Zeteo contributor Alex Colston, who was released from Israeli detention a week ago, breaks down the torture and other abuse Israel inflicted on Global Sumud Flotilla activists beyond the camera’s view
By Alex Colston, reposted from Zeteo, May 28, 2026
I stepped off the plane in Istanbul last Thursday, still in grey Israeli military prison garb, after three days in Israeli captivity, but I didn’t yet know the world had gotten a glimpse of the treatment my fellow detainees had faced. I didn’t yet know that European nations had summoned Israel’s top diplomats in their respective countries in protest. I didn’t yet know that Israeli leaders had put out obviously disingenuous statements condemning National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversaw our detention.
What I did know is that, along with more than 425 others who were aboard the latest Global Sumud Flotilla trying to break Israel’s siege of Gaza, I had endured abuse far worse than the last time we were detained, and yet this was only a small fraction of what Palestinians have endured for decades.
Watching the video posted by Ben-Gvir that went viral during our detention, and that perhaps helped to secure our release, I was struck by how little of the Israeli violence against the flotilla participants was actually documented in Ben-Givir’s self-serving depiction.
True, he had publicized a typical kind of domineering Israeli attitude about whomever the country imprisons and holds captive, but that is nothing new: Israeli officials often publicly gloat about their right to extreme, and often murderous, state violence, and for anyone on the other side of their guns, this also manifests in the comportment of the Israeli military and Israeli settlers. Yet still, the scenes on the ground that day – and the testimonies of what happened beyond the camera’s view – were more harrowing and terrorizing than the public could glean from that one video.
Here’s what I experienced and witnessed:
Before the Video – The Interception
The interception began at around 9am on May 18. By the next day, more than 50 boats had been violently boarded, with Israeli forces detaining hundreds of participants on Israeli military ships, including one that eventually became known by those detained on it as the “torture boat.”
This honorific was bestowed in light of the fact that most of the broken bones, concussions, and sexual violence were inflicted from the moment participants arrived on board, with many people testifying to constant beatings while being processed, and then in the private quarters of the ship, as Israelis regularly dropped flash bangs, shot rubber bullets, and doused the participants in skunk water.
Though the prison boat I was on was less brutal, I saw at least two people shot with bean bag rounds and rubber bullets. One person was shot twice at point-blank range, and a second person had the payload from a bullet buried into their inner thigh. They bled throughout the detainment. Almost immediately, it was clear that compared to the previous interceptions, this one would be worse.
During the mid-journey interception in April, one of the Israeli Naval commandos had said to me then, “I wish you could go to Gaza. In Gaza, I could kill you. Fuck Gaza. Fuck them.” During the later interception, one relatively contrite commando asked me in disbelief, “Do you really think we are the bad guys?” I responded, “no question, look at yourself, look at what you’re doing.”
I was one of the few on my ship who had been zip-tied immediately, and another commando had placed me on my back near the side of the sailboat; he put his foot on me and joked about kicking me overboard. I wondered if it was possible to swim with my hands tied behind my back.
Once on the Israeli prison boats, we didn’t know where we were ultimately going. From within the boat’s container walls, none of us could see the horizon, but once I saw cranes looming above the Israeli military vessel – where we had been crammed in squalid conditions – I recognized the Israeli port, which is the primary logistics hub for weapon shipments to the country. I whispered to someone next to me, “So we’re again going to Ashdod then, and probably to prison.”
What the Video Didn’t Capture
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose national security ministry was created uniquely for him and who is the primary architect of the torturous Israel Prison Service, would again supervise the grueling detainment of flotilla activists in Israeli custody.
Ben-Gvir’s own judgment of the flotilla participants, from this mission and the previous ones, is no secret, and he was blunt in his estimation of what Israel should have done to the participants, saying in his now infamous social media video taken at Ashdod, “I say to Prime Minister Netanyahu, give them to me for a long, long time, give them to us for the terrorist prisons,” likely referring to places like Sde Teiman and Ofer Prison – two places notorious for their torturous abuse of Palestinian political prisoners.
The national warden of the Israeli prison system – where Palestinians have long testified to torture, abuse, deprivation, rape, and all manner of inhumane brutality – Ben-Gvir continues to stand in the way of any independent investigations into Israel’s prison conditions. On Wednesday, according to Haaretz, he again blocked state inspectors from visiting the Israel Prison Service’s institutions.
