Israeli Prisons Are Killing Machines
A new report by an Israeli human rights group shows that Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and detention centers during the war on Gaza are subjected to torture, sexual abuse, violence, humiliation, starvation, sleep deprivation and denial of medical care.
Israeli prisons function as torture camps. Palestinians held by Israel since October 7 have been saying this for months, backed up by extreme weight loss after their release. A damning and comprehensive report by the Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem, released this week, backs up these claims, drawing on the testimonies of 55 Palestinian detainees after their release from Israeli prisons. The majority of those interviewed have never been tried for any crime.
The title of the report, “Welcome to Hell,” is a quote from an Israeli soldier. Fouad Hassan, a 45-year-old Palestinian from Qusrah, told investigators that this was the welcome he and his fellow prisoners received when they got off the bus at Megiddo prison.
“Hell” is no exaggeration. As the report states, Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and detention centers since the beginning of the war on Gaza have been subjected to torture, sexual abuse, violence, humiliation, starvation, sleep deprivation and denial of adequate medical treatment. The report lists sixty cases of Palestinian prisoners who have died since the beginning of the war, including forty-eight Gazan prisoners who died in army detention centers and twelve who died in the custody of the Prison Service; many testimonies refer to the Prison Service’s Keter unit, which functions as a specialized riot control force.
“Their testimonies reveal the results of the hasty transformation of more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, both military and civilian, into a network of camps whose policy is to mistreat detainees,” B’Tselem notes in the report’s introduction. “The facilities in which each detainee is deliberately subjected to intense and unrelenting pain and suffering function as de facto torture camps.”
The testimonies are worth reading in full, but they include: a prisoner beaten to death by guards for asking if there was a ceasefire, with inmates not receiving news inside the prison; an account of guards putting out cigarettes “in my mouth and on my body… they put clamps on my testicles… they put clamps on my testicles that were attached to something heavy”; the use of “loud disco music” played at volumes that made inmates’ ears bleed; an account of sexual assault and sodomy in which other guards filmed the act on their phones; story after story of the deliberate starvation of inmates.
In recent days, Israeli society has been torn apart by a court allegation that members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gang-raped a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military base. The allegation sparked an uprising in support of the soldiers in question, encouraged by IDF members and elected leaders of Israeli political parties. As the pro-rape mob stormed the military base, the IDF was forced to redeploy units from the West Bank to the base in an attempt to quell the violence and maintain control.
As B’Tselem’s reports, as well as the findings of the United Nations, make clear, the soldiers accused of rape in Sde Teiman are far from isolated cases. The Israeli military is pursuing a systemic policy of torturing the approximately ten thousand Palestinians currently held by Israel.
“Given the gravity of the acts, the extent to which the provisions of international law are violated, and the fact that these violations target the entire Palestinian prisoner population on a daily basis and over a long period of time, the only possible conclusion is that in engaging in these acts, Israel is committing torture that amounts to a war crime and even a crime against humanity,” the report concludes.
There have long been credible allegations that the Israeli Defense Forces use sexual violence against Palestinian detainees. The fact that Israeli society is now being forced to acknowledge this in court is itself the result of a growing consensus within the international legal community that Israel cannot investigate itself for its myriad alleged war crimes and must therefore be prosecuted by bodies such as the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Israeli public’s support for alleged Israeli military rapists and its remarkably muted response to the testimony contained in the B’Tselem report are further evidence of this.
As Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy noted of the lack of Israeli outrage over the report’s revelations, “indifference to all these things defines Israel.” In the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, nine prisoners were killed in twenty years; in Israel, sixty prisoners were killed in ten months.
Translation: JB for
Source: Jacobin
