Outraged if belated reactions came across the world after yet another brutal Israeli military misadventure seized a flotilla of civilian activists trying to relieve the people of a genocide-struck Gaza. As in autumn 2025, Israeli naval commandos raided the Global Sumud Flotilla, which seeks to bring humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave, in international waters: having first seized boats near Crete, the Israelis then stormed the flotilla near Cyprus and abducted the activists aboard, whom they then proceeded to publicly beat and abuse under the gleeful watch of interior minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Ben-Gvir merrily posted on social media footage of himself swaggering among blindfolded activists whose wrists and angles are bound as they are forced to the floor. This is a familiar image for any observer of Ben-Gvir’s record toward Palestinians, who are routinely humiliated and beaten by his thugs in public, and often tortured and raped behind closed doors. Even outlets long involved in whitewashing Israeli war crimes were recently forced to acknowledge these crimes, leading to a backlash by American Zionists.

But the gleeful humiliation of foreign civilian activists from over fifty countries, provoked a diplomatic outcry from even habitually permissive European countries. This led to a public spat between Ben-Gvir and foreign minister Gideon Saar, which occurred in the context of the upcoming Israeli election in which the cabinet colleagues are rivals.

No doubt aware of the public-relations difficulty of whitewashing this latest abuse, Saar attacked Ben-Gvir for publicizing the abuse and distanced both the Israeli state and military from such abuses, a claim laughable given the countless instances of such abuse already publicly documented by individuals outside the Israeli cabinet. Saar’s own ministry has long trafficked in the anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian rhetoric that provides the backdrop for the dehumanization of Palestinians as “Nukhba” terrorists and their supporters as attention-seekers: indeed, after the illegal interception it publicly sneered at the activists as “the provocation flotilla”, insinuating that they had somehow provoked their own abduction.

Still, the fact that an Israeli minister was willing to challenge a rival over these abuses meant that even ordinarily meek foreign diplomats were emboldened to criticize the abuses. Among them were the United States and Britain, which have long been involved in logistical support to Israel, as well as Canada, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, which have been generally meek against Israeli abuses. Also joining in the condemnation was Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez, a rare European leader who has consistently opposed the genocide.

Abuses are neither new nor particularly secret; Israeli papers, officials, soldiers, and security personnel have long discussed the practices of torture, humiliation, and rape in public, often in glowing terms. When the publicized rape of Palestinian prisoners, even more savage than the current ordeal of foreign activists, led to an inquiry in summer 2024, large political campaigns protested to support the rapists of long-dehumanized Palestinian “terrorists”.

Nor have foreign activists been immune from Israeli violence. Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian American activist deliberately run over by an Israeli bulldozer in 2004, was an early victim whose murder did nothing to jeopardize the blanket American support for Israel. More recently, an earlier iteration of the Global Sumud flotilla in 2025, which included such well-known personalities as Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and former Libyan premier Omar Hassi, was also assaulted and abused to minimal foreign reaction.

Indeed, the 2026 Sumud flotilla was first assailed at the end of April, as far off Israel’s coast as Crete. Then, nearly two hundred activists were abducted and eventually released to Greece, though not before being thoroughly beaten and abused. Rather than address either the Israeli genocide of Gaza or its illegal raids on humanitarian activists, most regional governments, with Spain and Turkiye the notable exceptions, chose to look the other way. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, one of the less uncritical European leaders toward Israel, nonetheless chose to scold the activists for their own abduction and abuse. The United States government, Israel’s indispensable abetter, went so far as to falsely attack the flotilla as serving Hamas and threatened to punish activists in a blatant inversion of justice.

With such a blank cheque by the international community, there was little to stop Israel from assaulting the remaining boats, bringing the total to fifty boats and over four hundred captives. Like their predecessors of 2025 and any number of Palestinian prisoners, the abducted activists were coerced into humiliating positions, beaten, and abused while Ben-Gvir gloated over their heads.

The question is now whether the increased outcry will result in any meaningful consequences by the international community for the Israeli state after years of permissive, whitewashing enablement.