decency or fulfil this fundamental duty. It is up to us to act. If it was right to oppose Nazism in the Second World War it is most certainly a moral imperative to oppose the brand of Nazism the Jewish State of Israel has created today. We must find the courage to oppose them.

The International Court of Justice ruled in 2007 in the ICJ Bosnia Genocide case that Serbia was guilty of breaching its duty to prevent the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica. Countries like the UK, Germany, New Zealand and Australia would likely, if international law was applied evenly, be found similarly culpable for failing to prevent genocide by Israel and the US.

This is the legal concept of erga omnes partes, the collective responsibility that signatory states share.

On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel faces credible allegations of genocide in Gaza and imposed urgent, legally binding measures, including an obligation to allow humanitarian access and prevent genocidal acts. All our states are fully aware Israel has defied this ruling.

War crimes tribunals on the Palestine Genocide will be essential to restore international law. War criminals whether in Tel Aviv, London, Canberra or Wellington must one day face justice.

In a recent article I described Stéphane Hessel, a leading member of the French Resistance, who survived time in Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald. After the war he was one of the co-authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), a pillar of international law to this day. The Declaration affirms the inherent dignity and equal rights of all humans.

In later years Hessel (d. 2013), who was Jewish, saw the treatment of the Palestinians as an affront to this and repeatedly called Israel out for crimes against humanity.

Hessel argued people needed to be outraged just as he and his fellow fighters had been during the war. In 2010, he said: “Today, my strongest feeling of indignation is over Palestine, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The starting point of my outrage was the appeal launched by courageous Israelis to the Diaspora: you, our older siblings, come and see where our leaders are taking this country and how they are forgetting the fundamental human values of Judaism.”

Imagine what action he would call for today.

Aaron Bushnell’s challenge to us
So, back to the core challenge I posed at the beginning. Are we willing to do what it takes to save Marwan Barghouti, to save our brothers and sisters in Palestine?

As Aaron Bushnell, the active duty US serviceman said the day he self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington last year to protest the genocide against the Palestinian people:

“Many of us like to ask ourselves ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

A researcher says the Israeli prison system aims to subjugate the Palestinian people as rallies across the West Bank marked Prisoners’ Day today while yet another prisoner was reported dead.

“When you have the statistics that one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and you understand that 50 percent of our population are children under 18 — that means that roughly one in every two male adults has been arrested, subjugated and criminalised by Israeli authorities,” researcher and former detainee Al-Aboudi told Al Jazeera.

He is the director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development, based in Ramallah, occupied West Bank.

• READ MORE: Call for collective global action over ‘horrific’ Israeli crimes against Palestinian prisoners
• Other Palestinian prisoners reports

The goal, said Al-Aboudi, who himself was detained in 2019, is to break Palestinian resilience.

“It’s only in Israeli jails that you will find doctors, professors, academics, physicists — the creme de la creme of Palestinian civil society is being targeted, incarcerated because Israel doesn’t want any kind of Palestinian agency, any Palestinian collective agency, any kind of Palestinian leadership,” he said.

Palestinians mark Prisoners’ Day on April 17 each year, reports Al Jazeera.

Human rights organisations warn that Palestinian detainees are subject to some of the worst conditions in Israeli prisons.

Detainees tell of torture, starvation
They are not allowed visits from family, lawyers or doctors, and former detainees tell of torture, abuse and starvation by Israeli prison authorities.

Musab Hassan Adili, a 20-year-old Palestinian prisoner from the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, was reported to have died on Wednesday night in Israel’s Soroka Hospital, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.

Palestine marches for prisoners’ freedom.    Video: Al Jazeera

Adili had been detained in March last year and sentenced to 13 months in Israeli prison. He was supposed to be released in a couple of days, his family said.

His death brings the number of Palestinian prisoners who have died in Israeli prisons to 64 since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel in 2023.

‘Shameless double standard’
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has condemned what it calls the “clear and shameless double standard” of those demanding the release of Israeli captives in Gaza but staying silent while thousands of Palestinians languish in Israel’s jails, including women and children.

In a statement marking Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, PIJ said the “international community is tarnished by its silence regarding the suffering of tens of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, which has continued for decades”.

Of the nearly 10,000 Palestinians that support groups say are held in Israeli prisons, 3498 are held without charge or trial under what’s known as “administrative detention”.

PIJ said that 400 children and almost 30 women are among those held, while some 2000 people from Gaza have been arrested by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023, and that the prisoners who have died in Israeli jails suffer from medical negligence and torture.

