cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/72882

Reports are emerging that Israeli authorities have abused activist Greta Thunberg while illegally holding her in detention.

Greta Thunberg beaten by Israeli authorities

On Saturday 4 October, the Israeli occupation authorities deported 137 of the kidnapped international solidarity activists who participated in the Global Sumud Flotilla to break the humanitarian siege on Gaza, in the second deportation operation in a matter of days, after returning four Italians to their country on Friday 3 October.

One of the deported activists who arrived at Istanbul airport on Saturday recounted shocking details of what he described as ‘brutal assaults’ on some activists during their detention, telling reporters:

They dragged little Greta (Thunberg) by her hair in front of our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her as a warning to others.

She’s still a little kid. They made her suffer.

⚡BREAKING: Turkish activist and Sumud Flotilla participant Ersin Celik:

“They [Israelis] dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,” pic.twitter.com/gV6SeMZr7U

— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws1) October 4, 2025

Separately, the Guardian reported that an email to Swedish authorities said Greta Thunberg was suffering from:

dehydration. She has received insufficient amounts of both water and food. She also stated that she had developed rashes which she suspects were caused by bedbugs. She spoke of harsh treatment and said she had been sitting for long periods on hard surfaces.

Meanwhile, other released activists spoke of similar degrading treatment.

Turkish activist Samanur Sonmaz Yaman, a member of the flotilla, recounts details of the occupation’s oppression and abuse of veiled women from the boats:

Occupation soldiers ripped off our headscarves during our arrest and took them from us, and our non-veiled friends gave us their shirts to cover our heads.

https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/WhatsApp-Video-2025-10-04-at-18.03.37_22b0064d.mp4

Adalah, the legal centre that monitors the cases of detainees, said that detention conditions at Ketziot prison in the Negev desert are ‘deteriorating alarmingly,’ amid reports of ill-treatment and violence against some detainees.

A spokesperson for the organisation said that it is difficult at this stage to provide a comprehensive assessment, but confirmed that the mistreatment primarily affects non-European detainees, especially those whose countries do not have diplomatic missions in Israel.

Ongoing Israeli violence

This incident is the latest chapter in the confrontation between Israel and the international solidarity flotillas that recently set sail in an attempt to break the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip for more than 18 years, amid growing international warnings about targeting solidarity activists and civil society activists, and the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Strip, which is suffering from famine and shortages of medicine and fuel.

Israel intercepted 40 ships in the Global Solidarity Flotilla that set sail to reach Gaza to break the blockade and deliver humanitarian aid amid the ongoing war of extermination on Gaza, which is now entering its third year.

Featured image via the Canary

By Alaa Shamali


From Canary via this RSS feed

    • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 days ago

      Your aunt is probably just racist and doesn’t feel as much empathy for brown people. It’s almost surely not really about “the Jews” but about the colonists being white. Good thing Greta is white too and can trigger the atrophied empathy of racists vicariously. She’s the perfect role model for what rejecting white privilege means in praxis: using your privilege to put yourself in harms way and attempting to protect the less privileged.

  • sewer_rat_420 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    10 days ago

    Weeks of calling her and the flotilla Hamas (but they have specifically focused on Greta a ton) in the Israeli Media have built consent for these thugs to treat her like they do the palestinians.

    This will shoot her back into popularity — those who may have been lukewarm on her before, or forgotten about her since she was just the “autistic climate girl” will see her as nobly standing up to Israel.

  • mickey [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 days ago

    I mentioned on here the other day how it feels like GWOT-era Islamophobia is back on the surface (it didn’t go away it was just overshadowed), but this also brings to mind the we don’t torture-our methods don’t count as torture-we need to torture these people to keep us safe mentality of the time. Coupled with the expanding naked use of military force we see used against Venezuela and the use of ICE as a paramilitary shock force against immigrant populations, the Chicago apartment they kidnapped people from and ransacked recently a prime example, and the attempt to expand the enemy within to include queer activists and leftists, it all points in a very troubling direction. I don’t say this to be doomer, and honestly in some way it’s helpful for me to write it out so I don’t become complacent.

    Edit: To make this more directly relevant to this article, I say that Greta has more integrity in her pinky toe than every Zionist combined in the world, Death to the IDF, Free Palestine.

    • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 days ago

      When I was her age I was too busy being a stupid kid playing video games and partying with my friends. She has more conviction in her than most adults do and she’s willing to put her life on the line to back it up. It makes me feel like an absolute coward behind a keyboard in comparsion.

