By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
Greta Thunberg, who initially stayed silent about her treatment under Israeli detention in order to center the plight of the Palestinians, has now revealed in the wake of Trump’s Gaza deal how she was sadistically tortured by her Israeli jailers.
From Aftonbladet, “Greta Thunberg: ‘They kicked me every time the flag touched my face'”:
Beating, kicking, and threats of being gassed in cages.
[…] Her red suitcase lies in the hall. “Whore Greta” someone has written in large black letters. Around the text: an Israeli flag and an erect penis.The bag was confiscated by the Israeli military from the boat – and returned to her like this. She laughs.
– They’re like five-year-olds!
[…] – This is not about me or the others from the flotilla. There are thousands of Palestinians, hundreds of whom are children, who are being held without trial right now, and many of them are most likely being tortured, says Greta Thunberg. […] – This shows that if Israel, with the whole world watching, can treat a well-known, white person with a Swedish passport this way, just imagine what they do to Palestinians behind closed doors. […] – What we have been through is only a small, small part of what Palestinians have experienced. On the walls of our prison cells, we saw bullet holes with bloodstains and messages carved into the walls by Palestinian prisoners who had been there before us.I ask her to walk us through the bombing of her boat off the coast of Tunis in early September. She would have been on board at that very moment, had she not been called in to help with a press conference. American intelligence agents have testified to CBS that the attack was ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
[…] – When I’m about to get off the boat, there are a bunch of police officers waiting for me. They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.Here, everything goes “from zero to a hundred,” several witnesses describe – the violence escalates.
Greta Thunberg describes how she is dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron fences. This is a protracted scene that lasts for over six hours, according to Greta, and is confirmed by several participants in the flotilla that Aftonbladet talks to.
– It was kind of dystopian. I saw maybe 50 people sitting in a row on their knees with handcuffs and their foreheads against the ground.
Greta gets up from the sofa and lies down, showing the position on the striped living room rug.
– They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.
Greta laughs.
– Then they ripped off my frog hat, threw it on the ground, stomped and kicked it, and kind of threw a tantrum.
– They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little whore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Whore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.
Every time someone looked up from the ground, they were knocked back down to the ground, Greta and the other Swedes recount. In the corner where Greta was sitting, the police placed a flag.
– The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.
– They took my bag and threw away everything they interpreted as being related to Palestine. They took every item and stared into my eyes while slowly cutting them up with a knife, while ten people took selfies.
Suddenly, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the area and stood in front of everyone, Greta recounts.
– He shouted, ’You are terrorists. You want to kill Jewish babies.’ Those who shouted back were taken aside and beaten. They were thrown to the ground and beaten. But I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, because every time I lifted my head from the ground, I was kicked by the guard standing next to me.
The Israelis proudly released some video of this:
Aftonbladet continues:
[…] Ben-Gvir himself later told the media about his visit to the prison – and boasted about how harshly they were treated. He described it as a policy that he himself had ordered.– I am proud that we treat flotilla activists as supporters of terrorism, he told the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. They should experience the conditions in Ketziot prison and think twice before returning to Israel. That’s how it works.
After the ministerial meeting in the scrub room, Greta describes endless meetings with officials who wanted her to sign papers stating, among other things, that she had entered Israel illegally, which she refused to do. Her hands were then tied together again with cable ties, she was blindfolded and placed in a small cell inside a car where she spent a cold night with other prisoners.
– It was freezing cold. We were wearing T-shirts.
She was driven on to the prison. Outside, she was forced to take off her clothes again, she says.
– It was mockery, rough handling, and everything was filmed. Everything they do is extremely violent. People’s medications were thrown into the trash can in front of their eyes. Heart medication, cancer medication, insulin.
Inside the prison, there is a large picture covering one wall, showing a bombed-out Gaza and people fleeing, with text in Arabic: “The new Gaza” next to a large Israeli flag, she says.
In prison, she is held in different cells. Sometimes a cell of around 15 square meters with 13 other prisoners. There are many days—four? Time blurs together, there were no clocks. They receive hardly any food and no clean water during their entire captivity, but are forced to drink from the tap in the toilet sink, where something brown flows. Several became ill.
– You felt that you couldn’t ‘afford’ to cry because you were so dehydrated.
– It was so hot, like 40 degrees. We begged the whole time: Can we have water? Can we have water? In the end, we screamed. The guards walked in front of the bars the whole time, laughing and holding up their water bottles. They threw the bottles with water in them into the trash cans in front of us.
At one point, around 60 people were put in a small cage outdoors, in the middle of the sun, according to several participants of the flotilla. Most of them did not have enough room to sit down.
– When people fainted, we banged on the cages and asked for a doctor. Then the guards came and said, ‘We’re going to gas you.’ It was standard for them to say that. They held up a gas cylinder and threatened to press it against us.
During the nights, guards regularly came by and shook the bars, shining flashlights, and several times a night they came in and forced everyone to stand up.
Greta Thunberg recounts how she was placed in an isolation cell full of insects. Hour after hour, she does not know for how long. She sang a song, as if to calm herself.
The full story notes how the Swedish embassy, seemingly beholden to Israeli interests, downplayed their abuse and barely helped them while they were being tortured in jail.
What Greta and other detainees describe is truly cartoonish evil — and all of it has the full backing of our occupation government.
They barely even try to hide their abuses — and often openly brag about them.
Last year, Israelis literally rioted in defense of their “right to rape” Palestinian captives!
[Left header image of Greta Thunberg in Stockholm (2023) by Kushal Das, CC BY-SA 4.0, Cropped]
