‘You’re here now’

The steel handcuffs the Israeli guard locked on me were ‘Tri-Max Made in England’. Clanking mine to the beat, I sang the Irish resistance ballad ‘Óró sé do bheatha bhaile’, then translated the lyrics for the other (French, Spanish, Canadian) occupants of my cell. We’d just been transferred by bus to our second prison, Givon, between West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

A few days earlier, in the first prison – Ktzi’ot, near the border with Egypt – after a strip search they’d given me a uniform: white cotton T-shirt, grey jumper and tracksuit bottoms, dark green flip-flops with a cartoon bull’s head on and the words ‘High and Mighty’ in shaky cursive. The sandals were quite funny. The guards’ repertoire, though, didn’t extend past saying ‘Welcome to Israel’ and mimicking us in high voices: ‘Genocide, I was kidnapped – I don’t care, you’re here now.’

Just after 5 a.m. on Wednesday, 8 October, Israeli forces had illegally boarded us in international waters, at roughly the same longitude as Port Said, Egypt. It was our twelfth day at sea in a forty-foot sailing boat, with medical aid and baby formula packed in the stern cabin and cockpit locker.

When I’d climbed outside at 2 a.m. to begin my watch, the two people on deck had told me they’d seen speedboats on the horizon that weren’t showing up on the tracker. ‘It’s probably just intimidation, but keep counting the lights.’ The drones that had been our constant companions the previous few nights had disappeared from the sky. The sailor still on duty smoked and adjusted the ropes while the yellow walkie-talkie beside me crackled with updates from other ships in the flotilla. They kept their dispatches factual and brief: more speedboats, some getting nearer. I went to bed at the usual time, 5 a.m., and debated whether to sleep fully clothed. In the end I just took my jumper off. Half an hour later, someone shouted from the cockpit: ‘Come outside, not a drill.’

We tossed anything that could be construed as a weapon into the ocean – plastic knives, camera tripods – along with our burner phones. Our communications had been jammed; the only message we could receive was an unidentified voice telling us to stop the boat. Two of their vessels were closing in on us: a larger boat accelerating in circles around us and a smaller one with troops preparing to board. ‘We’ll last until dawn,’ the sailor at the wheel said, still smoking. ‘We’ll do that much.’

They rammed us just before the sun rose. Soldiers with guns climbed on board. ‘Hands up!’ They repeatedly demanded of the man at their helm whether we’d hidden cameras: ‘If we find a camera, it will not be good.’

They ripped down the Palestinian and Irish flags – the French one they left intact – and searched us individually on the deck. ‘Remember that we are the good,’ a guard told me twice. He said it a third time as they prepared to traffic me from my hijacked boat onto a dark-grey Israeli warship. ‘OK,’ I said.

We spent the next twelve hours locked in a five-bed cabin. A barrier outside blocked the view; all we’d seen from the window was two men bickering on the deck, and another two sniffing a pair of underpants they’d taken from a confiscated bag.

‘Out,’ said the man who unlocked our cabin. ‘Left.’

Once on land we were handed over from the navy to the police. Two officers shoved my head down, wrenched my arms behind my back, dragged me forwards and shouted at me to kneel.

They herded us through port security. The police went through my bag, searched me (‘legs wider, legs wider’) and interrogated me. ‘To deliver humanitarian aid,’ I said when asked why I’d joined the flotilla. The officer slammed his fist on the desk: ‘I don’t understand it.’

They wanted me to sign a release form. Before setting sail, I had resolved not to; to do so, I thought, would be to collaborate with our kidnapping, and by extension with Israel’s blockade on Gaza. ‘You sign, you go home right now,’ the officer said. ‘You don’t sign, we arrest you.’

‘I won’t sign without seeing a lawyer,’ I said.

‘OK,’ he said, and sent me on to the prison transport van.

Five elected politicians from the flotilla flew home that night, but everyone else was imprisoned whether they’d signed a release form or not.

I was blindfolded and cable-tied for five hours. They’d separated men and women when they placed us in vans. The woman sitting next to me had been handcuffed so tightly that she was screaming in pain. The officers heard her before we left and told her to wait. When they finally removed her handcuffs, it took several attempts because of how badly her flesh had swollen around the metal.

By the time my blindfold was removed I was in a prison yard. Officers led me away for the first of several strip searches. In front of two guards in a harshly lit prefab, I changed into the grey prison uniform and the ‘High and Mighty’ flip-flops.

