Gaza Flotilla Update: “Torturous Conditions” in Israeli Custody
Interview with UK Journalist
HAVANA TIMES – Global condemnation is mounting as hundreds of international activists remain in Israeli prison days after Israel’s military raided and captured dozens of boats in the Global Sumud Flotilla. Reuters reports at least 170 flotilla activists, of the more than 400 arrested, have been deported from Israel. Many have described torture and mistreatment in Israeli custody. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg told Swedish officials she was held in a cell infested with bedbugs and deprived of food and water. Turkish activist Ersin Çelik told the Anadolu news agency that guards had “dragged little Greta by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag.”
Kieran Andrieu is a British Palestinian journalist who was recently deported to Britain after being detained aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla. Andrieu says that activists faced torturous conditions in Israeli prisons. “They were throwing people’s medicine in the bin in front of them and laughing in their faces,” he says. “They were totally and utterly insensitive to the possibilities of any of us dying.”
Transcript
NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Nermeen Shaikh in New York, with Amy Goodman in San Francisco.
AMY GOODMAN: Global condemnation is mounting as hundreds of international activists remain in Israeli prison days after Israel’s military raided and captured dozens of boats on the Global Sumud Flotilla. The flotilla set sail in late August in an effort to break Israel’s siege and starvation campaign in Gaza. Reuters reports at least 170 flotilla activists, of the more than 450 arrested, have been deported from Israel.
Many have described torture and mistreatment in Israeli custody. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who is reportedly being deported from Israel to Greece today, told Swedish officials she was being held in a cell infested with bed bugs and deprived of food and water. The Turkish activist Ersin Çelik told Anadolu Agency, news agency, that Greta had been, quote, “dragged by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her as a warning to others,” he said.
This is Spanish activist Nestor Prieto as he arrived back in Madrid Sunday with a group of activists deported from Israel.
NESTOR PRIETO: [translated] A 75-year-old colleague was asking for insulin for three days, and officers said they didn’t have medicine for animals in jail. Another Mexican colleague was asking for medicines for a cardiac disease, saying it was urgent, and they said it would only be urgent when her heart stopped.
AMY GOODMAN: The flotilla members were greeted with cheers at the Madrid airport. This is the Dutch Palestinian activist Marco Tesh, who was also deported to Spain over the weekend.
MARCO TESH: They are not giving any medical support to the prisoners there. The people has been kidnapped from international water, and Israel is mistreating everyone, but especially the people with Arabic or Muslim background. Me, myself, I’m from Palestinian origin. I was mistreated the first day. I was almost like I couldn’t breathe anymore, because they got something on my face, and they tied my hand to the back.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: This comes as CBS News reports Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly approved Israeli military strikes on at least two flotilla vessels last month, when, according to two U.S. intelligence officials speaking anonymously, Israeli forces launched drones from a submarine and dropped incendiary devices onto the boats, that were anchored off Tunisia’s port of Sidi Bou Said, prompting a fire. International experts have denounced Israel’s attacks on the flotilla and its civilian passengers as a war crime.
For more, we go to London, where we’re joined by Kieran Andrieu, a British Palestinian journalist with Novara Media who was on board the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza. He was live-streaming on the sailing boat Adara when the Israeli military intercepted it. He was just released from Israeli prison and deported over the weekend.
Kieran, welcome to Democracy Now! So, explain what happened, your experience joining the flotilla, and then what happened subsequently.
KIERAN ANDRIEU: Well, thank you for having me on.
The flotilla experience itself was long and arduous. It went on more than twice as long than anybody had initially expected. But one thing really held us together and really drove us forward, however many logistical setbacks, logistical challenges or drone attacks. Interesting to hear that Netanyahu has now admitted to the Tunisian drone attacks, by the way. That’s the first time I’m hearing that. But through all of these trials and tribulations, the thing that really, really held us together was our love for Palestine, for the people of Gaza, and the bonds of loyalty and solidarity that we developed among ourselves on the boats. So, though the journey on the flotilla across the Mediterranean from Barcelona to Gaza was long and episodic, those things drove us forward.
Once we got there, everything changed. And I can talk you through my experience now. So, initially, the interception of the IDF on the boats was what we would call a soft interception, which is to say they didn’t use the violence that would have been available to them, had they wanted to. They were all carrying machine guns and so on. But nobody was physically hurt. Nobody’s physical integrity was compromised on the boats, as far as I’m aware, at least, for the interception. Nonetheless, it’s important to stress that even if it’s a soft or light interception, it’s still illegal. It’s still illegal to kidnap us in international waters and take us to the Port of Ashdod in Israel, because we were 70 nautical miles, in my case, in international waters. Nonetheless, when we got to — when we got to Israel, when we got to Ashdod, that’s when the violence really began.
