Sometimes, a photograph says it all. This one showed Greta Thunberg, minutes after she was supposedly ‘kidnapped’ by Israeli naval forces, gratefully accepting a turkey sandwich.

She was aboard a boat, the Madleen, with 11 other activists taking a tiny shipment of aid to Gaza – much of which they had already eaten, according to Israeli authorities.

The rest was seized and given safely to the Palestinians using existing aid routes.

So there she was, the climate campaigner-turned-Palestine freedom fighter, safe in an orange life jacket and a green frog-shaped sun hat, gazing at the Israeli sandwich with a hungry smile. The vessel, which critics have dubbed the ‘selfie yacht’, was diverted to the port of Ashdod, north of the Gaza strip, by Israeli authorities.

Compare that image to footage of female hostages, many of them raped and mutilated, being abducted at gunpoint by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, or their bloodied bodies being dragged away. Now that, Ms Thunberg, was a ‘kidnap’.

The Swedish activist, who is 22, will soon have to explain the real kidnapping to her own conscience. The Israelis are about to provide her with some of the schooling she seems to have missed: before being released from the Middle East’s only democracy, she will be made to sit through 43 minutes of footage showing Hamas atrocities that defy description.

These include children’s bodies riddled with bullets, decapitated corpses and other acts of unbelievable depravity, including the kidnap of hundreds of innocent civilians. No one who has seen that video, as I have, will ever be able to wipe them from their mind.

Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, says it is ‘appropriate’ for Thunberg to learn ‘what atrocities Hamas committed against women, the elderly and children, and against whom Israel is fighting to defend itself’.

The climate campaigner-turned-Palestine freedom fighter, safe in an orange life jacket and a green frog-shaped sun hat, gazing at the Israeli sandwich with a hungry smile

Sadly, I have little confidence that even this shock therapy will change Thunberg’s mind. After all, she is notoriously resistant to education. Her initial claim to fame was as the brains behind a series of ‘school strikes’, encouraging young people to boycott lessons as a protest against climate change.

When that campaign began in 2018 with a sit-down protest outside the Swedish parliament, she was 15 years old. She is no longer a child, but as her froggie hat suggests, like so many of her generation, she remains deeply immature.

She also lacks all shame. To claim that she and the crew were ‘kidnapped’ – after they were prevented from breaking the legal blockade in the waters off Gaza – was staggeringly offensive. Of the 251 people who were actually kidnapped on October 7, at least 22 are still believed to be alive. Another 32 have probably been killed, but remain hostages in death. The rest have been rescued or exchanged, many of them suffering unspeakable wounds from torture.

But Thunberg is no stranger to offensive statements in the name of virtue-signalling. In 2023, she posted a photo on social media of herself and three other activists holding pro-Palestine placards, with a stuffed blue octopus visible in the photo. She was forced to delete the picture after critics pointed out that the octopus is a symbol often used in anti-Jewish propaganda, since being used in a Nazi-era cartoon.

The voyage of the Madleen, which set off from Sicily on Sunday, June 1, has been labelled a ‘media provocation’ by the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs. ‘There are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip – they do not involve Instagram selfies,’ said a spokesman.

And there have been a lot of selfies, most of them featuring Thunberg posing in a black-and-white tasselled keffiyeh – the trademark of the posturing woke Left. Strangely, her brand of ‘activism’ has no problem with such ‘cultural appropriation’. To her, the awful war is a cult television series and she is its number one fan.

Perhaps she will close her eyes to the real-life atrocities on film. Few people, in fairness, could fail to look away from the relentless horror of it. No doubt she will tell herself that it is fake Israeli propaganda – because the alternative will be to accept that she has made a terrible mistake, by supporting people whose barbaric inhumanity knows no bounds.

However much she tries to pretend that her jaunt on the high seas was about humanitarian aid, the truth is that in doing so, whether unwittingly or not, she was supporting Hamas. Aid consignments have been one of the chief ways the terrorists control the population inside the Gaza Strip.

Thunberg in a black-and-white tasselled keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn in parts of the Middle East

Hamas seizes all aid, wherever possible. Its fighters commandeer the convoys and take food and medical supplies for their own terrorists, selling whatever is left over to civilians at hugely inflated prices. This has been their chief source of income, enabling them to pay their jihadi fighters and control ordinary people far more effectively than they could with any threats of violence.

In the refugee camps, Hamas militia men are known as ‘dogs’ by the thousands who secretly despise them. It might be possible to dodge their armed patrols, but everyone is dependent on food and water. As long as Hamas controls the trickle of aid, they control the Palestinians.

And they do it with thuggery. Today, journalist Omar Abd Rabu, an anti-Hamas activist, was assaulted and tortured by their henchman, his legs broken. He was lucky to survive: other critics of the regime have been murdered and their bodies dumped for their families to find. What would Thunberg say about this, I wonder?

Happily, however, the way that Israel and the US is now bypassing the UN and delivering aid directly – for free – to Gazan civilians has weakened Hamas’s stranglehold on aid. In the past two weeks, Israel has sent 1,200 truckloads of supplies into Gaza. 

If Thunberg’s pathetic cargo of rice and dried formula milk had been allowed through the blockade, it would certainly have been seized by Hamas, and either distributed in a propaganda stunt or sold. Either way, she might as well have been buying weapons and placing them in the hands of mass murderers.

Obvious facts such as this go consistently unreported by the BBC and left-wing British media. Yesterday, the Guardian claimed that the majority of deaths and injuries inflicted on Palestinians during the war had been suffered by ‘women, children and elderly people’ – citing ‘health authorities in the territory, whose figures have proved accurate in past conflicts’.

Are we supposed to believe that Israel has been risking the lives of its young IDF soldiers – and telling them all the while to spare Palestinian men of military age?

Undoubtedly, the IDF has made some serious mistakes while trying to flush out Hamas from Gaza. Earlier this month, five people – including three journalists - were reportedly killed in an Israeli strike on al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, which hit a media tent.

But since the beginning of the war, Israel has striven to avoid civilian casualties. This has not always proved possible, because of the despicable way Hamas uses women and children as human shields to protect its jihadis. Nevertheless, according to research by the Henry Jackson Society, an independent foreign-policy think-tank, the ratio of civilian deaths to military fatalities has been much lower than in any comparable conflict, and at least half the fatalities have occurred during direct battle with Hamas fighters.

If Thunberg truly cared about the war, she would know all this. But her only concern is self-promotion and moral posturing – stitching her identity together out of selfies, keffiyehs and a needy attempt to insert herself into the middle of somebody else’s tragedy, she is not shrieking about the Israel or Gaza of real-life. She is shrieking about herself.

• Jake Wallis Simons is a columnist, broadcaster and author of Israelophobia