Source: Asia Pacific Report
SPECIAL REPORT: By Eugene Doyle
I interviewed several of the New Zealanders who, as members of the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, were taken hostage by the Israelis in international waters near Cyprus last week and moved to Israel.
The sadism and savagery of their mistreatment — clearly designed to intimidate and stop further attempts to open a humanitarian corridor — gave them a small taste of the network of torture camps that hold thousands of Palestinians in captivity suggestive of Dante’s Inferno.
Their ordeal lasted only four days. Repeatedly kicked, punched, sexually humiliated and beaten unconscious, the cruellest blow was that their own government refused to stand up for them.
READ MORE: Gaza freedom flotilla – reluctance of the West to protest Israel’s thuggery enabled the abuse
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Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports
Of the 430 activists from 60 countries, there were several who were raped and many who will carry injuries for the rest of their lives.
This is Hāhona Ormsby’s story:
Itamar Ben-Gvir himself spat at Hāhona Ormsby. Many will recall the footage of the Israeli National Security Minister swaggering among the zip-tied Global Sumud activists last week, each of whom was forced face down before him.
Sadists like doing this sort of thing. It recalled the dreadful footage from last year of him intimidating the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti.
Hāhona was being moved through a huge tent. He passed a table where Ben-Gvir was drinking a can of Coke. The minister looked up and saw a man with a facial tattoo. Recognising an Indigenous person, he spat at him! “It landed on my t-shirt,” Ormsby told me.
“As soon as he spat at me — and I don’t know if the soldier did it to impress Ben-Gvir — but the soldier with me punched me in the back of the head.”
Hāhona Ormsby is Ngāti Maniapoto, a member of a major tribal federation in New Zealand. He is one of the nicest, most decent people you could possibly meet. His mataora (tattoo) is both sacred and traditional. Earlier that day it had already drawn unwelcome attention.
“He’s a Māori! He’s a Māori!” a female soldier shouted, pointing at Ormsby. She may have recognised this if she was one of thousands of Israeli soldiers who holiday in New Zealand every year. Our government welcomes them, no questions asked.
Few Palestinian refugees are ever allowed entry.
Personal ‘minder’
As with each activist, Hāhona was provided a personal “minder” soon after he arrived in Ashdod, Israel.
“A soldier came and lifted me up by my zip ties. He pulled down his mask and said, ‘Look into my eyes. I am the craziest motherfucker here. I will hurt you every minute you are with me’.” And that is how the nightmare started.
Throughout the day the New Zealand citizen was intermittently punched, kicked, kneed in the groin, body slammed, stripped naked, and repeatedly hauled up by the plastic zip ties that bound his wrists together.
Several of the captives told me how incredibly tight and painful these zip ties were and how they feared long-term nerve damage.
“The whole time I looked at that soldier I was thinking, ‘I know you kill children, I know you kill women, I know you are that evil,” Evil. That word has come up several times in my conversations with the activists who got this taste, this small intimate encounter with the genocide.
Hāhona thought of his good friend, fellow Kiwi Julien Blondel who was savagely beaten a couple of weeks earlier. “I felt his wairua (spirit), his brokenness and I now understood that brokenness. That sense of lostness.”
Forced head down for long periods in stress positions, receiving random kicks and body slams throughout the day, he was also menaced by close encounters with dogs. “If you do not stop lying to me, I’m going to lock you in that cell with these dogs!” he was told when an interrogator said he didn’t believe he was a teacher.
Hāhona thought of his whānau, his extended family. He remembered they had urged him to come home after he made it to Türkiye after an earlier interception, an earlier ordeal in April.
“But I thought: my comrades, they were going on and I had to stand with them.”
Beaten unconscious
At one point his “minder” beat him unconscious. The Kiwi citizen was kicked hard in the groin and that night had blood in his urine. “The whole night I thought about the Palestinians and what they are going through. If the Israelis do this to a New Zealander imagine what the Palestinians are going through.”
To me, listening to this, I recognised true courage, true humanity, the kind we seldom encounter and should always revere.
Listening to Hāhona Ormsby I recalled my Catholic upbringing and the words of John 15: “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.” Ormsby and all those other activists joined the flotilla not out of hatred for Israel but out of love for suffering humanity, for their brothers and sisters in Palestine. They represent the very best of us.
Another man who professes to be a Christian is the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Christopher Luxon. For me, his variant bends towards Hell and Israel; our government being a stalwart ally of the Israelis. The Israeli Ambassador is being called in by the ministry of foreign affairs for what, Ormsby says, is likely “a slap with a wet bus ticket” over the state terrorist attack on New Zealand citizens.
Our government offered no material support to the Sumud activists after the recent ordeals our citizens were subjected to. They issued no warnings to the Israelis to respect our citizens, providing the IDF with a free pass to abuse New Zealanders in captivity.
And, my god, they did. The first duty of a leader is to protect citizens. All this comes in a week that saw Israel added to the United Nations blacklist of nations committing sexual violence in conflict zones.
I won’t repeat all the grim details of what Hāhona went through. Let us just say it was a huge relief when, four days after his capture aboard the Al Tira (named, as all the Sumud boats were, after a Palestinian village that had been erased by the Israeli occupation), Hāhona was transferred to the airport where they boarded planes provided by the Turkish government.
Turkish delight!
Ormsby had his first food in four days on that plane — Turkish delight! On the tarmac at Istanbul they were welcomed by top Turkish politicians and Foreign Ministry staff, a crowd of supporters, media and a fleet of buses and ambulances to shuttle those who needed it to hospital, others to medical checks, forensic interviews to record their testimony, psychological evaluations and eventually a banquet and accommodation provided by the government.
It is worth noting that no officials welcomed them when they returned to New Zealand. No media was there to interview them. It reminded me of the similarly shameful way New Zealanders who fought Franco’s Fascists in Spain in the 1930s were treated on their return, prior to the Second World War.
It’s our collective job to make sure this extraordinary story is shared and remembered — and that we draw the necessary lessons from it.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/29/hes-maori-hahona-ormsby-a-new-zealander-in-the-israeli-prison-system-nightmare/