American Journalist’s Harrowing Tale of Kidnapping at Sea and Detention in Israeli Prison

IMAGE: Emily Wilder, a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles, working with Jewish Currents

In May 2021, the Associated Press dismissed young Jewish journalist, Arizona native Emily Wilder, due to her social media activity, leading some to speculate that the news organization succumbed to political pressure from pro-Israel groups regarding her pro-Palestinian activism while a student at Stanford University, where she graduated in 2020.

On Friday, October 10, Emily was deported to Istanbul, Turkey, following her detention by the Israeli military a few days prior while covering an aid flotilla bound for Gaza. Currently a reporter for Jewish Currents, Wilder was among a group of numerous boats aiming to break the naval blockade and provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza. She was aboard a vessel named The Conscience, the leading ship of the flotilla arranged by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, when Israeli soldiers illegally seized her vessel in international waters and detained her along with other journalists and aid workers on Monday, October 6.

Today’s featured article recounts her account of the appalling treatment she received while in captivity. Jewish Current has the story…


IMAGE: Conscience, a vessel part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition en route to Gaza (Source: Canada Boat Gaza)

Emily Wilder reports for Jewish Currents…

Forty-Eight Hours in Israeli Captivity

A journalist captured on a flotilla mission recounts treatment at the hands of the Israeli navy, border police, and prison guards.

The nearly 100 medical workers, journalists, activists, and crew aboard the Conscience awoke to the alarm on October 8th at 5 am. We had gone to bed with news of an imminent Trump-brokered ceasefire agreement. Our ship, an old repurposed ferry joining the latest wave of the flotilla movement seeking to penetrate Israel’s 16-year naval blockade of Gaza with humanitarian aid, was sailing eastward in international waters of the Mediterranean near the Suez Canal over 100 nautical miles from Israeli or Palestinian territory. Over the loudspeaker, the captain alerted everyone to assemble on the deck immediately, as the Israeli military was approaching. I climbed the stairs and attempted to send a message to my editors, which did not deliver, our internet disrupted. We donned our life jackets, dropped our devices overboard into the water, took our seats, and within ten minutes, before we could complete roll call, warships surrounded us and helicopters were upon us, whipping up wind and spray and drowning out our chants of “We are journalists. We are medics.”

Dozens of soldiers rappelled from the helicopters to the upper deck and trained the lasers of their rifle scopes on our torsos. Others pulled themselves from small powerboats up ladders over the sides. They smashed the CCTV cameras and cut the Starlink wires. They brought the captain from the bridge to the deck, and the Conscience began swerving in the water as they took control of its temperamental wheel.

They ordered us out of our seats, to take off our life vests and shoes, to empty our pockets, and to submit to patdowns. The young woman soldier asked me what was dangling from a lanyard around my neck. I told her, “It’s my press pass, I am a journalist, and you have just kidnapped me at sea while doing my job.” She did not respond. We were reseated according to some unspoken rationale, with several of the men, most of them Middle Eastern or North African, zip-tied and separated. One woman demanded to sit with them, which the soldiers allowed. I sat near the captain, who told the soldiers they were breaking the law; they were kidnapping us; we had a right to reach Gaza in safety; the people of Gaza had a right to receive visitors in their waters; they could let us pass and the world would consider them heroes. Meanwhile, a soldier carrying a camera followed us with his lens and taunted us, calling us terrorists.

Most of us were then taken to the dining area below the upper deck, while a handful of others, apparently identified as troublemakers, were kept in another room under close watch. Over the next 12 hours we were held captive by rotations of three or four of the dozens of soldiers on board. Mostly young men, with balaclavas masking all but their eyes, they were fitted with rifles, tasers, cuffs, and other toys, which they played with absentmindedly. The overcrowded room grew hot and rancid as the sun rose in the sky. We were taken to use the bathrooms on the lower level in groups of three to five at a time. One soldier permitted me to grab my notebook and pen from my bag, whose contents had been ransacked and strewn across the floor, on my way back from the bathroom; another later stood over me and demanded I hand it over, which I did—it held a few pages of shorthand. They passed out our food, granola bars and ramen, though many refused to eat, protesting our captors’ show of benevolence.

Some passengers grew ill, including an octogenarian on board. One doctor demanded to treat one of the sick herself, rather than hand him over to the naval unit’s medic, and a soldier stood over her, took out his cuffs, put his hand on her arm, and told her to sit down. They removed one person and zip-tied him to a railing outside the restaurant before disappearing him elsewhere on the boat. Periodically, the soldiers ordered us to stop talking or they would withhold our bathroom breaks. As we became unrulier—whispered conversations and hums of Bella Ciao spreading through the room—one said, “We have been very nice to you so far, we do not want to use violence.” We passed the day in the sweltering discomfort, sitting and dozing against our lifejackets. Always out the portside window, I saw a naval frigate in the distance, which I came to learn held another group of flotilla participants, those who had been piloting the eight small sailboats of the Thousand Madleens campaign.

