Rizky Amelia
TUNIS, Tunisia — A Tunisian appeals court has rejected a defence challenge to the continued detention of four activists linked to the Global Sumud Flotilla, leaving the group in pretrial custody for an additional four months while a financial investigation into fundraising for the Gaza aid campaign grinds on. The ruling, delivered on Wednesday at the Court of Appeal in Tunis, deepened a case that has already cost the men their liberty, their health and, their relatives say, their stability at home.
The four — Wael Naouar, Ghassan Henchiri, Ghassan Boughdiri and Nabil Channoufi — have been held since March following an inquiry by Tunisia's Economic and Financial Judicial Pole, a specialised unit dealing with financial and economic crimes. The Global Sumud Flotilla is described as an international campaign seeking to deliver aid to Gaza and to challenge Israel's blockade of the Palestinian territory.
According to the state-owned TAP news agency, quoting judicial sources, investigators are tracing the origin and use of the money collected for the flotilla and whether any of it was diverted to other purposes. The activists and their defence lawyers have repeatedly rejected the allegations and maintain their innocence. None of the four has been convicted, and the case remains at the pretrial stage.
Authorities have consistently framed the proceedings as a financial inquiry about the handling of donations rather than a prosecution targeting the men's political or pro-Palestinian activism. The government has also rejected claims that the judiciary is being used to silence opponents, saying the courts are independent and that proceedings are conducted in accordance with the law.
For the defence team, however, the central question is not only what the money did but why the men must stay behind bars while investigators work. Ghassan Ghribi, a member of the defence committee, described the latest extension of the pretrial detention as "an exception to the exception", arguing that freedom ought to be the rule and detention the deviation. He said the investigating judge spent six months on the file without conducting investigative work beyond questioning the activists themselves, adding that any extension had to rest on clear, demonstrable reasons. The four men, he said, were paying the price for what he called an absence of proper investigative steps.
The physical toll is most visible in Wael Naouar, 41, who began a hunger strike on August 16 to protest his continued detention. He was transferred to hospital as his condition deteriorated, and he ended the strike after 38 days following appeals from his lawyers and supporters — while stressing that suspending it did not mean abandoning his demands.
His father, Hichem Naouar, described a man visibly transformed by the detention. During a recent prison visit, Hichem said, Wael sat with one hand pressed against his cheek, his elbow trembling and his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance. He was struggling to see properly, was repeatedly vomiting water he tried to keep down, felt dizzy and had trouble controlling his left leg. Hichem also said other prisoners had told him that Wael sometimes wakes in the night calling out the name of his youngest daughter.
Those same traits, relatives say, are what made Wael a target of admiration before his arrest. During the Sumud land convoy in Libya in May, Hichem recalled, armed men attempted to seize another participant. Wael intervened, pulled the man away and helped him get clear before turning back to the armed group and telling them they could take him instead. On the first Sumud flotilla, when a woman fell into the sea and came close to drowning, he jumped in after her and brought her out. "Wael's strength lies in his ideas and in his loyalty to his people," Hichem said, adding that whenever workers or employees were being treated unjustly, his son was always at the front of the response.
For the man's own children, the separation has been difficult to process. His nine-year-old son, Yassar, now visits his father in prison and tries not to cry in front of him, fearing that tears would only make an already painful situation harder for Wael to bear. Once outside, the boy finds a corner of the building where he can finally let the tears flow.
Hichem said Yassar has changed since the detention began. The child now sleeps beside his mother after waking up screaming at night, and his school results have slipped. He also revealed that other children at school had been asking whether his father was a thief — a question Yassar relayed to his mother, who asked him what he thought. "Never," the boy answered.
Wael's four-year-old daughter, Sumud, is too young to understand why her father is being held. Hichem took her to see him, and when she spotted him behind the glass she leaned forward to try to embrace him, only to strike her head against the barrier. Hichem said he broke down several times as he described the visit, and he spoke to Al Jazeera outside the appeals court where he had come to follow the latest legal development in his son's case.
The strain is not limited to the Naouar family. Speaking by phone from Gafsa, Sebti, the father of Ghassan Henchiri, said his son remains conscious but is visibly worn down after going on hunger strike on September 9. "According to what his sister told me after visiting him, he is still holding up. The fatigue is visible. He is exhausted, but he is still conscious," Sebti said.
Henchiri, who sustained a head injury during his detention in Israel, has not been taken out of prison for a further medical examination, Sebti said. He said the family has raised the matter both with the prison administration and with the investigating judge, and has been told that the examination would take place. Henchiri, Boughdiri and Channoufi all remain on hunger strike, even as the appeals court has refused the defence's bid for release.
The consequences have spread well beyond the original four. Fourteen people arrested after the September 19 protest calling for the detainees' release have themselves been placed in pretrial detention, lawyer Rafed Rabbeh confirmed to Al Jazeera on Friday. Among them is a 17-year-old who was brought before a juvenile judge. Rabbeh noted that Tunisia's Child Protection Code establishes a preference for preventive and educational measures and calls for pretrial detention for children to be avoided as far as possible.
Those newer detainees face a range of charges, Rabbeh said, including taking part in a gathering allegedly intended to disturb public order and commit an offence, publicly attributing unlawful acts to an official without proof, and making public statements deemed to damage the reputation of a person or public body. The charges draw on multiple provisions of Tunisia's Penal Code.
Taken together, the case illustrates how a financial investigation opened in March has developed into a prolonged campaign of detention, hunger strikes and protest-related arrests. With none of the four convicted, the defence is likely to keep pressing the argument that detention cannot be justified by an inquiry that, in its view, has yet to produce investigative results. For the families, the immediate calculations are more immediate still: how long a health condition can be tolerated, and how many more prison visits a child can endure.
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