Palestinian prisoners describe systemic abuse in Israel’s jails,Guardian

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Published: 06 August 2024

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LONDON - The London-based Guardian interviews back up report by rights group B’Tselem, which says jails should now be labelled ‘torture camps’

Violence, extreme hunger, humiliation and other abuse of Palestinian prisoners has been normalised across Israel’s jail system, according to Guardian interviews with released prisoners, with mistreatment now so systemic that rights group B’Tselem says it must be considered a policy of “institutionalised abuse”.

Former detainees described abuse ranging from severe beatings and sexual violence to starvation rations, refusal of medical care, and deprivation of basic needs including water, daylight, electricity and sanitation, including soap and sanitary pads for women.

In a months-long investigation, B’Tselem interviewed 55 former prisoners housed in 16 Israeli prison service jails and detention centres run by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), mapping the scale and nature of abuse. The highly respected Jerusalem-based group concluded that Israel’s prisons should now be labelled “torture camps”.

“When we started the project we thought we would find sporadic evidence and extreme cases here and there, but the picture that has emerged is completely different,” said Yuli Novak, the organisation’s executive director.

“We were shocked by the scale of what we heard. It is uncomfortable as an Israeli-Palestinian organisation to say Israel is running torture camps. But we realised that is what we are looking at.”

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) said it operated according to the law and under the oversight of the state comptroller. “We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility,” it said in a statement. The IPS also claimed that several petitions regarding jail conditions filed by human rights organisations had been rejected by the supreme court.

The IDF said it “rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees in detention facilities” and acts “in accordance with Israeli law and international law”. Allegations of abuse were thoroughly examined, a statement said. Conditions for detainees had significantly improved throughout the war, it added.

There have been multiple reports of arbitrary, cruel and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees since the Hamas attack of 7 October – the outside world’s only glimpses of conditions inside the jails, since Israel has denied access to lawyers, family members and Red Cross inspectors.

In late July, multiple members of parliament broke into two military bases, backed by a far-right crowd, to protest against the arrest of nine men over the violent rape of a detainee in Sde Teiman detention centre. The MP Tally Gotliv told the crowd that Israeli troops deserved total immunity, regardless of their actions.

A former barracks that became a processing centre for people seized in Gaza, there have been suggestions that suffering at Sde Teiman is a horrific and temporary exception created by the Gaza war.

Detainees’ testimony and the B’Tselem report suggest, however, that it is just one particularly violent component of an abusive system, and cases of abuse are not unsanctioned acts of violence.

Instead, it is suggested that under the direction of the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the mistreatment has become an integral part of Israel’s detention system.

At least 60 people have died in Israeli custody since the war in Gaza broke out, compared to one or two deaths a year previously.

The Guardian carried out separate interviews with eight detainees, the majority arrested without charge and released without trial, who detailed patterns of abuse matching those documented by B’Tselem.

Field researchers in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza collected dozens of testimonies, medical reports, autopsies and other evidence.

They found consistent and widespread testimony of severe, arbitrary violence, sexual assault, humiliation and degradation, starvation, deliberately unhygienic conditions, overcrowding, denial of medical treatment, prohibitions on religious worship, and denial of legal counsel and family visits.

Several witnesses the Guardian spoke to gave details of three killings: Thaer Abu Asab and Abdul Rahman al-Maari, who were allegedly beaten to death by guards, and Mohammad al-Sabbar, who died from a chronic medical condition. Cellmates said that after 7 October he was not given medicine or the special diet he needed.

Along with the use of direct violence and restrictions on movement, Palestinians have long alleged that imprisonment is a key element of Israel’s 57-year-old occupation: various estimates suggest that up to 40% of Palestinian men have been arrested at least once in their lives.

Before 7 October, 5,200 Palestinians were held in Israeli jails, including 1,200 in administrative detention, which allows indefinite detention without charge or trial. Intense waves of arrests in the aftermath of the Hamas attack mean that prisoner numbers soared to 9,623 as of early July.

Among them, 1,402 prisoners from Gaza are classed as “unlawful combatants” under emergency legislation, which also allows detention without charge or trial. The IDF says the measure complies with international law.

Firas Hassan, a 50-year-old youth ministry worker from Bethlehem, was arrested under an administrative detention order in 2022. Conditions then were acceptable, he told the Guardian: there were hot showers, decent food, time outside in the yard, and about six prisoners to a cell, each with his own bunk.

In early 2023, Ben-Gvir was appointed the minister in charge of prisons. He immediately set about getting rid of what he called “perks” for Palestinian inmates, such as fresh bread, and limiting shower times to four minutes.

But those changes were nothing compared to what happened after 7 October, Hassan said. “There was respect before. But after 7 October I was sure I was going to die there. I lost all hope.”

Hassan described conditions common to many of the interviews. He said he and his cellmates – up to 20 people in the same cell designed for seven – were beaten, sometimes several times a day. He said one injured cellmate claimed to him through tears after a particularly brutal incident in November that guards had raped him with a baton.

With little water and no washing facilities or clean clothes, conditions quickly became extremely unsanitary. Food for the entire room consisted of a piece of meat, a cup of cheese, half a tomato and half a cucumber in the morning, and about five spoonfuls of uncooked rice per person for dinner. There was one 2-litre bottle of water for the whole room to share.

“The guards told me, we are giving you enough to keep you alive, but if it was up to us we will let you starve,” he said. On his release without charge in April, Hassan had lost 22kg in weight.

Hassan also heard the screams of 38-year-old Thaer Abu Asab, who was allegedly beaten to death in the cell next door after refusing to bow his head to guards.

