An additional 171 activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla, including Greta Thunberg, were deported to Greece and Slovakia, Israel announced on Monday.
The Foreign Ministry said that the activists hold citizenships from Greece, Italy, France, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, Switzerland, Norway, the UK, Serbia, and the US.
Before Thunberg’s and the other 170 people’s expulsion, a separate group of 170 activists was deported to Istanbul, with Adalah, the legal aid group advising them, noting that a different group had been deported to Italy and Spain, respectively.
On Tuesday, Jordan's state news agency reported that an additional 131 activists were deported from Israel to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge crossing.
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On Sunday, two activists alleged that Thunberg was mistreated during her detention.
“It was a disaster, they treated us like animals,” said Hazwani Helmi, a Malaysian citizen, adding that detainees were not provided with clean food or water and that medication and belongings were confiscated.
Windfield Beaver, an American citizen, said Thunberg was “treated terribly” and “was used as propaganda,” describing how she was pushed into a room as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir arrived.
At the Athens airport, Thunberg told the crowd, “Let me be very clear. There is a genocide going on,” referring to the war in Gaza.
“Our international systems are betraying Palestinians. They are not even able to prevent the worst war crimes from happening,” she said. “What we aimed to do with the Global Sumud Flotilla was to step up when our governments failed to do their legal obligation.”
Adalah said in a Sunday night update that, per information it received, “medications were allowed into the prison following Adalah’s repeated legal interventions and visits by several foreign embassies, whose representatives met with their nationals and checked on their health conditions inside the prison.”
The legal aid group added that when its lawyers were able to meet with 11 Tunisian activists being held in the Ketziot Prison in the Negev for an allotted 30-minute visitation session, they “confirmed to the lawyers that widespread assaults and violence occurred during their transfer from the port to the prison and in the first days of their detention.”
Adalah also said that the conditions within the prison appeared to have stabilized. All 11 activists were on a hunger strike.
Other activists, including those from Switzerland and Spain, also said they were subjected to inhuman conditions during their detention. Among the nine members of the flotilla who arrived home in Switzerland, some alleged sleep deprivation, a lack of water and food, as well as beatings and incarceration in cages.
The Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that these allegations were “complete lies,” and in a Monday announcement, it said, “All the legal rights of the participants in this PR stunt were and will continue to be fully upheld. The lies they are spreading are part of their pre-planned fake news campaign... Don’t believe the fake news they are spreading.”
It added that some activists had chosen not to sign their deportation orders, which would have allowed them to be deported sooner.
That said, Ben-Gvir did say on Sunday that Thunberg and other flotilla activists detained by Israel deserved to be treated in the same manner as terrorists in prison because “anyone who supports terror is a terrorist.”
“If any of them thought that they would come here and be greeted with a red carpet and fanfare, they were mistaken,” he added at the time.
The national security minister visited the prison, and while there, he said that he “took pride in the fact that we are treating these flotilla activists as terror supporters.”
Israel originally detained 429 people.
Tobias Holcman contributed to this report.