According to PIJ, the October 7 attacks on Israel were launched “primarily to impose a genuine prisoner exchange deal that would free prisoners from the occupation’s prisons and alleviate the suffering of our people”.

“Their liberation has become an unwavering goal in the battle for dignity and freedom,” it said.

Two Palestinian resistance groups have condemned “the brutal assault” on prisoners at Ofer Prison, saying it was “barbaric criminal behaviour that reflects the fascist and terrorist nature of” Israel.

In the joint statement, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) called the attack a “miserable attempt” by Israel “to restore its shattered prestige”, reports Al Jazeera.

They called on the world to expose “these inhuman crimes against the prisoners”, which “blatantly violate all international conventions and norms”.

• READ MORE: Welcome to hell: The Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps
• Gaza hospital chief Abu Safia detained, tortured in Israeli jail: Lawyer
• Other Israel’s war on Palestine reports

The statement called on the international community to intervene to protect the “prisoners, stop criminal violations against them, document them and work to hold the criminal occupation leaders accountable”.

The statement came after Palestinian authorities said Israeli forces had raided a section of Ofer Prison, west of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and assaulted detainees.

“Prisoners were beaten and sprayed with gas,” the Palestinian Prisoners Media Office said.

Persistent serious allegations of torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners — many who have not been charged or are held on administrative detention — and beatings right up until the release of detainees under the ceasefire have been made over all six exchange events so far.

Medical director severely tortured
Last week, lawyers representing Kamal Adwan Hospital’s medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya met him for the first time since he was detained by Israeli forces in north Gaza last December 27.

He told them he was severely tortured with electric shocks and was being denied needed medication.

Lawyer spells out torture allegations over Israeli detention of doctor.  Video: Al Jazeera

Samir Al-Mana’ama, a lawyer with the Al Mazan Center for Human Rights, described his brutal torture in a failed attempt to “extract a confession” from him in an interview with Al Jazeera.

Al-Mana’ama said Dr Abu Safiya suffered from “an enlarged heart muscle and from high blood pressure” and was beaten up and refused treatment for the heart condition.

Transferred to Ofter Prison on January 9, he was held in solitary confinement for 25 days and interrogated nonstop by the Israeli army, Israeli intelligence and police, the lawyer added.

There was “no legal justification” for Abu Safia’s arrest and no evidence against him, the lawyer said.

Since the interview, Israeli authorities said he was being held under an “unlawful combatant” law — despite his status as a civilian doctor — stripping him of any rights as a detainee.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in Jordan, said the doctor was one of hundreds of medical workers taken from Gaza by Israeli forces to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and other Israeli military prisons.

Analysts and commentators have described how images of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees and prisoners have “dehumanised” them and revealed their “horrible” treatment.

Three Israeli captives were released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad yesterday in exchange for 369 Palestinians held in Israeli jails as part of the ceasefire in Gaza.

The captives released were identified as US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen, Russian-Israeli Alexandre Sasha Troufanov and Argentinian-Israeli Yair Horn.

• READ MORE: Israel frees Palestinian prisoners after 3 captives released in Gaza
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

Of the Palestinians released, 333 had been arrested in Gaza and held without charge. They were sent back to the besieged enclave and greeted by remarkable emotional scenes of large crowds.

They disembarked from the buses that had taken them to the European Hospital in Khan Younis.

They made the Victory sign as they left the buses and were greeted by their loved ones.

Ten were released in the occupied West Bank — and half of them were taken to hospital after being treated badly in captivity, one in occupied East Jerusalem and 25 were either being deported to Gaza or Egypt.

The Israel Prison Service published images showing Palestinian prisoners who were being released were forced to wear shirts with the Star of David and slogans that read, “We do not forget, and we do not forgive”.

‘Stunning’ photos of ill-treatment
Dr Mohamad Elmasry, professor in the media studies programme at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, called the photographs “stunning”.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, he said this was “another method” under which Israel intended to “dehumanise” Palestinians.

Elmasry noted that 333 of the Palestinians being released today were arrested without any charge.

“These are people who by Israel’s own admission have not committed a crime,” he said.

“And this is the case with thousands of Palestinians who are in jail right now [under] administrative detention,” he said, adding it was well-documented that many of the Palestinian prisoners were “treated horribly” inside Israeli prisons.

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, Nour Odeh said that half of the Palestinian prisoners released to the West Bank were taken to hospital.

“We have seen that time and time again whether it is in the occupied West Bank or in Gaza,” she said.

“Palestinians released from Israeli captivity are in very bad shape. They speak of malnutrition, of going hungry; for the past 15 months of being deprived of even hygiene products.”

RAMALLAH: Palestinian prisoners have been released from Israeli jails.