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 days ago

    Hey wait a minute. Anyone find it strange that us, a bunch of anti-white godless commies are the ones sticking up for Greta Thunberg: a white nordic woman (the literal aryan)

    And the greatest champions of the white race are all on Twitter supporting the IDF beating one of their own “aryans”? Do they even know who makes up the IDF that they’re rooting for?

    (Of course they do. But for any lurkers. Nazis are misanthropes first way before they ever care about helping white people.)

    • Skye [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 days ago

      I’ve seen two nazis on twitter realize in real time that they actually hate the people they supposedly identify with and just idolize an imagined version of their ethnicity that does not exist lol

      Didn’t seem like either of them managed to draw any further conclusions from that, unsurprisingly

      • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
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        I don’t want to be overly annoying with it because it also doesn’t matter all that much, but the Nazi Aryan stuff wasn’t really a belief that Germanic or Nordic people were “the Aryans.” They believed the Aryans were a real people who had existed, not mythological, and basically that modern people in Nordic and Germanic nations were sort of “fallen” descendants of those ancient people.

        They had a sort of hierarchy that basically people of Nordic descent who had their idealized perfect Nordic features were placed at the top as “closest to Aryan ideal.” This is important because obviously not every Swede is 7ft tall, green eyed, blond hair, muscle bound. They were creating this “perfect” phenotype which excluded even many within the groups that ostensibly met their other criteria. At least as far as their birth place and perceived genetics went (traced through their parents/grandparents).

        That’s the entire basis or “logic” insofar as there needed to be any logic beyond “We want to kill them and take their lands” for Nazism. The belief in a fallen great race of people. The belief that they were the descendants of this race. And the belief that through “cleansing” their gene pools they could resurrect that great race again one day. It’s sort of an implied “admission” of like “we and our recent ancestors were too close to the inferior races (Jews, Slavs, Roma, etc.) and our punishment is our current situation (humiliation of losing WWI and the Versailles agreement). If we throw off these inferior, lesser peoples and seek to cleanse our bloodlines we can rise again into the mighty Aryans.” Something like that.

        I’m only pointing this out because there’s a reason many “non-Aryan” Germans and others from around the region were fine with Nazism directly opposing their existence. Even Hitler very clearly failed to meet the expectations set. The whole thing was less about who they were (though obviously that mattered. Those deemed not Aryan enough or refusing to get on board the project were condemned) and more about who they were going to be (again.) (In their minds anyway.)

        It’s just worth noting because they care less about someone’s exact physical characteristics (though again obviously… it matters a lot) and more about being on board with the whole “bringing back the Aryans” idea. If you were a communist and looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger or that giant dude who played The Mountain, that was great and all… but you were still an enemy and were going to be dealt with the way they dealt with any Eastern European Jewish or Slavic communists. You gotta look the part and you gotta play the part of you can gtfo (usually through death). That’s why they can write off Greta. She may meet their physical requirements, but ideologically she’s very clearly not aligned with them. It might make some Nazi shed an extra tear to execute someone who looks like her, but they’ll gladly do it anyway in pursuit of their goals. Whether they truly believe the Aryan myth stuff or are more pragmatic ie “just in it for the killing and stealing” she stands in their way and has to go.

        You see similar (the same really) logic applied to anti-Zionist Jews. They may be “Jewish” but if they oppose Zionism… doesn’t matter. Hardline Zionists will announce that they aren’t real Jews. If it comes down to it they’ll happily kill anti-Zionist Jews as well. No one can stand in the way of the ethnostate project.

        Again abolitionists were treated in a similar way. If you meaningfully side with the oppressed then you are socially stripped of your protections and sometimes this leads to further consequences. The in-group may be slower to act on dissenters from within, but in the end there is some line that they will punish people for crossing. “The 1000 Year Reich,” “Israel,” or “The United States” were/are all far more important projects than any dissident regardless of their physical characteristics.

      • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 days ago

        First time I saw introspection from those lot…and of course they decide to just be violent misanthropes with a slight soft spot for white people solely because they are white a la Mahito.

      • Riffraffintheroom [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        10 days ago

        I’ve always assumed that most modern overt white supremists all came to it by way of 4chan culture and were therefore misanthropes first who then took up racism as a consciously absurd and entertaining expression of their misanthropy.

    • redchert@lemmygrad.ml
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      10 days ago

      OG nazis killed aryan german/dutch/french/norwegian/austrian/belgian communists & resistance fighters as well. Whiteness wont protect you forever or from all