So, I was dragged out of the boat by my collar and chucked on the floor, cut my knee open. And the first thing I saw as we were dragged out, or I was dragged out, was 300 people kneeling with their hands behind their backs, facing straight down at the concrete, outside of the Port of Ashdod. They were forced to stay there, in some cases, for six hours. I was forced to stay there for about two-and-a-half hours on my knees with my hands behind my back, before I was processed in the Ashdod center and sent to the prison in the Negev Desert, which we can get onto the conditions of in a moment.
At that point, Ben-Gvir, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was brought out so that he could parade in front of us. And I think the assumption — and I want to emphasize this — I think the assumption was that we would be cowed, that we would be fearful, that we would stay quiet. And actually, that’s not what happened. And what happened sets the tone for what then carried on in the prison, which is that everybody, as soon as we saw Ben-Gvir, 300 people on their knees — in fear, no doubt — started shouting, “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” calling him a génocidaire and a baby killer and so on. And he was really shocked. You could see that Ben-Gvir was stunned by that. His people, the police, they were all stunned by it. They expected us to be cowed, and we weren’t.
Then I was processed through the center. It took about three or four hours. And they said to me, “No immediate deportation. Even if you want to be immediately deported, you’re going to prison.” So, they bound our hands with cable ties very tightly. In my case — not everybody had it as tight as me. In my case, I was genuinely concerned that my fingers were going to drop off after several hours of having my hands bound this tightly. And I was having to maneuver them and maneuver them as carefully as I could to try and get blood to my fingers over the three or four hours that I had this cable tie on my wrists.
We were transported to a prison in the Negev Desert. I only found out when I asked a British consul general, who came to visit us, “Where are we?” He said, “We’re in the Negev Desert.” I had no idea until that point. We were transferred in a police bus. They pumped freezing cold air onto the bus while our hands were tied, took two hours to get to the Negev Desert. Then they transferred us to the prison. And that’s where — I think this is where the really torturous conditions started to begin.
We were 10 to a cell. We were in cells without drinking water. For the whole time that I was there, which was two days, we weren’t given any drinking water whatsoever. We had to drink out of a tap that was producing brown water. There was one toilet between 10 people, not in a good condition, as you can imagine, no toilet paper initially. I had to beg after 24 hours with one guard, who gave us toilet paper after my continuous interventions and attempts.
The most egregious thing of all, though, Amy, is that they were throwing people’s medicine in the bin in front of them and laughing in their faces. And I’m not just talking about people who, like myself, need a medicine called propranolol, which is just a beta blocker to regulate heart rate. I can live without that for a few days — and indeed, I was forced to. We’re talking about people who are HIV-positive and need their meds for that. We’re talking about 75-year-old men and women who need medicine for their heart conditions, who may drop dead at any moment if they don’t have that medicine. We’re talking about a good friend of mine, who’s still there, I believe, Tommy Marcus — he’s still incarcerated — who needs his medicine to regulate potential seizures. And if he doesn’t get his medicine, he could keel over and die at any moment. We told them this over and over and over again. We pleaded with them from our cells, because we didn’t get yard time, by the way. We were kept in our cells all the time that we were there, except to be transferred to see the British — in my case, the British consular. We told them, “People are going to die.” Individuals pleaded with them, “I need my medication for this. It’s my human right. Where are our lawyers?” etc., etc. They laughed in our faces. They spat on the floor. They did not care.
Just a couple of other brief horror stories for you. The food we were given was infested with insects. I mean, it was almost inedible anyway, but it was also infested with insects, for good measure.
Several people saw women have their hijabs ripped off their heads violently by Israeli police officers and then forced to crawl without their hijabs on in front of other men, Israeli police officers. One of the women that I was deported with told me what was going on — because men and women were separated, by the way — what was going on in the women’s quarters.
One young woman has a problem where her blood doesn’t clot. And she was on her period. They refused her any sanitary towels and any medication to handle her condition. And she’s anemic, so she almost died, bleeding out in her prison cell, with her comrades around her unable to do anything to help her, because no matter what they said to the Israeli prison guards — women prison guards, in this case — no matter how they pleaded with them, they were totally and utterly insensitive to the possibilities of any of us dying.
AMY GOODMAN: Kieran, I want to thank you for this very descriptive report. And Kieran Andrieu is a Palestinian British journalist for Novara Media. He’s been speaking to us from London, where he was just deported to.
And this latest news: Reuters is reporting that Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been released from Israeli prison, will be deported to Greece, according to Israel’s foreign minister. There was a tweet that just came in from the Sumud Flotilla, and it said that well over a hundred activists are being deported to both Greece and Slovakia. Nermeen?