Another witness, Mousa Aasi, 58, from Ramallah governorate, told the Guardian that after the beating, Asab was dragged into the courtyard in view of all the inmates. “They said he died in hospital later, but I think he was already dead,” he said.

Israeli strikes kill 15 Palestinians in Gaza school

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 03 August 2024

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By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Ali Sawafta

CAIRO/RAMALLAH - An Israeli airstrike on a school sheltering displaced persons in Gaza City killed at least 15 Palestinians on Saturday, hours after two strikes in the occupied West Bank killed nine militants including a local Hamas commander, Hamas said.

The Israeli military said the first of two West Bank airstrikes hit a vehicle in a town near the city of Tulkarm, targeting a militant cell it said was on its way to carry out an attack.

A Hamas statement said one of those killed was a commander of its Tulkarm brigades, while its ally Islamic Jihad claimed the other four men who died in the strike as its fighters.

Hours later, a second airstrike in the area targeted another group of militants who had fired on troops, Israel's military said, during what it described as a counter-terrorism operation in Tulkarm.

Palestinian news agency WAFA said four people had died in that strike, and Hamas said all nine of those killed in the two Israeli attacks in the West Bank were fighters.

Violence in the West Bank was on the rise before the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and has risen since, with frequent Israeli raids in the territory, which is among those that the Palestinians seek for a state.

There has also been an increase in anti-Israeli street attacks by Palestinians.

GAZA STRIKES

In the Gaza Strip, at least 15 people were killed in the Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced persons in Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, the Hamas run-government media office said.

The Israeli military said the school was being used as a command centre for Hamas, to hide militants and manufacture weapons. Hamas has denied Israeli accusations that it operates from civilian facilities such as schools and hospitals.

Earlier on Saturday, Israeli strikes in the enclave killed six people in a house in the southern area of Rafah and two others in Gaza City, Gaza health officials said.

The Israeli military said its forces had struck militants and destroyed Hamas infrastructure in Rafah and elsewhere in the enclave.

At least 39,550 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, according to Gaza health officials. The offensive was triggered by a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 abducted, according to Israeli tallies.

A high-level Israeli delegation made a brief visit to Cairo on Saturday in an attempt to resume Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Egyptian airport authority sources said. The delegation returned to Israel hours later, Israeli media said.

Chances of a breakthrough appear low as regional tension has soared following the assassination of Hamas' leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday, a day after an Israeli strike in Beirut killed Fuad Shukr, a top military commander from Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which like Hamas is backed by Iran.

Haniyeh's death was one in a series of killings of senior Hamas figures as the Gaza war nears its 11th month, and it fuelled concern that the conflict in Gaza was turning into a wider Middle East war.

Hamas and Iran have both accused Israel of carrying out the assassination of Haniyeh and have pledged to retaliate. Israel has neither claimed nor denied responsibility for the death.

Italy urged Iran on Saturday to show restraint.

"Italy makes an appeal to Iran, calling on it for restraint and to contribute to a phase of de-escalation throughout the Mediterranean region and the Middle East," the Foreign Ministry said, adding that the message had been delivered to the Iranian ambassador in Rome.

Israel used dogs, waterboarding on Palestinian detainees from Gaza, UN report

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Category: MENA

Published: 31 July 2024

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By Emma Farge

GENEVA - Thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly removed from Gaza, sometimes from bomb shelters, and dragged into detention in Israel where some have been tortured and dozens have died, according to a U.N. human rights office report on Tuesday.

Many of those seized in Gaza since the war began on Oct. 7 were taken at checkpoints as they fled Israel's military offensive or from the schools and hospitals where they were sheltering, said the 23-page report based primarily on interviews with released detainees and other victims and witnesses.

Often, they were blindfolded and shackled before being transported to Israel and placed in "cage-like" military centres and forced to wear nothing but diapers for prolonged periods, it said. The U.N. report said 53 detainees died in custody.

"The testimonies gathered by my Office and other entities indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees, amongst other acts, in flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law," said United Nations High Commissioner Volker Turk in a statement accompanying the report.

He called for their immediate release as well as the release of the remaining hostages from among the 253 kidnapped in Israel in the Oct. 7 attacks in which 1,200 people were killed.

The Israeli military has said it is investigating allegations of mistreatment of detainees at facilities in Israel but has declined to comment on specific cases. It plans a phase out of the Sde Teiman camp in the Negev desert which was cited both in the U.N. report and by Palestinians rights group as a location of detainee abuse.
Reports of mistreatment of detainees in Israeli prisons have been growing in recent months.

Generally they were held in secret, without being given a reason for their detention or access to a lawyer, the report said.

FORCED TO STRIP

The issue of detainees has added to international pressure on Israel over its conduct of the Gaza war, now approaching the start of its 11th month. In May, the U.S. State Department said it was looking into allegations of Israeli abuse of Palestinian detainees.

It is also sparking domestic tensions in Israel where this week right-wing protesters broke into military compounds where Israeli soldiers were due to be questioned as part of an investigation into alleged abuse of a Palestinian detainee.

The U.N. report also referred to dire conditions endured by Israeli hostages in Gaza, including lack of fresh air, sunlight and beatings, citing testimonies from those freed.
The Palestinian detainees held in Israel are mostly men and boys and included a range of people such as residents, doctors and nurses and their patients, as well as captured Palestinian fighters, the report said.

Some were subject to sexual violence, it said, without giving the number of incidents.

The report, which was shared with Israel's government and Palestinian authorities, did not say how many detainees have since been released. A U.N. spokesperson said it was impossible to determine.