Tunisian flotilla activists stay behind bars as hunger strikes and family strain deepen

TUNIS, Tunisia — Four Tunisian activists detained over an international campaign to deliver aid to Gaza will remain in pretrial custody for another four months after an appeals court on Wednesday upheld a remand order they had challenged as unjustified and legally exceptional. With three of the men still refusing food, the case has become as much a story about the deteriorating health of the prisoners as about the questions hanging over the funds raised for the Global Sumud Flotilla.

The four — Wael Naouar, 41, Ghassan Henchiri, Ghassan Boughdiri and Nabil Channoufi — have been held since March on the authority of Tunisia's Economic and Financial Judicial Pole, the specialised body responsible for probing financial and economic crimes. The flotilla, an international effort to reach Gaza and break Israel's blockade, depended on money collected from supporters abroad, and investigators are said to be scrutinising both where that money came from and how it was spent.

The state news agency TAP, citing judicial sources, reported that the inquiry is examining whether any donations were diverted to purposes other than the campaign. The activists and their lawyers have consistently rejected the allegations and maintain their innocence, and none of the four has been convicted of anything.

Tunisian authorities have deliberately framed the proceedings as a financial case rather than a prosecution arising from the men's political or pro-Palestinian activism. The government has also pushed back against claims that the courts are being deployed to silence government critics, saying the judiciary is independent and that proceedings follow the law as set out in statute.

On the legal front, the defence team has not been persuaded that the accusations justify continued incarceration. Ghassan Ghribi, a member of the defence committee, described the latest extension as an "exception to the exception", arguing that liberty ought to be the default and imprisonment the rare deviation. He said the investigating judge spent six months on the file without conducting meaningful investigative work, and that the four men are effectively paying the price of that inaction. The remand extension was granted on September 11, and the challenge to it failed before the Court of Appeal in Tunis.

Naouar's own ordeal began in August, when he started a hunger strike on August 16 to protest his continued imprisonment. As his condition worsened he was moved to hospital, and he called off the strike after 38 days following appeals from lawyers and supporters, insisting the decision did not amount to abandoning his demands. Henchiri, Boughdiri and Channoufi have continued striking; Henchiri has refused food since September 9.

For Naouar's family, the strain is visible in the faces of his children. His grandfather, Hichem Naouar, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday outside the appeals court, where he had gone to follow the hearing, that his grandson Wael sat with his cheek resting on his hand, his elbow shaking and his eyes fixed on some distant point. He was struggling to see properly, to hold water down without vomiting, and to control his left leg, and he was dizzy. His fellow prisoners told the family that he sometimes wakes in the night shouting the name of his youngest daughter.

That daughter, Sumud, is four years old and too young to understand why her father is in prison. When Hichem took her to see him, the toddler pressed forward to hug him through the partition and struck her head against the barrier. Her nine-year-old brother Yassar has taken a different burden: he holds back his tears during visits, fearing that crying in front of his father would only deepen his pain, and lets them fall only once he is out of sight. According to Hichem, the boy now sleeps next to his mother after waking up screaming at night, and his schoolwork has slipped. When Yassar told his mother that classmates had begun asking whether his father was a thief, she turned the question back to him, and he answered simply: "Never."

The family's account of Wael's character is a portrait of a man unwilling to stand aside when others were in danger. During the Sumud land convoy in Libya in May, armed men attempted to seize another participant; Wael pulled the man away and helped him to safety, then faced the gunmen and said they could take him instead. On the first Sumud flotilla, when a woman went into the water and was close to drowning, he leapt in and pulled her out.

"Wael's strength lies in his ideas and in his loyalty to his people," Hichem said. "Any time he heard about an injustice done to workers or employees, you would find him at the front line."

Ghenchiri's father, Sebti, speaking by phone from Gafsa, said his son remains conscious but is visibly worn down. "His sister told me after visiting him that he is still holding up. The exhaustion shows on him, but he is still conscious," he said. Sebti also said his son has not been taken out of prison for the further medical examination of a head injury he suffered during his detention in Israel, a request raised with both the prison administration and the investigating judge.

The political fallout has spread well beyond the original four. Lawyer Rafed Rabbeh confirmed on Friday that fourteen people arrested after a September 19 protest demanding the activists' release have been placed in pretrial detention, among them a 17-year-old who was brought before a juvenile judge. Rabbeh noted that Tunisia's Child Protection Code calls for preventive and educational measures to be prioritised and for pretrial detention of children to be avoided wherever possible. The protesters face charges that include taking part in a gathering allegedly intended to disturb public order, publicly accusing an official of unlawful acts without proof, and making statements said to harm the reputation of an individual or public body — offences drawn from various provisions of the country's penal code.

Taken together, the case raises questions that the hearings so far have not answered: what evidence, if any, supports the alleged diversion of funds, why six months of inquiry produced little beyond questioning, and on what basis continued detention can be justified for men who have never been tried. For the families, those questions have been answered only in the currency of hospital beds, hunger strikes and children who cannot make sense of an absent parent.