Stockholm, June 02: Top Swedish author Henning Mankell condemned Israel’s “brutality” in attacking an aid fleet heading for Gaza, when he returned to Sweden from taking part in the operation, a press report said.
“What will happen next year when we come back with hundreds of boats? Will they fire a nuclear bomb,” the author of the Wallander crime series told the TT news agency when he returned to Gothenburg airport on Tuesday night.
The author was among 11 Swedish nationals on the boats taking aid to Gaza which were boarded by Israeli commandos on Monday. The raid left at least nine dead. All the activists were detained by Israeli authorities.
A lawmaker, Mehmet Kaplan, and a doctor, Victoria Strand, also returned Tuesday after chosing to be expelled rather than face legal action in Israel.
Mankell also accused Israel of “piracy,” in comments broadcast Wednesday.
He said Israeli commandos shot people who were sleeping during Monday’s raid on the flotilla.
“The Israelis transformed their navy into a pirate enterprise,” Mankell told reporters after he returned to the southwestern Swedish city of Gothenburg late Tuesday after taking part in the aid operation.
“All the ships (in the flotilla) were hijacked, and this was really piracy,” said Mankell, whose comments were broadcast by Swedish public radio Wednesday.
“We had expected to run into trouble when we reached the border (of Israeli territorial waters), but we were mistaken,” Mankell said.
“Far from the limit, in (international) water, we were attacked… by helicopters, speedboats and other vessels and lots of commando soldiers who came onboard and hijacked ship after ship.
“They did not hesitate to attack using lethal force. They shot people who were sleeping,” he said.
Mankell said the Israelis’ claim that large numbers of weapons were found on the vessels was “nonsense.”
“On the ship I was on, they found one weapon: my razor. And they actually came up and showed it off, my razor, so you see what level this was at,” Mankell said.
The author further accused Israel of kidnap when it towed the ships to one of its ports and detained those on board.
“At the moment they started taking the boats towards Israel, we were all kidnapped. It is that simple,” he said.
Despite the aid flotilla’s failure to break Israel’s blockade against the Gaza Strip and deliver some 10,000 tonnes of supplies, Mankell said the operation was a partial success.
“Today we know that Israel is on its knees. No one could predict that the rest of the world would react in this way. They are completely isolated,” he said, adding “people are completely fed up with this brutality and this violence that the power (Israel) has on its conscience.”
He said he was in “despair” over the killings and added that he was also saddened to think of “some of our friends who are still sitting in some very uncomfortable prisons in Israel, where they are being beaten.”
—Agencies