Fifty-two hours on an Israeli prison ship
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 humo
They had just pushed Eleni next to me, forcing her to her knees, her face squeezed against the cold metallic container.
“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.
