Swedish activist Greta Thunberg returned to her home country on Tuesday and held a press conference in which she reiterated her claims of abuse during her detention in Israel, stating that she had been "freed from an Israeli torture prison in the desert."
Thunberg, who had taken part in a pro-Palestinian flotilla attempting to breach Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, made the allegations upon her return to Sweden.
At the press conference in Stockholm's central square, attended by hundreds of demonstrators, Thunberg said, "I can speak about the extreme physical abuse and torture we endured." However, she added, "Personally, I don't want to share what I went through. I don't want the headlines to be 'Greta was tortured.' That's not the story here."
According to a quote published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Thunberg described a situation in which people "were sick and passed out. When we asked for a doctor and essential medication, they shoved 60 people into tiny cages and said they would gas us." Another activist claimed people were locked in a small cage under the scorching sun for five hours.
Thunberg also lashed out at Swedish diplomats, accusing the embassy team of leaving the prison despite activists' fears of being assaulted by guards. "There are no words to describe the war criminals who are allowed to walk free, even in our own country," she added.
Israel's Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Monday in response to the accusations. "Another 171 provocateurs from the Hamas-Sumud flotilla, including Greta Thunberg, were deported today from Israel to Greece and Slovakia," the ministry said, referring to the flotilla by a term linking it to the terrorist organization Hamas and its partner group Sumud.
The statement emphasized that the deportees were nationals of Greece, Italy, France, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, Switzerland, Norway, the UK, Serbia and the US.
"All the legal rights of the participants in this public relations stunt were and will continue to be fully upheld," the statement continued. "The lies they are spreading are part of a pre-planned fake news campaign." It also noted that "the only act of violence during the incident came from a Hamas-Sumud provocateur who bit a member of the medical staff at Ketziot Prison."
