While female flotilla members were nominally searched by female prison guards, male prison guards had every opportunity to watch. Liedtke recalls a female crew member screaming that they were “touching my breasts!”
In late December, German journalist and activist Anna Liedtke publicly alleged that she was raped by female Israeli prison guards while in Israeli imprisonment.
Liedtke, a member of the women’s organization Zora, which has faced German state repression due to statements supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was speaking at a conference in solidarity with political prisoners in Paris on 21 December.
In late September, she had set sail for Gaza with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition vessel Conscience. The Conscience carried about 100 journalists and medical staff. The passengers belonged to two of the professions most under attack by the Israeli military in Gaza.
Just like the other several dozen boats aiming to break the nearly two-decades-long Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip, the Conscience was intercepted in international waters by the Israeli navy – which sources much of its material from German weapons manufacturers — and the crew was forcibly brought to Israel, in violation of international law.
Once in Ashdod port, the members were subjected to humiliating treatment by Israeli forces as well as physical and psychological abuse. Liedtke, 25, was brought to Ketziot prison, named a “torture camp” in the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s 2024 report “Welcome to Hell.”
Liedtke reports severe mistreatment at the hands of Israeli forces.
She and her fellow crew members had hands and feet shackled, were blindfolded, verbally abused when trying to communicate with each other, and held for five days without access to clean drinking water, she recalled in a podcast from late October. She also witnessed violent physical abuse of other prisoners from her prison cell: “I heard the barking of a dog and then his screams.”
While in prison, the crew members were subjected to repeated strip searches, clearly intended to humiliate prisoners.
“Prisoners were dragged by the hair and laughed at during strip searches,” Liedtke said.
While female flotilla members were nominally searched by female prison guards, male prison guards had every opportunity to watch. Liedtke recalls a female crew member screaming that they were “touching my breasts!”
Systemic pattern of abuse
It was during one of these strip searches that Liedtke reports having been raped by female prison guards.
On 10 October 2025, the crew members were transferred from Ketziot prison to the Givon deportation prison. According to Liedtke, the rape happened during the transfer and because she resisted yet another strip search.
Since Liedtke’s statements in late December, two further Freedom Flotilla members have come forward with allegations of sexualized violence by Israeli prison guards.
Italian journalist Vincenzo Fullone is quoted in a press release by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition saying that “on three separate occasions, I was ordered to enter a small, specially arranged room where I was completely stripped and subjected to invasive and painful anal searches… During the third search, the pain became unbearable and was compounded by mockery, verbal abuse – including the words, ‘Don’t you like it, Hamas whore?’ – and the photographing of my body.”
Surya McEwen, an activist from Australia, states that he “was stripped naked and sexually assaulted by Israeli officers while being held hostage. One held a gun to my head, angrily threatening that he would kill me, while the other yanked and pulled on my genitals, perversely and almost gleefully.”
McEwen had previously alleged that Israeli soldiers had dislocated his arm and that he had been forced to kneel with other flotilla members while Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, verbally abused them.
Israel has employed sexualized violence against Palestinians for decades. This includes “organized and systematic practice of sexual torture, including rape, forced stripping, forced filming, sexual assault using objects and dogs, in addition to deliberate psychological humiliation aimed at crushing human dignity and erasing individual identity entirely,” according to a recent report by the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
Humiliation appears to be a deliberate goal throughout the reports, going back to the Orientalist trope that Arab men are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation and “only understand force.”
This trope was also at play in the widespread propagation of claims that Hamas systematically raped Israeli women on 7 October. Despite many of these claims – along with the atrocity propaganda of beheaded babies – being thoroughly debunked, Western mainstream media outlets have yet to reckon with their role in instrumentalizing sexualized violence to justify the genocide in Gaza.
Just the first victim
The German government and German media have remained silent on the alleged rape of a German citizen. Not a single state media outlet has reported on Liedtke’s case, and Zora confirms that no press representatives other than this reporter have reached out.
“Israel may torture Palestinians daily and now has a free pass to abuse our activists as well,” a spokesperson for the Freedom Flotilla’s German delegation told The Electronic Intifada.
The world has allowed Israel to utilize brutal violence against Palestinians for decades. October 2023 only served to spike this violence.
The deliberate murder of internationals such as Rachel Corrie or Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, while drawing a modicum of protest from Western governments, has not led to any substantial changes in the West’s continued support for Israeli apartheid and genocide.
It is therefore no surprise that Israeli impunity for sexualized violence and rape extends to international solidarity activists as well.
“What happened to us is only the tip of the iceberg,” Liedtke said.
Vincenzo Fullone said he is “still unable to find peace because if they were willing to do this to me, I can’t imagine what they’ve done – and continue to do – to the Palestinians under their complete control.”
Whose dignity and whose pain matters? The silence of Western governments provides a clear answer: not Palestinians, and increasingly, not anyone in solidarity with them.
In her first public disclosure of her experience, the video of which has since gone viral online while being ignored by German media, Liedtke speaks with a clear and steady voice. It only breaks towards the end.
“I will not stop fighting for justice and the end of violence until every woman is free and has received justice.”
What does justice mean for her?
“Justice is the end of Zionism,” she said.
Jara Nassar is a German-Lebanese-US-American writer, performer and anthropologist based in Berlin.
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