On October 8, 2025, Israeli authorities arrested American freelance journalist Thomas Bain Becker Jr, while he was sailing aboard the Wijdan (Conscience), a vessel that was part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), one of several aid convoys that have attempted to break the blockade on Gaza. He was released and deported from Israel on October 10.
After his release, Becker posted a video on his social media accounts saying “we were abused, they zip-tied us, they blindfolded us, they put us in distress positions. They made us kneel for hours, smashed our faces into the ground, you know, with urine on it.”
“They hit us, kicked us, dragged us, pushed us. They used all sorts of problematic discourse, genocidal language about there is no Palestine or Gaza or there will be no Palestine or Gaza. They told us to say that we loved Israel,” he said.
Becker also mentioned that the Israelis denied them lawyers, “They denied us food until our consular representatives came and requested that we get food. At that point, a lot of us had already declared a hunger strike because someone in our block, there was a 69-year-old Buddhist monk who had a heart condition and they refused to give him his medicine.”
The Adalah Center — a legal advocacy group for Arab minority rights in Israel that is representing the detained journalists and activists — told CPJ that Israeli authorities “treated the journalists accompanying the flotilla no differently than they treated the activists,” even though the press were there to report on the voyage.
Adalah said that at Ashdod Port, “the authorities issued arrest and long-term entry ban orders against several journalists,” calling the actions “a serious and unlawful infringement on their right to work and a restriction on their ability to cover events in the region.”