Israel on Monday deported the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and about 170 other participants in a flotilla that tried to deliver aid by sea to Gaza but was intercepted last week by the Israeli authorities, the foreign ministry said.
The widely publicized mission, involving dozens of boats and hundreds of activists, aimed to breach an Israeli blockade of Gaza, where hunger is widespread and a U.N.-backed panel of experts has declared that famine afflicts hundreds of thousands of people. Israel, which has limited deliveries to the territory for almost two decades, has imposed stringent restrictions on the entry of food and other aid since the war there began two years ago, and for more than two months earlier this year, it prevented any food from being brought in.
Flotilla participants say that Israeli forces illegally intercepted their boats in violation of maritime law and international humanitarian law. Israel says the activists violated a legal blockade.
Some who had been arrested and released over the weekend reported that they were mistreated in Israeli custody. Israel’s foreign ministry denied the accusation in statements on Monday and over the weekend. “All the legal rights of the participants in this P.R. stunt were and will continue to be fully upheld,” the ministry said, accusing activists of spreading “fake news.”
Miriam Azem, a spokeswoman for Adalah, a legal organization for Arab minority rights in Israel that is representing the flotilla participants, said in an interview on Sunday night that lawyers who met with activists were told they had been kept on their knees with their hands bound for many hours. They were held in overcrowded cells and denied adequate drinking water, she said, and some said they had also been denied food and critical medications in the initial days and were deliberately deprived of sleep.
Some flotilla participants were on a hunger strike while in custody, Ms. Azem and the group’s organizers have said.
Ms. Azem said that there had been numerous due process violations, with lawyers for the group not notified that hearings were taking place and activists denied access to counsel. She said that Israel’s process was “entirely illegal,” as activists were forcibly taken to the country, treated as having entered illegally and detained in a security prison in “a cycle that is meant to intimidate and to deter.”
There were also reports from activists and others that Ms. Thunberg was mistreated. The press office of the Swedish foreign ministry declined to comment on the allegations “for reasons of consular confidentiality,” but said the ministry and embassy “have acted intensively to ensure that the detained Swedes’ rights are observed.”
Those deported on Monday were sent to Greece and Slovakia, the ministry said. “The deportees are citizens of Greece, Italy, France, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, Switzerland, Norway, the U.K., Serbia and the United States,” it said on social media.
On Sunday, the ministry said that Israel had sent to Spain 29 flotilla participants from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. On Saturday, 137 people from the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Algeria, Mauritania, Malaysia, Bahrain, Morocco, Switzerland, Tunisia, and Turkey were deported to Turkey, it said.
Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering breaking news around the world. She is based in Washington.
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