Freedom Flotilla activist Dr Veronica O’Keane told The City she felt “utterly abandoned” by the Irish Government in their response to their capture in international waters.  

The group experienced “absolute brutality,” while in custody, according to Keane, “No opportunity was too small to be used as a weapon of humiliation,” she said. 

O’Keane and Fionn MacAurthur were two of the 22 Irish citizens on the Freedom Flotilla mission delivering aid to Gaza when they were intercepted “120 nautical miles off Gaza strip,” MacAurthur told Tthe City. 

O’Keane and MacAurthur, were travelling on the Conscience when they were intercepted by the Israeli Occupying Forces “We were a boat filled with 90 medics and journalists when a military machine descended on us,” said O’Keane. 

“We sat there in life vests with our hands in the air while their guns’ lasers pointed at our chests,” said MacAurthur.  

Once they reached the detention facility, they said the physical abuse began, “We had to kneel for hours with our heads down and if we looked up or to the side they came and hit us on the head,” said MacAurthur.  

They only had access to “filthy water,” said O’Keane, and many of them refused food as you wouldn’t trust it,” said MacAurthur.  

The activists maintain that what they went through pales in comparison to what others in the prison experienced.  

“You could hear Palestinians being tortured from our cells,” said MacAurthur. 

“One of my friends was a nurse, they took her to a room where there was a Palestinian who had just been tortured. He was just in his underwear and covered in blood, they had forced dogs on him,” said MacAurthur. 

“One of the girls [on the Conscience] was Israeli, two Israeli police pulled her by her hair and kneed her twice in the stomach,” said MacAurthur. 

In the prison, “there was a hierarchy of racial discrimination,” said O’Keane. 

“I was in a cell with a black woman, she was heavily discriminated against, she was badly bruised and treated very unpleasantly,” said O’Keane. 

When the Israeli military boarded the conscience “they singled out the Arab men, their hands were ziplocked behind their backs and they were kept on the upper deck,” said O’Keane. 

The activists maintain that despite the brutality they faced it’s only a fraction of what Palestinians are experiencing, and they want attention to remain on Palestine rather than themselves. 

“Unfortunately, people have put us in the limelight and said that we’re heroes having tried to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, to people of Gaza. We’re not, we never wanted to have to do this. We wish we’d never have to go on these boats and put our own lives at risk to it for the Palestinian people. More focus needs to be put on Palestinian people rather than us,” said MacAurthur.