Unbowed: The South Africans who participated in the Global Sumud Flotilla, who were detained briefly by Israel, at a press conference after their arrival in Johannesburg on Wednesday. Photo: Global Sumud Flotilla
Israel’s prison network has become the backbone of its occupation, a machinery that turns confinement into governance and makes humiliation routine.
New evidence from Palestinian legal organisations, together with testimony from South Africans briefly detained after joining the Global Sumud Flotilla, shows how imprisonment functions not as punishment but as policy.
The flotilla, a multinational civilian convoy carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, was intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters on 1 and 2 October. More than 450 participants from 44 countries were detained.
Among them were six South Africans who were later released and deported via Jordan.
Fatima Hendricks, Zaheera Soomar, Zukiswa Wanner, Reaaz Moola, Carrie Shelver and Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, returned to South Africa on Wednesday. Their accounts mirror conditions Palestinians have endured for decades.
The Adalah Legal Centre, which coordinated legal representation for most of the detainees, said they were blindfolded, denied legal counsel and treated as “illegal entrants”, despite being seized outside Israeli territorial waters.
“They were forced to enter Israel,” lawyer Lubna Tuma said.
Adalah argues Israel’s use of domestic immigration law in these circumstances breaches international maritime and humanitarian law, the same legal elasticity that allows occupation to pass as administration.
A fact sheet released on 7 October by the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, Addameer and the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs places these incidents in scale.
It records about 11 100 Palestinians imprisoned, the highest figure in 20 years. About 3 544 are held under administrative detention without trial and more than 400 are minors.
Seventy-seven Palestinians have died in custody since October 2023, when Israel’s war on Gaza escalated after the resistance group Hamas attacked festival-goers in Israel.
The report cites starvation, medical neglect, solitary confinement and collective isolation as authorised practice, not aberration.
Legal scholars describe this system as one of carceral sovereignty, a state that governs through custody rather than representation. Military Order 1651 and the 2002 Unlawful Combatants Law allow extended detention on secret evidence with limited judicial review.
Since October 2023, local rights monitors have documented roughly 20 000 arrests in the West Bank, including journalists, medical personnel and humanitarian staff. Thousands from Gaza are missing after abduction or enforced disappearance. The line between judicial process and military command has largely collapsed.
Monitors also describe new detention sites such as Sde Teiman and Rakevet, where detainees from Gaza are kept incommunicado. These facilities, inaccessible to the Red Cross, are described by Addameer as zones of legal non-existence.
They extend imprisonment beyond prison walls into checkpoints, population registries and surveillance databases that regulate movement. The result is a geography of control in which freedom is the anomaly.
Speaking after his release, Mandela placed his experience within that continuum: “It will never be about us but about the memory of what was on the walls within those prisons, the blood stains of those martyred within those walls.”
He said hearings began without legal representation and the sequence of releases appeared designed to humiliate the South Africans.
“We left with a smile and told them we will return. We are unshaken.”
His comments align with the joint report’s finding that humiliation and deprivation are systemic features of incarceration. Rights analysts say the language of domination extends into official communication. After the detainees were freed, the Israeli Embassy in Pretoria posted their photos online with mocking captions calling them provocateurs. This replicated in public the control enacted in custody, punishment as spectacle.
When the activists returned on Wednesday, they spoke about having got a glimpse of the humiliation and degradation that Gaza residents and Palestinians are subjected to daily.
“I feel disappointed because I don’t feel we accomplished the mission, because we were kidnapped before we could do so, and one of the things that will stay forever with me is the image of the Palestinian children — the people in Gaza waiting hopeful that we would arrive and then we didn’t,” Wanner, a journalist and novelist, told the Mail & Guardian.
For Pretoria, the episode sits uneasily alongside its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which argues that Israel’s assault on Gaza constitutes systematic destruction of a people.
The treatment of South African citizens reflects the same pattern of arbitrary imprisonment and denial of due process cited in that case.
Mandela has urged the government to act under the Foreign Military Assistance Act against South Africans serving with or aiding Israeli forces and to probe companies supplying goods to Israel’s military. His call for enforcement rather than rhetoric underscores the gap between South Africa’s legal posture abroad and its domestic follow-through.
Meanwhile, another civilian convoy, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, and its sibling mission the Thousand Madleens, was intercepted on 8 October about 200km from Gaza. At least 145 people, including journalists and doctors, were detained.
Lawyers expect the same procedures used against the earlier flotilla’s passengers: administrative hearings without counsel and restricted communication. Each interception re-enacts the same logic, humanitarian action defined as subversion, detention deployed as deterrent.
Israeli officials maintain that these arrests are necessary to enforce the Gaza blockade and prevent weapons smuggling. Rights groups counter that the blockade and the prisons form a single structure of domination. The state’s stability, they argue, depends on the permanent production of detainees, people who can be held without trial, without visibility and without end.
Flotilla organisers plan to resume missions when sailing season opens in May and to coordinate a Global March to Gaza. Whether or not those missions sail again, the system they exposed endures. Israel’s prisons remain the most durable architecture of its rule, institutions where law becomes captivity and the management of bodies replaces politics.
The flotilla participants’ brief detention made visible what Palestinians have long lived — a world in which imprisonment is not the exception. It is the rule. — Additional reporting by Aarti Bhana