Ben-Gvir had visited us at Ashdod when the 2025 mission was intercepted. That previous time, he arrived with his social media posse to the open tarmac in front of the port authority building, where we had been placed in rows and contorted into the prone “stress positions” that are uniformly, constantly, and brutally enforced by Israeli forces to subdue and exhaust their detainees.
Flanked by Israeli soldiers, he did his typical song and dance for the Israeli public as he was filmed by his underlings, calling us terrorists and haters of Israel, and the participants responded in kind by chanting “Free Palestine” and by singing the anti-fascist folk song “Bella Ciao.” Comparatively speaking, those acts of collective resistance were relatively tolerated by the Israeli authorities then. No such tolerance in Israeli captivity was on display when taken by the Israelis this time.
In fact, the reception had been deliberately planned to be more cruel and forbidding, with the tarmac outfitted with a labyrinth of tent stations. Israeli Transport Minister Miri Regev posted a video tour through the maze with the eerie sound of the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, being sung by a chorus of children over the loudspeakers.
The song played on a loop in the tents and could be heard above the screams of the participants as they were abused. In the video, Regev says, “Do you hear the music? This is how we receive terror supporters.” Journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin commented on the video, writing, “With all eyes on Ben-Gvir, it bears repeating: he is not an anomaly in Israeli society or even in the cabinet.”
According to one estimate, in the 2022 legislative elections, one-third of Israeli soldiers voted for Ben-Gvir, a person convicted on terrorism charges and who is the leader of the fascist Jewish Power, a political party motivated by the fanatically racist “Kahanist” Israeli political tendency that openly advocates for “Death to the Arabs.”
Ben-Gvir’s apparent command to inflict as much violence on the flotilla participants as befits accused “terrorists” likely had enthusiastic assent from the Israeli Naval commandos, guards, and police who manhandled participants on the prison boats, at Ashdod, and in Ktzi’ot prison.
In the first tent where flotilla participants were taken for processing, concealed from the eyes of the press and public, participants were slammed to the ground and systematically beaten and tased. In my case, two guards threw me to the ground and kicked me repeatedly as they checked my passport, with one saying, “Trump is King.
He is Israel’s greatest champion,” when he realized I was a U.S. citizen, while the other asked me why I hated Israel as he kicked me. I thought the question answered itself with his kick, but I couldn’t breathe at the moment to answer why.
I saw someone to my right being tased, as I was lifted up solely by the zip ties on my wrists, straining my shoulders so severely that I had to pull my arms forward to keep them from dislocating, which only tightened the cuffs more. Then, as my prescription glasses fell off my face (I never got those back), I was carried through the narrow vista for the press to take photos.
I arrived at the main tent, the primary staging area for the captives and the makeshift theater for Ben-Gvir’s broadcasted antics. In his video, Ben-Gvir ambles between rows of detainees, taunting and menacing them, as he waves an Israeli flag, saying, “Welcome to Israel. We are the landlords here.” In the opening shot of the video, Irish GSF organizer Catriona Graham chants “Free Palestine,” and the guards tell her to shut up as she is pushed to the ground in her cuffs.
I had been taken to a corner of the tent, and again placed in the typical stress position with my hands tied behind my back and my passport between my fingers, though my hands had started to go numb, and I kept dropping it. A bag of clothes had been tossed in front of me, so I tried to place my head on it. When I saw someone struggling to my left, I pushed the bag over to her with my forehead to perhaps provide some relief.
A foot away from me to my right, someone was doubled over onto their side, so I tried to scoot over to him and ask him how I could help him. He said he had three broken ribs, and we tried to call out for a doctor. When I got close to him to help him find a more comfortable position, an Israeli guard came over and kicked me and put his hands on my neck to drag me back to where I was initially.
He then placed his foot between my arms on my cuffs and stepped down on them to inflict pain, demanding that I stay in one place. Eventually, my hamstrings simply gave out, and I fell over onto my side, where I lay while I heard another person screaming, “My hands, look what you did to my hands.” As more people filed in with serious wounds and broken bones, and as people were passing out, people across the tent yelled for help. In his social media video, Ben-Gvir can be heard telling Israeli guards, “Do not be bothered by their screams.”