Back in the yard, while I waited with the other women in our new uniforms to be assigned to our cells, we heard a man from our crew screaming in agony on the other side of the fence.

Our cell had two metal bunk beds, another single bed and thin purple mattresses with no sheets. On the walls were calendars with days, months, years crossed off, and messages written mostly in Arabic. The view from the back window was of a twelve-foot cement wall topped with barbed wire; from the front, a grey yard and a huge Israeli flag on the wall. Beneath it was a poster of a razed city with a slogan clearly targeted at Palestinians: ‘The new Gaza.’ (We were kept apart from Palestinian prisoners throughout our time in Ktzi’ot.)

Our sanitary facilities consisted of a dirty toilet and sink. We hadn’t had bathroom access or anything to drink since our arrival at the port at least six hours ago. I gulped the brown water from my cupped hands at the tap.

The guards came every few hours through the night to count us. The electrical fittings in our cell had been ripped out before we arrived but they seemed to have forgotten this. ‘Who did this?’ they asked every time the light didn’t work.

A rush of land sickness hit me in the morning when I tried to climb down from my bed; my insides swayed as if I were still at sea.

Most of us had resolved to go on hunger strike throughout our detention. The only breakfast offered, anyway, was stale bread and sliced tomato. I hadn’t eaten since Tuesday evening, around 36 hours earlier; the toilet water hit my stomach hard. ‘Today,’ I reminded myself, ‘is Wednesday, 9 October.’ The date was a precious thread that I would not be able to pick up again if I dropped it.

Late in the morning, in a small room with no natural light, I and two other abductees met with a judge who issued our deportation orders. (We still hadn’t seen a lawyer.) ‘How are you?’ she asked. We took the opportunity to get various things on the record: that we’d been denied water, our friend’s injuries from the handcuffs. The judge looked momentarily disquieted.

The flotilla participants who’d signed release forms went home on Friday morning, along with a few we were fairly sure hadn’t. They shackled the rest of us and herded us outside without saying where they were taking us. In the stations that followed – holding cell, passport check, strip search – it still wasn’t clear; only once we’d been locked in our new cells were we sure that we’d simply moved jail.

There were six of us in this cell. We banged on the door, chanted, sang, organised exercise sessions and discussion circles. Seven officers barged in and held us against the wall while one shouted that we were animals. Every few hours they searched us in the bathroom, handcuffed us or made us kneel; they took away our twenty minutes of daily yard time, leaving us to stew in a room with one window you had to climb on a wardrobe to see out of.

Knowing that most of us had been on hunger strike for days, they left food in the cell. ‘You don’t want to eat, don’t eat,’ they said. (Bobby Sands’s prison diary describes H-Block guards doing the same thing.)

‘I’m going to read my Quran now,’ a Muslim cellmate said each night. They had allowed us no personal items, certainly no books, but she scanned a piece of memorised text in her head before going to sleep.

On our fifth day the guards told us we were leaving. ‘They lie,’ we reminded ourselves. ‘They lie all the time.’

Before we left our cells, they cuffed us in pairs, wrist to wrist; they removed those in the holding cell and cuffed us individually; finally they took those off, too, and shackled us to board a vehicle outside. ‘Non, rien de rien,’ I sang with a French friend who was still in the holding cell as officers led me away.

In the van we were two to a small compartment. We faced away from the grille window, but I could faintly see its reflection on the glass in front. Only when the signs changed to Arabic was I positive we would be free.

Nearly 2000 Palestinians, including about 1700 seized from Gaza since October 2023 and held without charge, were released from Israeli jails at the same time as us. It is already well-documented that they faced far worse abuses than we did at Ktzi’ot. Firas Hassan was arrested in August 2022 and held in administrative detention until April 2024. After 7 October 2023, he told the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, ‘it was like living inside a tsunami’. He described a six-month flurry of collective punishment, with severe food and water deprivation, attacks by dogs and relentless beatings, sometimes on camera (‘we’re livestreaming for Ben Gvir’). Thousands of Palestinians are still held prisoner by Israel with no prospect of release. They remain behind bars without any of the protections that we had.

In my first cell at Ktzi’ot, we found a pen hidden in the windowframe; a French cellmate used it to write ‘Free Palestine’ in large block capitals on the floor. I don’t know who is in that cell now. But I’ll keep sailing with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition until she too is free.