Ghina Nahfawy faces another interrogation after documenting animal abuse, the latest in a series of police actions against her activism.
Ghina Nahfawy has been called for questioning at Burj Hammoud police station over a video showing animal torture and allegations that she incited activists against the person responsible. This marks the latest in a series of police actions taken against the animal rights campaigner. Previously, she was detained for several hours at Baabda police station after refusing to delete a video documenting a religious figure abusing an animal by tying a dog to a vehicle and dragging it along roads.
Before that incident, Nahfawy faced a defamation complaint filed by the mayor of Sofar after she commented on a municipal post about missing dogs and cases of animal mistreatment. In another case, she was summoned by the Cybercrime and Electronic Surveillance Bureau after exposing environmental crimes committed by a restaurant owner in Bhamdoun, including the crucifixion of a gazelle in public.
The crimes Nahfawy documents are not environmental violations or excessive animal exploitation that might benefit their perpetrators. They are gratuitous violence, sadistic torture, and extreme cruelty. They are offences difficult to justify or explain. Yet it is Nahfawy who is being brought to police stations.
Her Instagram page functions as a catalog of human cruelty, a visual record of the torture methods humans have devised against animals. The images show dogs being dragged, gazelles crucified, donkeys confined to boxes, and cats beaten to death. The account acts as a mirror of how societies coexist with the animal world, exposing capacity for deriving pleasure from torture and inflicting gratuitous violence on the weak while taking pride in playing the executioner.
This violence is not the result of individual psychological disorder or personal inclination. It stems directly from the nature of societies that establish not merely a hierarchy between human and animal, but a systematic erasure of the animal from the sensory world, stripping it of its right not to be tortured.
Against this cruelty stands Nahfawy's stubbornness, which resists not only intimidation and threats but also fatigue. Her obstinacy does not tire of exposing any crime, however minor, and does not surrender before the enormity and systematic nature of the violence. Cruelty is not countered by awareness campaigns or dialogue with perpetrators. It is countered by stubbornness, by Nahfawy's stubbornness.
Nahfawy faces interrogation today, but she is not alone within a network of individuals, associations, and shelters attempting to defend the animal world against human assault, society's indifference, wars, and gratuitous violence. Among the most prominent was Mona al-Khalil, who died in Israeli bombardment of the sea turtle sanctuary near the city of Tyre. Yet fame is not a characteristic of these defenders, from owners of dog shelters on the outskirts of cities to hundreds of individuals feeding cats after sunset, to advocates for animal rights who often end up under interrogation.
They form a shadow army that has become the voice of the voiceless. They do not defend animals as a form of civilian luxury in a country collapsing under the weight of wars and crises. They defend us by seeking a different relationship with our natural environment, one less exploitative and destructive, one more humble and gentle. This relationship does not merely save certain creatures from our mindless violence. It may constitute the gateway to reimagining our relationship with one another, less cruel than the one in which we live.
Nahfawy stands interrogated for demanding a gentler relationship with the natural world. Facing her is a society claiming its right to torture, maltreat, and abuse. The legal system has become an instrument of those who inflict cruelty, while those who document and resist it face detention and investigation. The pattern is clear: those who expose violence are penalized, while those who commit it remain largely unchallenged. What unfolds in the interrogation rooms is not justice but its inversion.