Eventually, we were processed in the port authority building, where we were subjected to more abuse and sadism from our Israeli escorts, including at least two strip searches. In the second search, I was stripped naked and backhanded by one of the guards, and afterward, before I was placed on the prison bus to Kitziot, a guard interrogated me again. When he asked my occupation, I told him I was a journalist, and he said, “If Trump knew you were here, he’d fuck you and kill you.”
International Outcry, U.S. Complicity
Ben-Gvir’s publicity stunt has drawn widespread condemnation from Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and Spain, whose Israeli ambassadors were summoned as political leaders condemned the treatment as unacceptable and as a violation of human dignity. On Monday, France went as far as banning Ben-Gvir from entering the country, joining the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway, which had already imposed a travel ban on the political official last year.
Even US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee condemned the spectacle, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar distanced themselves from Ben-Gvir’s conduct. “The core problem for Israel is that this video transmitted its true reality to the entire world,” Mtanes Shehadeh, an academic and expert on Israeli affairs, 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.”
At least 35 people suffered fractured ribs, several had concussions and head trauma, at least two people were injected with unknown substances, and 14 people reported being sexually abused, including some who said they were raped, according to a summary report released by GSF. Likewise, several participants have confided their own testimonies to me, and I personally witnessed the bruising and fractures from the beatings and from the weapons used by Israeli forces on the participants. At least two people were still in the hospital in Istanbul on Monday.
To give but one example of Israeli abuse, between tears, a participant on the “torture boat” told me on the plane to Turkey that he had been taken to a kind of “doctor’s office,” or so he was told, and that the participants were forced to get on their knees in their underwear. An Israeli guard was in the private quarters, also in his underwear, otherwise only shouldering his gun, which was used to graze the detainees.
The participant looked between his legs, behind him at the other soldiers groping and touching the detainees. When I spoke later to the individual to see how he was doing, he said that he was relieved to talk to me at that moment, because I was “the first person he had seen who wasn’t going to hurt [him].” I told him I shared that feeling and relief.
On May 19, the day of the Israeli interception, the U.S. State Department sanctioned four people associated with the flotilla, including Saif Abu Keshek who had been detained, interrogated, and tortured by Israeli authorities earlier that month, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calling the effort a “pro-terror flotilla.”
GSF has since urged an investigation into U.S. complicity in the abduction and torture of the flotilla participants in a press release. “As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the [I]sraeli regime continue to surface, the United States’ critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable,” GSF said in a statement.
The organization also pointed to the use of a U.S.-made vessel that became the Israeli “torture boat.” In a previous report for Zeteo during the journey, I had identified that boat as the amphibious landing ship INS Nahshon. GSF also pointed to the use of U.S.-made CTS stun grenades and Los Angeles Police Department-casing for the rubber bullets that were used – two details I had also reported after the detainment. Likewise, on April 27, two days before we were initially intercepted west of Crete, I identified a likely U.S. surveillance plane that passed overhead three times midday.
The extensive complicity of the U.S. government’s involvement in the genocide in Gaza and the occupation in the West Bank has been well-documented, but the use of U.S.-supplied weapons and warships extends that involvement in Israeli state violence beyond the Palestinian territories.“
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,” said former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned from the Biden administration over its unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “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.”
It remains the case that Palestinians suffering under genocide and occupation have little recourse to international support, whether in the form of aid, reconstruction, or international diplomatic efforts, and Israel has yet again stopped a civilian-led effort toward the end of supporting and helping them.
That governments will advocate on behalf of the flotilla participants, while leaving Palestinians in Gaza to endure wretched and deadly conditions, amounts to a grievous double-standard. Palestinian ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, addressed the UN Security Council this week, saying, “You were correctly outraged by how Ben-Gvir treated your nationals. Please think of how he treats ours.”
From within Israeli captivity, it was not clear how long the Israelis would keep us detained – or what they might ultimately do to us in those conditions. Clearly, Ben-Gvir had wished we would be kept for much longer in Israeli custody. Ironically, however, it would appear that Ben-Gvir’s own hubris—and his attempt to gloat about Israeli state violence – is part of the reason we were released so quickly.
Alex Colston is an independent journalist, writer, editor.
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