When we arrived at Ashdod port around 7 or 8 pm, the soldiers ordered us to grab our bags and passports and marched us to the gangway to disembark. The last to get off, I watched as one by one my co-passengers were handed by the military to the border police, who pulled them onto land, bent them over, and perp-walked them 30 yards to a floodlit holding area on the asphalt. At my turn, as the two women twisted my arms behind my back and folded me forward, I announced, in case some camera somewhere was rolling, “I’m a journalist, I’m press.” The woman to my left hissed, “We don’t give a fuck,” and the other dug her nails into my scalp and pulled me by my hair across the port. I alerted them that my glasses were falling off, and they told me to shut the fuck up—though in Hebrew, one said to the other, “Grab her glasses.” They deposited me in the final position of the last row and zip-tied my hands tightly behind my back; those kneeling around me seemed to have their hands free, but others further away, I was later told, were also bound at random or in retaliation.

On my knees, with hands pinned behind me, my fingers and feet quickly grew numb. My press pass still hung around my neck and swayed in the night breeze. Twice, one of the officers forced my head down lower, and I watched out of the corner of my eye as they roamed among the rows, shoving others’ heads while casually chatting and laughing. In Hebrew, they commented on our appearances, called us Hamas, Gestapo, and whores, and joked about our obvious discomfort as people shifted and vocalized in pain. A speaker blasted Israeli pop music. We were kept in these positions for some time, perhaps an hour. I later heard from others that agents had ordered a North African man to say “I love Israel,” and when he responded “I love Palestine,” they kicked him. I also heard that on the port, officers beat at least one other man; pushed over a woman with a prosthetic leg; kept a woman’s hands tied until her skin swelled around the plastic; and took the ailing 82-year-old to the hospital, where, she later told me, an officer hit her in her side, took her pain meds, and told her, “Welcome to hell.”

What followed was a series of degrading and invasive searches of our bodies and possessions. Agents took my camera, e-reader, press pass, highlighted copy of Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger, and letter from a friend. One called my Star of David–inspired necklace a swastika. While unpacking all of my clothes, another came upon my Jewish Currents t-shirt, and asked me, “Are you Jewish?” I nodded, and he raised his eyebrows but said nothing else. My handler through the process was a small teenager, who mostly seemed bored; but behind me, a burly officer kept his hand on the neck of a Palestinian American man, forcing his head to remain bowed. I had a brief hearing with an immigration official, during which I was denied a lawyer. I signed a paper waiving my right to see a judge within 72 hours before being deported, as attorneys had previously advised. One agent asked why I had come to Israel, and I responded, “You brought me here,” and he laughed. We were then blindfolded, zip-tied, and loaded onto metal benches in frigid armored buses. We tried to doze for the next several hours on the cold, bumpy ride to Ketziot, a 99-acre prison camp in the Naqab, or Negev, Desert.

At Ketziot, we were separated by gender and placed in cages. One by one, they strip-searched us and put us in gray sweats. Then they marched the women to a massive concrete cell block. On an external wall, someone had fingerpainted a massive Star of David in red. On the interior wall hung an Israeli flag. Above it, a large banner featured a photo of dark silhouettes walking on a dirt road between the rubble of former buildings. An inscription in Arabic read “Gaza al-jadeeda”: “the new Gaza.” We were divided into filthy cells and handed two pieces of bread, our first meal after more than 24 hours, which the five of us in my cell left aside, to be quickly overtaken by ants. We were also each given a pair of underwear, soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. There was a toilet and a sink in a small closet; when we first turned on the faucet, the water flowed from the tap brown.

The following day, we were let out of our cells twice. In the morning, we were taken in groups of four to see immigration judges; ours informed us she had already heard our lawyers’ arguments after members of the Global Sumud Flotilla wave had been captured a week before. In the afternoon, we were grouped by nationality for haphazard and brief visits with our consular representatives—but first, we were made to stand in front of monitors in the cell block’s courtyard playing footage from October 7th on a loop. A shipmate had her fingers up in peace signs in silent defiance, and the guards sent her back to her cell. I asked, “Why can’t she come? She has a right to meet with the consulate.” He responded, “She is provoking me.” They were particularly sensitive to “provocation.” I learned several others had been repeatedly assaulted and kept in solitary confinement. With the US officials, I wrote a message to be shared with my family, and we showed our bruises while recounting our experiences so far. The representatives told us this was the earliest the consulate had been permitted entry to see US citizens from the flotilla, and that we’d likely be getting out in one to two days.

The rest of the day, confined behind a locked iron door with a grated window and a slit for food, we passed the time sleeping on thin brown mattresses, making hairbands from the elastic of the underwear, and braiding each other’s hair. A few of us ate a little but many refused the food passed door to door. We called out to our friends in neighboring cells. Three times I asked for my daily medication and did not receive it. To my knowledge, no one did, except for an elderly woman, after a collective chant from our cells demanding she receive medical attention. I did not see a single Palestinian, but I read the Arabic scrawled on our cell walls. Beside one of the bunks, a previous prisoner had scratched “hon”: “here.”

We were processed for deportation in batches ahead of Trump’s arrival in Jerusalem. After two nights in the camp, the morning of October 10th, I was one of 94 detainees released. We were again loaded into cells on armored buses, this time without blindfolds or zip ties, and driven south to the airport in Eilat. Another series of searches later, and we boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul. Some remained in captivity for several more days and reported extreme brutality, including threats of rape. The last got out October 12th. The following day, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement. All flotilla members are now free; over 9,000 Palestinians still remain imprisoned.

See more reports from Jewish Currents

READ MORE ISRAEL NEWS AT: 21st CENTURY WIRE ISRAEL FILES

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.

Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/10/16/american-journalists-harrowing-tale-of-kidnapping-at-sea-and-detention-in-israeli-prison/