At least 4 have been taken straight to the hospital due to poor health because of conditions in Israeli prisons.

A total of 369 Palestinian detainees are set to be released. pic.twitter.com/jNdFv3sERa

— Hamdah Salhut (@hamdahsalhut) February 15, 2025

‘Beatings, threatened with assassination’
They were only being allowed to shower every 10 days for a minute as per the command of the former Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

“They talk about beatings, mistreatment even in those last hours of their release . . .  they were told not to speak to the media, not to celebrate in any way their release,” she said.

“They were threatened with assassination even if they resume any activity. That’s why a lot of those who were released today in Ramallah apologised for not speaking to the media.

“They spoke openly about being monitored, about not being allowed to speak.

“Their health is clearly ailing because of those months of mistreatment.”

‘Bittersweet happiness’
In Ramallah, a Palestinian mother, Mariam Oweiss, spoken of her “bittersweet happiness” after the release of her sons from Israeli prison.

The two brothers had been sentenced to life terms. But one was released to the occupied West Bank while the other was being deported.

“I was hoping they would both be released home,” Oweiss said. But she added, “At least they will both be out of prison shackles.”

She said it would be easier for her as a mother if both had come home, but that it would be easier for the son being deported.

“Anywhere but prison,” she said.

The fate of Palestinian Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, who was “arrested” by Israeli forces last month after defiantly staying with his patients when his hospital was being attacked, featured strongly at yesterday’s medical professionals solidarity rally in Auckland.

The Israeli government bears full responsibility for the life of Dr Abu Safiya’s life amid alarming indications of torture and ill-treatment since his detention.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has received information that Dr Abu Safiya’s health has deteriorated due to the torture he endured during his detention, particularly while being held at the Sde Teyman military base in southern Israel.

• READ MORE: Israel orders patients, staff to ‘evacuate’ last two hospitals in northern Gaza siege – NZ protest
• Israel faces mounting pressure over detention of Gaza hospital chief
• Dr Hussam Abu Safiya profile – Frontline Defenders
• Who is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of key Gaza hospital detained by Israel?

Euro-Med Monitor warns of the grave risk to his life, following patterns of deliberate killings and deaths under torture previously suffered by other doctors and medical staff arrested from Gaza since October 2023.

Euro-Med Monitor has documented testimonies confirming that Israeli soldiers physically assaulted Dr Abu Safiya immediately after he left the hospital on Friday, 27 December 2024. He was then directly targeted with sound bombs while attempting to evacuate the hospital in compliance with orders from the Israeli army.

According to testimonies gathered by Euro-Med Monitor, the Israeli army subsequently transferred Dr Abu Safiya to a field interrogation site in the Al-Fakhura area of Jabalia Refugee Camp.

There, he was forced to strip off his clothes and was subjected to severe beatings, including being whipped with a thick wire commonly used for street electrical wiring. Soldiers deliberately humiliated him in front of other detainees, including fellow medical staff.

Transferred to Sde Teyman military camp
He was later taken to an undisclosed location before being transferred to the Sde Teyman military camp under Israeli army control.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has also received information from recently released detainees at the Sde Teyman military camp, confirming that Dr Abu Safiya was subjected to severe torture, leading to a significant deterioration in his health.

This occurred despite him already being wounded by Israeli air strikes on the hospital, where he worked tirelessly until the facility was stormed and set ablaze by Israeli forces.

The Israeli army has attempted to mislead the public regarding Dr Abu Safiya’s detention and torture.

Pro-Israeli media outlets circulated a misleading promotional video portraying his treatment as humane, even though he was tortured and humiliated immediately after filming.

Euro-Med Monitor warns of the severe implications of Israel’s denial of Dr Abu Safiya’s detention, describing this as a deeply troubling indicator of his fate and detention conditions. This denial also reflects a blatant disregard for binding legal standards.

Physicians for Human Rights — Israel (PHRI) submitted a request on behalf of Dr Abu Safiya’s family to obtain information and facilitate a lawyer’s visit on 2 January 2024. However, the Israeli authorities claimed to have no record of his detention, stating they had no indication of his arrest.

Deep concern over execution risk
Euro-Med Monitor expresses deep concern that Dr Abu Safiya may face execution during his detention, similar to the fate of Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, head of the orthopaedics department at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, who was killed under torture at Ofer Detention Centre on 19 April 2024.

Dr Al-Bursh had been detained along with colleagues from Al-Awda Hospital in December 2023.

Likewise, Dr Iyad Al-Rantisi, head of the obstetrics department at Kamal Adwan Hospital, was killed due to torture at an Israeli Shin Bet interrogation centre in Ashkelon, one week after his detention in November 2023. Israeli authorities concealed his death for more than seven months.

