This is David Adler, now in Amman, Jordan, having been only recently liberated from an internment camp in the Naqab Desert, where I was held with hundreds of other participants of the Global Sumud Flotilla for five days in horrific conditions that have yet to be reported.

We were intercepted illegally and violently by Israeli naval forces. Many of these interceptions were caught on CCTV. Others were not, such as the case of our Ohwayla, which was targeted by a barge that sought to destroy and sink our boat. Our belongings and our boats were stolen from us. We were kidnapped, stripped, zip-tied, blindfolded, and sent to an internment camp, on a police van, without any access to food, water, or legal support. For the next five days, on and off, we were psychologically tortured.

People were taken individually out of their cells and regularly beaten, handcuffed, ankle-cuffed, and left in solitary confinement. This happened many times over many days. We were denied the most basic things, like critical access to insulin for diabetic detainees that were part of the flotilla. In short, we were treated as terrorists, just as national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had promised.

From the first moment that we stepped onto that tarmac after interception, we were violently forced onto our knees into positions of submission. The two Jews of the flotilla were taken by the rear and ripped from the group for a photo op with Ben-Gvir — staring at the flag of the State of Israel and taunted by his goons. Thus began a five-day nightmare of serial and systematic violation of our most basic rights. Reports varied from the different cellblocks. But one report that is consistent is that we were all denied food and water. At all times, we were denied access to medicine based on the whims of individual officers working shifts.

Any requests for medical attention were denied or delayed indefinitely. We had no access to lawyers or legal representation. Consular services were not able to communicate any information about our condition. It goes without saying that other instruments of psychological warfare were deployed against us.

The humanitarian workers who were part of the flotilla were not taken to a regular prison. They were driven deep into the Naqab Desert, near the border with Egypt. We heard F-16s and F-35s overhead every night going to bomb Gaza. We heard dogs barking that menaced us daily. Every single day, riot groups would come to our cells with tear gas, riot gear, and German shepherds to terrify and terrorise us.

These were not at all normal prison conditions. Of course, all of this pales in comparison to the treatment that Palestinians endure every single day. Eleven thousand of them are in indefinite detention at the moment, including in the same internment camp where we were held as terrorists by Israel.

But what has not been reported so far is the way that humanitarian workers were treated. We were never told that we had committed a crime. We never saw a judge with a lawyer and a prosecutor. We saw one judge who asked, “Do you want to go home?” And we said, “Of course, we want to go home. We didn’t ask to come here. We were kidnapped and abducted and sent here illegally.”

So it’s a critical part of the story to look into what the conditions are normally like at this camp. Who was held at that camp? Why were we sent there? What do people at this camp endure? Our detention reveals how rogue the State of Israel has become in its utter disregard for basic international humanitarian law that should have been protecting us.

That’s the critical message that we’re trying to send now from the US delegation, and others who have just been released today, in the US delegation’s case, with absolutely zero consular services. We arrived at the Jordanian border, and the US general consul said: “We are not your babysitters. You have no food, no water, no money, no phones, no planes, no visa. We are taking you straight to the airport, and you’re on your own. We are not your babysitters.” They repeated this four or five times to us, as if we needed to be told.

This is the kind of Ben-Gvirian-Trumpian nightmare that we have been living for the past few days. In the end, Ben-Gvir got his way with this group of activists, schoolteachers and nurses and medics, and people from around the world who were just trying to deliver this aid — we were treated like terrorists.