‘Most relentlessly cruel’: Gaza flotilla activists tell harrowing accounts of abuse in Israeli custody
New Zealand activist Mousa Taher, who was part of the Gaza-bound Global Sumud humanitarian aid flotilla, which was attacked and intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters, said he was subjected to humiliating treatment and torture after being detained.
Activists from the flotilla spoke to Anadolu after arriving at Istanbul Airport aboard three Turkish Airlines flights.
Taher said that after previously being detained by Israeli forces in Greece, he travelled first to Istanbul and then to Marmaris before once again setting sail toward Gaza.
“The Israeli occupation forces really tortured me this time,” he said.
Pointing to injuries on his face and leg, Taher said Israeli soldiers recognised him and addressed him by name because it was his second attempt to join the flotilla.
He said that when Israeli forces intercepted the boat he had joined for the second time, they forced him and another activist to strip on board, while other passengers were not subjected to the same treatment.
Taher added that Israeli soldiers bound him so tightly with plastic zip ties that he cried and pleaded with them to stop, but they instead tightened the restraints further while stepping on his hand.
“Then he put his boot on my face and took a picture like he had captured an animal,” he said.
Taher said the Israeli soldier who tortured him asked whether he hated him.
“I told him, ‘No. I hope for you to be guided. I want goodness for you,’ even while he was torturing me,” he said.
He said he was later transferred to a prison-like ship, where he lost consciousness after being severely beaten.
“They punched me and punched me. I woke up and I didn’t know where I was or what was happening,” he said.
He added that Israeli soldiers continued kicking and beating him before conditions eased slightly inside the prison facility.
“They humiliated us. They want us to feel small. They made us crawl on the ground just to make us feel like we are nothing,” Taher said.
“I honestly felt in my heart these people are really evil,” he added.
‘They have no love in their heart’
Taher said his father was Palestinian but that he was raised by his non-Muslim mother and converted to Islam about 20 years ago after learning about Al-Aqsa Mosque, located in occupied East Jerusalem.
He said that as a child, he could not understand how Jews were killed during World War II without the world intervening.
“Now I know, because people love themselves more than they love other people. They love their luxuries and their lives, and they don’t want anything to change their life,” he said.
Taher called on people to “put themselves in the place of those living under occupation in Gaza”.
“What if it was your family who was killed? Then what would you do?” he said.
He stressed that not all Jews and Israelis were bad people and condemned attacks targeting Jewish communities.
“This is the same thing the Israelis do by saying all Palestinians or all Muslims are bad. Not all Jews are bad. Not everybody in Israel is bad. If we do this, then we become like them,” he said.
He described the Israeli government as “evil” and said some Israeli soldiers lacked compassion but added that he had not lost hope.
“I’ve seen with my own eyes that they have no love in their heart. But I don’t give up hope. Maybe some of them can come back,” he said.
‘They kept escalating violence’
Mauritanian activist Isselmou Ould Maloum also spoke about what he described as constant violence used by Israeli soldiers.
“Every time they use violence and it doesn’t solve a problem, they use more violence. That tells us how weak they are,” Maloum said.
He said many activists suffered broken ribs but stressed that the violence they experienced was minor compared to the abuse Palestinians face in Israeli prisons.
“While the world’s eye is trained on the suffering of our participants, we cannot emphasise enough that this is a mere glimpse of the brutality Israel imposes daily on Palestinian hostages,” the Global Sumud Flotilla’s official account said on X, describing that its activists had suffered at least 15 cases of sexual assault, broken bones and rubber bullets at close range.
Maloum said the Israeli military had no strategy other than violence against Palestinians and had treated the activists in the same way.
He added that Israel continued escalating its use of force even when it failed to achieve results.
Maloum said this was his first time joining a boat mission to deliver aid to Gaza, adding that fellow activists who had participated in earlier flotillas told him the level of violence had increased.
He stressed that activists would not stop sailing toward Gaza with aid ships and would continue protest marches until Palestinians achieved freedom.
“We’re here to help Gazans to basically bring some relief. That’s medication and food for Gazans who need it. But the liberation of Palestine is going to be done at the hand of Palestinians,” he said.
‘Forced to kneel for several hours’
American activist Gregory Terry called the detention “a miserable process in which I encountered … the most relentlessly vindictive and cruel people I’ve ever met in my entire life”.
“Imagine what they’re doing with the Palestinian prisoners they’re holding right now,” he said. “They are systematically torturing, raping, beating those people, because they don’t see them as human.”
He said he, too, was beaten, but several of his fellow activists “had it much worse”.
“Many people were repeatedly tased, many people had their arms broken … We were forced to kneel for several hours at a time.”
Terry added, “I think we got a glancing blow, a fraction of the ludicrous violence that the Zionists are capable of and happy to commit. They love to hurt people.”
‘I thought I was going to drown’
Australia’s Juliet Lamont said Israeli forces stepped up violence time this around.
“I was on the last mission and there … was sexual assault and there was physical violence. But, this time it was much more,” she said.
Lamont said she was on one of the prison boats were 180 people were “systematically bashed and beaten”.
“We had 40 people who had broken ribs, we had 12 sexual assaults, we had people who were tasered in the face. People were syringed with unknown sedatives … We were tortured.”
Sharing her own ordeal, she recalled: “I was put down, cable-tied. They put so much water under me for an hour that I thought I was going to drown. I was sexually assaulted in a kind of a torture chamber. And five men were bashing me and smashing my face, and then it just continued for the whole time.”
Lamont said, “It was a relentless and very targeted and very planned campaign of violence, so that we wouldn’t come back.”
“They have broken our bones, but they haven’t broken our soul. And now that I have met them, I know that they don’t have a soul. So we are much stronger than them. Free Palestine.”
Header image: This screen grab taken from footage released on Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s X account on May 20, 2026 shows shows a detained activist from the Gaza-bound aid flotilla being escorted by security forces with their hands tied behind their backs. — AFP
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