David Adler, a 33-year-old U.S. citizen and participant in the Gaza Sumud Flotilla, said he was detained for five days in an Israeli internment camp in the Negev Desert after the flotilla was attacked by Israeli naval forces while attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
In a WhatsApp audio message sent from Amman, Jordan, after his release, Adler described being “kidnapped, stripped, zip-tied, blindfolded, and sent to an internment camp on a police van without any access to food, to water, to legal support.”
At the port of Ashdod, Adler said detainees were made to kneel before Israeli officials, including Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister.
“We were violently forced onto our knees into positions of submission where the two Jews of the flotilla were taken by the ear and ripped from the group for a photo op with Ben Gvir staring at the flag of the State of Israel, taunted by his goons,” Adler said.
He added: “We were treated as terrorists, which is what Ben Gvir promised he would do from the first moment that we stepped onto that tarmac after interception.”
Adler also recounted his experience in an interview with journalist Prem Thakker of Zeteo, conducted hours after his release.
Adler said detainees were transferred to a remote facility in the Negev Desert, “basically to the border with Egypt,” where they endured harsh conditions. “People were taken individually out of their cells and regularly beaten and handcuffed, ankle cuffed and left in solitary confinement,” he said.
Requests for medical attention were often met with violence or ignored. “We were asking for the most basic things like critical access to insulin for diabetic detainees…Any request for a medic was basically denied or delayed infinitely,” Adler said.
Adler recalled that when detainees shouted for help, guards retaliated. “When we would shout from our cells, ‘insulin, insulin for cells 16 and 17,’ anyone who was shouting loudest would get the riot treatment,” he said. “The riot brigade would come with their German shepherd and their shotgun, pointing guns at us. The loudest person in the room — often the Tunisian or Algerian — would be shackled at the wrists and ankles and sent to solitary confinement.”
“We were told this isn’t a prison…you don’t get access to a lawyer because you’re not a prisoner. You’re a terrorist.”
He said detainees were never charged or given access to legal counsel. “We were never told we’d committed a crime…We never saw a judge with a lawyer and a prosecutor. We saw one judge who basically said, do you want to go home?”
Upon release at the Allenby Bridge crossing into Jordan, Adler said American officials offered little support. “We arrived at the Jordanian border, [and] the U.S. Consul told us, ‘we are not your babysitters…You have no food, no water, no money, no phones, no planes…you’re on your own.’”
Adler said his experience “pales in comparison to the treatment that Palestinians endure every single day, including in the same internment camp where we were held.” Still, he called on reporters and international organizations to document what he called “the real story of how Ben Gvir got his way with this group of activists, schoolteachers, and medics who were just trying to deliver aid.”
“If this is how humanitarian workers from 45 nationalities are treated under international attention,” Adler said, “imagine what happens under the cover of total darkness to Palestinians who are enduring horrific treatment so much worse than what we endured.”
