Juliet Lamont was freezing in the back of a prison van that had been driving through the desert for hours – no idea where she was going, listening to the roar of military aircraft – when she saw the sign. The van windows were blacked out and she was afraid she would be struck if she looked around, but, craning her head and peering through a crack, she could read it. Some of the blue and white signs were in Hebrew, others Arabic. This one was in English. Later, as soon as she had access to a pen, the Australian documentary maker would scribble it down, as best as she could recall, upon a serviette. “The eternal state never forgets and will pursue its enemies till the end”. Those were the words fluttering upon a banner in the Negev desert that Lamont read as she entered Ketziot prison in Israel. “It was terrifying,” she says. Sign up: AU Breaking News email Lamont, 54, who has two children, was a world away from her home in the northern rivers of New South Wales. Inside the walls of a prison primarily used to detain Palestinians, many of whom Israel accuses of involvement in militant or terrorist activities, other words ringing in her head were those of Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Related: Israel intercepts another Gaza aid flotilla amid criticism over treatment of activists
Israel’s far-right national security minister had just berated her and hundreds of other activists from around the world who had been attempting to break the Israeli siege of Gaza by delivering aid. Those on the Global Sumud flotilla saw themselves as humanitarians. Ben-Gvir had called them “terrorists”. He called them, she says, “the enemy of Israel”. Lamont says she was taken to a cell she shared with 15 other women. It was about 6m long and 3.5m wide. “It really started to feel like there wasn’t enough oxygen in there to even breathe,” she says. But some fears were more immediate than that of slow suffocation. “They would wake us up in the middle of the night by bringing two really big dogs into the cell, [the guards] in full riot gear and train their semiautomatic machine guns into our heads with these laser beams,” Lamont says. This was not the first time that Lamont says an Israeli firearm was directed at her forehead. That began from the moment her ship was intercepted in the Mediterranean by Israeli security forces last Thursday morning.
Lamont says the crew of the Wahoo were cable-tied and forced below deck where the lasers of semiautomatic machine guns were trained on them for nine hours. “We weren’t allowed to go to the toilet,” she says. “So all the denials, food and all of that, began then”. The “humiliations” continued, Lamont recalls, in the port of Ashdod where they were also cable-tied and forced to kneel in the blazing sun for hours. They were smacked with rifles if they moved. Lamont says she was stripped and cavity-searched by a woman. Her “breasts and arse” were groped by men who, she says, taunted her. Further denials, she says, included access to lawyers, doctors and the medication she needed for her blood pressure, which had been confiscated upon her capture. “I just kept going: ‘I do not want to have a stroke in this awful place’.” That sign before the Ketziot prison about pursuing enemies until the end also looms large in the recollections of another of the seven Australian activists who was detained there until all were released and deported to Jordan early Tuesday morning, local time. Bianca Webb-Pullman’s account of her ordeal begins prior to the flotilla’s interception, when her boat came under a drone strike. She also saw the “humiliation” of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, witnessed by many, and humiliations more private – women not provided sanitary products and left to bleed through their clothes. But it was another sign that chills the 52-year-old general practitioner from St Kilda, Melbourne, more deeply still. “It was a big poster of decimated Gaza with people walking down the street in the destroyed buildings,” she says. The Arabic writing was translated to Webb-Pullman by a cellmate as: “the new Gaza”. “That wasn’t targeted at us,” she says. “That was targeted at the Palestinian prisoners.” What struck Webb-Pullman in that moment, she says, was “a tiny taste of what Palestinians have routinely received over decades”. “Our treatment would be nothing … minor compared to what we know is being inflicted on Palestinian prisoners,” she says. “They didn’t tell us what was happening – well, they sure as hell don’t tell people who are in administrative detention for years on end without even knowing why they are there”. Which, perhaps, explains why she doesn’t hesitate for a moment when asked: would she do it again? Would she sail in another aid flotilla for Gaza? “Yes,” she says. “Absolutely. And I hate boats. “This is one of the greatest moral failures that Australia has ever had, I believe, and if our government won’t stand up – it’s up to us as citizens to do that”. Lamont is staying in the same hotel in Amman, Jordan, and shares the conviction of her compatriot. “We want to come back [to Australia] and fundraise and get more boats and we want to break the siege,” she says. “We’ve had a rest, we’ve had some croissants and some nice hotel coffee. We just have to hit the ground running”. The Guardian contacted Israel’s prison service, the Israel Defense Forces, the country’s ministry for foreign affairs and the Israeli embassy in Australia but none have responded to a request for comment. The ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster, reported that Israel’s foreign ministry rejected allegations that prisoners were mistreated. “The claims of the mistreatment of Australians who were on board are complete lies,” the statement reportedly said. “All their legal rights, including access to medical care, were fully upheld.”