A flotilla activist recounts his detention after Israeli forces intercepted a Gaza-bound solidarity mission at sea.
They had just pushed Eleni next to me, forcing her to her knees, her face squeezed against the cold metallic container.
She turned to me and whispered, “How are you?”
“Been better, to be honest,” I thought to myself. That’s all I could think of, as if a mediocre attempt at humour might make the guards looming over us disappear. But I said nothing. I nodded back at her before being dragged around 90 degrees to face someone typing on a computer. The person opposite me was in a face mask, like they all were, a desk-based commando who wanted to know my first and last name, my birthdate, and my passport number.
But I didn’t have my passport. It had been left on our sailboat with the others. We were held at gunpoint by commandos who were unambiguous: No personal items, no shoes, no passports.
We were part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of more than 50 sailboats carrying activists in an act of solidarity and providing symbolic humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.
We set off on Thursday, May 14, from Marmaris, Turkiye, for Gaza in a bid to challenge Israel’s illegal naval blockade. But on the following Monday afternoon, May 18, Israeli naval forces intercepted our vessel, La Sirena, in international waters near Cyprus. Over the next two days, they boarded all of our boats, detaining 428 activists from more than 45 countries. The seven of us on board La Sirena were taken at gunpoint and transferred to the Nahshon, one of the two Israeli military landing crafts converted into floating prisons for the operation.
The name Nahshon is sometimes linked to the Hebrew word for serpent, and it belongs to a figure from the Book of Exodus – the leader who, according to Midrash, initiated the Hebrews’ passage through the Red Sea. So we had become prisoners on a ship named for a man who walked into the sea to free his people – held captive in the name of liberation by those who had turned that legacy into a tool of siege.
The desk-based commando opposite me didn’t seem bothered by the symbolism. He simply wanted to know my passport number. But I couldn’t remember it, and we had to settle on my name and nationality. There was something almost procedural about how I was being processed at that moment. What I didn’t know was that it would be the last moment of that ordeal, more than 50 hours in all, that wasn’t governed by deliberate cruelty.
Soon after, I was thrown into a metal shipping container that the soldiers had repurposed as a processing chamber, or so it seemed at first. But then, a leg, possibly a knee, took me to my own knees. As I fell, a hard blow landed on my left ear, and I heard nothing but buzzing. I was being beaten – and then, seconds later, I was spinning towards a white door on the right, still on my knees, like a human pinball.
I flew through a door and landed in a compound. At first, I must have mirrored the terrified gaze I saw on others’ faces when they exited after me. We were all convinced that we had just entered the next level of whatever this place was.
Immediately, I was greeted with soothing hugs, sips of water and the warm gazes of those who went through the container before me. Together, we spent minutes that turned into hours, listening to the repetitive cacophony of sounds coming from behind the white door.
Kicks and screams were followed by the buzz of Taser guns, more screams, bangs on the metal container, and yet more screams. At the end of each cycle, the white door flew open, revealing a comrade rolling or limping, holding their chest or head or pulling their pants up, always with the same look of terror.
“What level of hell have I just entered?” they seemed to wonder.
The compound we landed in was open to the elements. It was outlined by six containers arranged in a rectangle. Four of them were accessible to us, two on each long side, while the remaining two formed the short ends and were sealed shut. One was reserved for the wounded, one was already filled to the brim, and another was what I understood to be a torture container.
To get out of the cold, we made our way towards the fourth, the one opposite the white door we had all just been spat out of, slowly venturing past the black tape on the floor just past its entrance. We were warned by comrades who came through before us that our captors didn’t want us crossing that line; they wanted us outside and crammed as far away from the white door as possible. But we made it in.
From there, I could see a sticker on the container door. “F*** Hamas,” it read, along with Israeli and US flags. There was a guard at each of the four corners of the deck above, always pointing their guns straight towards us in the compound. Over our entire prison journey, these guards never said a word. A metallic tube protruded beside the guard opposite the torture container, rising and curving into an L that leaned towards us, pointing straight into the compound. All night long, the guards opposite our container would flash strobe lights and point the laser beams of their weapons at comrades unfortunate enough to be crammed next to the container opening.
The bangs and screams as comrades were spat out of the white door continued for hours. Some of us retreated into the container; others remained in the compound. Towards the end of that first day – whatever a “day” or an “end” might mean under these circumstances – some news arrived.
Some of our comrades had caught sight of birds, possibly pigeons. With that, we rationalised that because pigeons were land birds that never strayed too far from shore, it must have meant we were approaching land.
A little later, a female comrade from France walked into our container, triumphant and cautious in equal measure, unable to suppress a grin. It wasn’t just the pigeons – someone had also spotted a couple of guards trying on lifejackets. We were approaching land – that was now clear. She suggested that we start packing our belongings and discreetly get ready without letting our captors know, but most of us didn’t have much with us.
Her message: Don’t get too excited, but allow yourself a sigh and a slight grin.
To terrify us, our captors stormed into the compound several times, each with a loud bang. The door would swing open, and stun grenades were thrown randomly towards us – into an opening, onto bodies; it really didn’t matter. The Israeli naval commandos would form a wall with their shields, and with their guns protruding at us, another stun grenade and then another. We would crouch together at the far corner away from the white door, trying to stay safe and as far away from our captors as possible.
But moments after our French comrade triumphantly announced our imminent departure, the door swung open once again. We heard two bangs from the stun grenades, and our captors formed their usual shield wall. There we were, once again in our small corner, but this time something was different. Our captors stayed around, and they ordered us all into a container for the first time. I could not stop grinning on the inside. I sensed that something had changed. I considered the pigeon, the lifejackets, the cramming. Surely, we were going home, I thought.
Our captors were looking for a volunteer or two to clean up our rubbish. They wanted us to sweep the place clean before we left. Two people put their hands up. The rest of us would have happily helped had we been asked to do so – or had we been given the chance. Why wouldn’t we? We were going home at last.
The two volunteers picked up all the rubbish and stacked it in a corner. We, in turn, were stacked inside our container, where we struggled to breathe. We devised a clever system where we took turns walking in front of the opening of the container. At some point, as we walked around in circles, I missed our captors retreating through their usual white door.
They left behind
📰 மூல செய்தி (Source): https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/6/7/fifty-two-hours-on-an-israeli-prison-ship?traffic_source=rss
