Multiple Gaza flotilla activists describe severe violence and psychological torment while in Israeli detention.
Injured activists from the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla, detained by Israeli forces after their vessels were intercepted in international waters in the Mediterranean, gather upon arrival at Istanbul Airport on May 21, 2026, in Istanbul, Turkey.
(Burak Kara / Getty Images)
As hundreds of activists from the latest voyage of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) and Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) returned to their homes around the world, multiple participants reported that Israeli authorities physically and psychologically abused them in a systematic manner reminiscent of the mistreatment that Palestinian political prisoners are subjected to every day. I spoke with a few of these activists—who had set out to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza—and they all described serious injuries inflicted on them by Israeli authorities.
Starting on May 18, Israel intercepted dozens of boats and abducted about 430 activists who were carrying aid to a besieged and starving Gaza, as part of a now decades-long mission started by the FFC. The abductions occurred over two days in international waters, dozens of miles away from the coast of Palestine. Activists were then transported from their boats to Ashdod port in Israel on “prison ships” with makeshift holding areas constructed from shipping containers and barbed wire, without any information on when and where they would arrive. The excruciating journey lasted up to two days.
Cássio Pelegrini, a Brazilian pediatrician who was aboard the GSF boat Hawsha , told me that Israeli authorities beat him until they broke a rib, and then continued to beat him despite his fracture. “They started intercepting us really far from the Palestine coast, so they could have more time to perpetrate the violence, ” Pelegrini told me. “All the violence happens there, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the ocean, when nobody is watching.”
Ariadne Telles, also from Brazil, told me that her hands were zip-tied so tight that she fractured her radius bone. Mecid Bağçivan, from Turkey, said that he was shot with a rubber bullet at close range and wound up needing reparative surgery. Amrou Ibrahim, a US citizen who was aboard the FFC boat Adalah , told me they were violently beaten up three separate times while in Israeli custody.
Pelegrini said his vessel was the second to last to be intercepted, about 90 nautical miles away from Gaza. He was then moved to a prison ship that detainees dubbed the “torture boat” (the GSF believes this is the US-built-and-funded naval ship the INS Nahshon ). “After a passport check, they took me to a dark container,” Pelegrini told me. “There were five soldiers with flashlights on their heads and lasers. They asked me to sit. They started kicking me and punching me with guns. I felt my rib being broken, and I stood up instinctively. They asked me to sit again and started beating me again really hard, and then they asked me to stand up and pull my pants down, and they poured more water on me, and then they asked me to put my pants back on again, and they threw me inside.”
Pelegrini said that Israeli soldiers poured water on him multiple times to keep him cold in the damp, dark containers of the ship. Many others had their warm clothes taken from them. Everyone was subjected to some level of cruelty. “We tried to sleep to get some rest, but it was a nightmare. There were 188 people divided in three containers. There wasn’t space for everybody, and also with the fractures, we couldn’t find a comfortable position,” he said. Pelegrini and others on board started to take a tally of the incidents that happened on this military vessel alone; they counted 35 fractures, 22 taser injuries on the head and neck, and 10 cases of sexual violence.
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“The harder people screamed, the more [the Israeli authorities] enjoyed it, and the harder and longer they beat you. If you didn’t react, they would eventually get bored,” Ibrahim, who was transported to Ashdod port on a second prison ship separate from Pelegrini, told me. “You could hear screams of torture all around you, and everything was meant to break you and degrade you.”
“I have a fracture in my hand, my radius bone, because they zip-tied my hands until it smashed the nerves and broke my bone,” Telles told me. She said she thinks she was treated this way because she protested the violent assault of her comrades. When she saw Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, who can be seen taunting flotilla activists in a now widely circulated video, she screamed that he was a terrorist and criminal. “They are very sadistic. They enjoy the violence they are doing to us,” she said. Telles and Pelegrini said that the Israelis were particularly violent with people of color, people from the Global South, Muslims, and anti-Zionist Jews.
After arriving at the Ashdod port, Pelegrini was violently be…
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