Dozens of doctors and medical staff remain subjected to arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance in Israeli prisons and detention centres, where they face severe torture and solitary confinement, according to testimonies from former detainees.

The detention of Dr Abu Safiya must be understood within the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has persisted for nearly 15 months. His arrest, torture, and potential execution form part of a broader strategy aimed at destroying the Palestinian people in Gaza — both physically and psychologically — and breaking their will.

This strategy includes not only the deliberate destruction of the health sector and the disruption of medical staff operations, particularly in northern Gaza, but also an attack on the symbolic and humanitarian role represented by Dr Abu Safiya.

Despite the grave crimes committed against Kamal Adwan Hospital, its staff, and patients, especially in the past two months, Dr Abu Safiya remained unwavering in his dedication to providing essential medical care and fulfilling his medical duties.

Call on states, UN to take immediate steps
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor calls on all concerned states, international entities, and UN bodies to take immediate and effective measures to secure the unconditional release of Dr Abu Safiya. His fundamental rights to life, physical safety, and dignity must be protected, shielding him from torture or any cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Euro-Med Monitor also urges international and local human rights organisations to be granted full access to visit Dr Abu Safiya, monitor his health condition, provide necessary medical treatment, and ensure he is free from human rights violations until his release.

Furthermore, Euro-Med Monitor reiterates its call for the United Nations to deploy an international investigative mission to examine the grave crimes and violations faced by Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.

It calls for the immediate release of those detained arbitrarily, for international and local organisations to be granted visitation rights, and for detainees to have access to legal representation.

Euro-Med Monitor expresses regret over the continued inaction of Alice Jill Edwards, the Special Rapporteur on Torture, who has failed to address these atrocities. It condemns her bias and deliberate negligence in fulfilling her mandate and calls for her dismissal.

A new Special Rapporteur who is neutral and committed to universal human rights principles must be appointed.

Additionally, Euro-Med Monitor urges the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to conduct immediate and thorough investigations into crimes committed by the Israeli military in Gaza.

Call for prosecution of Israeli crimes
It calls for direct engagement with victims and families, as well as for reports to be submitted to pave the way for investigative committees, fact-finding missions, and international courts to prosecute Israeli crimes, hold perpetrators accountable, and compensate victims in line with international law.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor renews its call for relevant states and entities to fulfil their legal obligations to halt the genocide in Gaza.

This includes imposing a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, holding it accountable for its crimes, and taking effective measures to protect Palestinian civilians. Immediate steps must also be taken to prevent forced displacement, ensure the return of residents, release arbitrarily detained Palestinians, and facilitate the urgent entry of life-saving humanitarian aid into Gaza without obstacles.

Finally, Euro-Med Monitor demands the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from the entire Gaza Strip.

Republished from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

On August 3, last Saturday, prisoner rights institutions and Palestinians all around the world were standing in solidarity with Gaza and Palestininian prisoners. This day is dedicated to highlighting Israeli crimes and violations of Palestinian prisoners’ rights and the continuing genocide in Gaza.

The machinery of brutality that punishes and tortures in secrecy in Israeli prisons must be brought to light.

Since October 7, Palestinian detainees have faced horrific crimes.

• READ MORE: Palestinian prisoners describe systemic abuse in Israel’s jails
• Other torture of Palestinians reports

Shortly after Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was cutting off food, water, electricity and fuel to Gaza, effectively announcing the start of the genocide, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir launched his own war against Palestinian political prisoners and detainees held in Israeli jails and camps, by declaring a policy of “overcrowding”.

Since then, the Israeli army and security services have launched mass arrest campaigns, which have swelled the number of Palestinian citizens from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to 9800.

At least 335 women and 680 children have been arrested. More than 3400 have been put under administrative detention — that is, they are held indefinitely without charge. Among them, there are 22 women and 40 children.

There has never been such a high number of administrative detainees since 1967.

Gaza arrests number unknown
Israel has also arrested an unknown number of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, possibly exceeding thousands, according to our humble estimates. They are held under the 2002 “Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law”, which allows the Israeli army to detain people without issuing a detention order.

Israeli prisons cut food rations for Palestinians to the point of starvation since 7 Oct.

Testimonies of freed prisoners reveal that Israeli authorities rapidly converted more than a dozen prison facilities into a network of torture camps for Palestinian detainees. >> pic.twitter.com/BzciJGfzGY

— B’Tselem בצלם بتسيلم (@btselem) August 7, 2024

Under Ben-Gvir’s orders, the already grave conditions in Israeli prisons have been made even worse. The prison authorities sharply reduced food rations and water, closing down the small shops where Palestinian detainees could purchase food and other necessities.

