Gaza activist on 39-day hunger strike hospitalized in critical condition in Tunisia

Wael Naouar is in a hospital bed in Tunisia, his body depleted after thirty-nine days without food. He stopped eating to protest his own detention—to demand that authorities drop charges against him and three fellow activists arrested in March on accusations of misusing funds meant for a Gaza-bound flotilla. On Wednesday, Bassem Trifi, who heads Tunisia's League for the Defence of Human Rights, said Naouar was in critical condition and approaching death.

Naouar and his three co-defendants—Ghassen Henchiri, Ghassen Boughdiri, and Nabil Channoufi—were arrested after the Global Sumud Flotilla, an international campaign challenging Israel's blockade of Gaza, set sail last September. Israeli forces intercepted the vessel, detained the activists, and deported them to Tunisia. The four have never been convicted of anything. They remain in pre-trial detention while authorities investigate what they describe as suspicious financial flows connected to the flotilla's fundraising. The activists deny the charges.

None of this has stopped Naouar from refusing food. His lawyer reported that he has lost more than twenty kilograms—forty-four pounds—and is wracked with pain throughout his body. Ghassen Bouaazi, a member of the National Committee for the Defence of Sumud Flotilla Activists, told Al Jazeera that Naouar has recently experienced repeated fainting spells, difficulty breathing, and hallucinations. "There is now a real danger threatening him," Bouaazi said, speaking from the sidelines of a Saturday protest where at least eleven people were arrested for demanding the activists' release.

The Tunisian authorities have offered little transparency. A prison spokesperson has not commented on Naouar's condition. The Gaza Sumud Flotilla, the organization to which Naouar belongs, stated that authorities are refusing to disclose information to his family or lawyers. This silence came immediately after a judge rejected an appeal against extending the pre-trial detention of all four activists.

The timing matters. Human Rights Watch has documented what it calls the "weaponisation" of financial and criminal investigations by Tunisian authorities against civil society activists. The government denies the prosecutions are political. President Kais Saied has said that freedoms are guaranteed, the judiciary is independent, and no one is above the law. But the pattern—activists detained without conviction, investigations dragging on, a man starving himself in a hospital bed while the state remains silent—suggests something more complicated is happening beneath the official reassurances.