Collection of Flotilla Survivor Stories (Edit: Longer Paul McGeough Story)

Apparently there's a blog, gazaflotillasurvivors.posterous.com, that is collecting together all the flotilla survivors' stories. A good resource, check it out.

Edit: The first link is to a new amalgamation of the stories by Paul McGeough. There are new accounts I hadn't read, including discussions of their treatment at the Israeli prison and, well, this:

People were not allowed to go to the lavatories - they were made to soil their clothes. Gardel was especially horrified by witnessing the experience of a badly wounded man in his late 50s, who the Israeli troops forced to remain on the open deck. "Suddenly, his right eye exploded in a gush of blood - and a blob of something fell out of it..."

...The images broadcast around the world, despite Israel's best efforts, dovetailed with the colourful rhetoric of the likes of Anne Jones, a former American diplomat and US Army colonel who cut through efforts by some diplomats to find words with precise legal meanings to describe what Israel had perpetrated. "The Israel Defence Forces acted as pirates in shooting at us and stealing our ships in international waters," she told the Herald. "They kidnapped us and brought us to Israel; they arrested and imprisoned us; they paraded us before cameras in violation of the Geneva Conventions.''

Jerry Campbell awoke at 4am to attend dawn prayers but she had hardly bowed her head before she was dragged off to a nursing station to help treat four gunshot victims. Worse was in store for this naif from Queensland's Gold Coast - "I looked up as I was caring for a wounded Indonesian and saw my husband being carried in." That was Ahmed Luqman Talib, 20, who had been shot in the leg. She cut his blood-soaked clothing away but then followed his instructions to tend to others. "I'm OK," he told her.

She lost count of the number and nationalities of those she tended to - "I saw two men die out there … the floor was covered in blood and the IV units were tied to the ceiling with bandages."

Campbell went to and from her husband, who seemed to be deteriorating. "One man's stomach was opened - his intestines were out and the doctor reached inside and pulled out some bullets, before pushing everything back in and wrapping him up," she said. "I don't know if he survived."

Good question. We should find that out. It might help determine how many ribbons the guy who shot him gets on his new medal.