They also cut off water and power and even reduced the time allocated to using the restrooms. Prisoners are also prohibited from showering, which has resulted in the spread of diseases, especially skin-related ones like scabies.

There have been reports of Palestinian prisoners being deprived of medical care.

The systematic malnutrition and dehydration Palestinian prisoners are facing has taken a toll. The few that are released leave detention centres in horrific physical condition.

Even the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that such weaponisation of food is “unacceptable”.

The use of torture, including rape and beatings, has become widespread. There have been shocking reports about prison guards urinating on detainees, torturing them with electric shock and using dogs to sexually assault them.

Human shield detainees
There have been even testimonies of Israeli forces using detainees as human shields during combat in Gaza.

The systemic use of torture and other ill-treatment has predictably gone as far as extrajudicial killings.

According to a recent report by Hebrew daily Haaretz, 48 Palestinians have died in detention centres. Among them is Thaer Abu Asab, who was brutally beaten by Israeli prison guards in Ketziot Prison, and died of his injuries at the age of 38.

According to Haaretz, 36 Gaza detainees have also died in the Sde Teiman camp. Testimonies from Israeli medical staff working at the detention centre have revealed horrific conditions for Palestinians held there.

Detainees are reportedly often operated on without anaesthesia and some have had to have their limbs amputated because they were shackled even when sleeping or receiving treatment.

Palestinians who have been released have said what they were subject to was more horrific than what they had heard took place at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo detention centres, where American forces tortured and forcibly disappeared Arabs and other Muslim men.

They have also testified that some detainees were killed through torture and severe beatings. One prisoner from Bethlehem, Moazaz Obaiat, who was released in July, has alleged that Ben-Gvir personally took part in torturing him.

Denied lawyer, family visits
Israeli authorities have denied prisoners visits by lawyers, family, and even medics, including the International Committee of the Red Cross. They have carried out acts of collective punishment, destroying the homes of their families, arresting their relatives and holding them hostage, and illegally transferring some to secret detention camps and military bases without disclosing their fate, which constitutes the crime of enforced disappearance.

Despite condemnations from various human rights orgaisations, Ben-Gvir and the rest of the Israeli governing coalition have doubled down on these policies. “[Prisoners] should be killed with a shot to the head and the bill to execute Palestinian prisoners must be passed in the third reading in the Knesset […]

“Until then, we will give them minimal food to survive. I don’t care,” Ben-Gvir said on July 1.

Electric shocks, rape, and torture to death.. Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons face serious violations, with some families receiving news of their deaths weeks later.

Euro-Med Monitor regularly documents dozens of testimonies from released Palestinian detainees and… pic.twitter.com/o04T1JS9bG

— Euro-Med Monitor (@EuroMedHR) August 7, 2024

By using mass detention, Israel, the occupying power, has systematically destroyed Palestinian social, economic and psychological fabric since 1967. Over one million Palestinians have been arrested since then, thousands have been held hostage for extended periods under administrative detention and 255 detainees have died in Israeli prisons.

Israeli crimes against the Palestinians did not begin in October 2023, but are a continuation of a systematic process of ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and apartheid that began even before 1948.

But Israel’s colonial regime overlooks the Palestinian people’s resilience. Inspired by the experiences of the free nations of Ireland, South Africa and Vietnam, we draw strength from our determination to achieve our right to self-determination, freedom and independence.

This is why on this day, August 3, we urged the world to collectively protest against Israeli occupation crimes and racist laws and we call on governments to uphold their legal duties to prevent such crimes from happening.

Political prisoners solidarity
We also called on unions, universities, parliaments and political parties to effectively participate in large-scale events, demonstrations and digital campaigns in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners.

The international community should hold the occupying power to account by imposing a complete arms embargo on it, applying economic sanctions, and suspending its UN membership.

They should also nullify bilateral agreements, and halt Israel’s participation in international forums and events until it abides by international law and human rights. The international community must compel Israel to protect civilians according to its obligations as an occupying power.

Israel must also reveal the identities and conditions of people it has forcibly disappeared. We demand an end to arbitrary and administrative detention policies. The bodies of those who have died inside and outside prisons must also be released, and all prisoners must receive legal protection.

Israel, the occupying power, is under the obligation to allow special rapporteurs, United Nations experts, and the International Criminal Court prosecutor to visit Palestine, inspect prisons and deliver justice for the victims, including material and moral compensation.

Israel must not be allowed to get away with these horrific crimes.