August 20, 2024
In October 2023,
Fadiah Barghouti’s home in Ramallah was raided by Israeli forces. Soldiers
broke down her door and smashed everything that they could get their hands on.
They were searching for her son Basel, whom they beat along with her other son,
saying they would all “pay the price for supporting Hamas.” It was a claim
Barghouti was familiar with: Her husband Mahmoud is currently being held in an
Israeli prison for the same unsubstantiated charge, as he has been on and off
for 10 of the last 30 years.
Still, Barghouti
was unwilling to lose Basel, a computer engineering student at Birzeit
University, to the abyss of the Israeli prison system. She began advocating for
his release, along with other Palestinian detainees like her husband, on social
media, in interviews and at public demonstrations. So, in February, Israeli
forces arrested her too.
“I experienced
the meaning of the stories that we have heard about Guantánamo,” Barghouti told
Truthout.
Barghouti and
her son are among the more than 10,000 Palestinian men, women and children who
have been arrested by Israeli forces since October 7. Taken into custody in
violent raids and held indefinitely without charge under conditions that
include hunger, torture and even death, many Palestinian detainees are
essentially held hostage by the Israeli prison system.
“Detain Them for
an Indefinite Period of Time”
Due to the churn
of the Israeli prison system, in which detainees can be apprehended and
released following a few months’ detention, not all of the 10,000 Palestinians
arrested by Israeli forces since October 7 are still being held. Some, like
Fadiah Barghouti, were released after a few months’ detention, while others,
like her son Basel, are still being detained.
Those who are
still held joined the thousands incarcerated prior to October, like Barghouti’s
husband, bringing the current number of Palestinian detainees up to 12,000,
according to Addameer, a Palestinian human rights organization dedicated to
advocating for prisoners. Jenna Abu Hsana, Addameer’s international advocacy
officer, estimates that of the current Palestinian detainees, 9,700 are from
the occupied West Bank and 2,300 are from Gaza. The vast majority are men,
although there may be up to 84 women and 250 children, who face conditions
indistinguishable from the men except in extremity, including overcrowding,
hunger and violence.
As Hsana
explains, more than a third of Palestinian detainees are held by Israeli
authorities under what they call “administrative detention.” Many are
apprehended in what have become near-nightly raids by Israeli forces in the
West Bank, which, along with Gaza and East Jerusalem, is internationally
recognized as Palestinian territory. During these raids, Israeli forces destroy
public and private property with bulldozers, bomb buildings, kill bystanders
and even take hostages, threatening the family members of the suspect in order
to force their surrender.
“One of the
cases of excessive use of force after October 7 was when the [Israeli]
occupation forces raided a home and they attached a bomb to the door,” Hsana
told Truthout. “The same time that the bomb had gone off, the brother of the
Palestinian who was being targeted for arrest had gone to open the door. The
door exploded and, in that, he was killed. … All of this happened in front of
the other family members in the house, in front of the mother as well.”
Outside of the
detainees held at Ofer Prison — which is situated near Ramallah, the de facto
Palestinian capital of the West Bank — all Palestinian detainees are held in
Israel, a contravention of international law prohibiting the transfer of
prisoners from occupied territories, according to Hsana. Under an aspect of
apartheid so egregious that even the U.S. State Department has acknowledged the
inconsistency, Israeli authorities try all Palestinians from the West Bank in
military courts — even while Israeli settlers living illegally in the territory
face only civilian courts back in Israel. Under administrative detention in
Israeli military courts, Palestinians face Kafkaesque trials without access to
their charges nor the evidence against them, if either exists.
“The so-called
‘evidence’ that the Israeli prosecutor in military court claims that they do
have is kept in a secret file that the detainee or their lawyer don’t have
access to,” said Hsana. “So ultimately, [administrative detention] is just an
order given to only Palestinians that allows the occupation to withhold and
detain them for an indefinite period of time. Their order can be from three to
six months. Then, once the initial time period of the first order was given, a
review will take place in military court in which their order can either be
renewed or the detainee can be released. However, most commonly, the order is
renewed and then the detainee is given another three to six months of
detention.”
“Every Boy Old
Enough to Grow a Mustache”
Of particular
concern to Defense for Children International-Palestine(DCIP), the local
section of an international organization dedicated to protecting children’s
rights, are the Palestinian children detained by Israeli forces. According to
Miranda Cleland, advocacy officer for DCIP, the Israel Prison Service (IPS)
most recently reported 226 Palestinian children in custody — but that number
does not include children from the Gaza Strip being held in Israeli military
bases, rather than IPS prisons.
“The fact that
Israeli authorities won’t allow any sort of international observers to visit
the military bases where they’re keeping seemingly several hundred, if not
more, Palestinians from Gaza is pretty alarming,” Cleland told Truthout. “We
can’t say how many children are being held there, because that information is
not available. We know that they treat every boy old enough to grow a mustache
as a potential combatant or militant. And because of the way that they target
children in the West Bank, we can say pretty confidently that there are
children from Gaza being held in these military bases and they are most likely
experiencing torture at the hands of Israeli forces with no due process, in
terms of when they might be released or get to see their families again.”
Israeli forces
subject Palestinian children to the same treatment as adults, according to
Cleland and DCIP. Prior to October, DCIP estimated that Israeli forces arrested
500 to 700 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17 every year, the vast majority for
throwing stones. In contravention of international law defining adulthood as
beginning at age 18 — including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
to which Israel is a signatory — Israeli authorities charge children 12 and
older as adults, and their cases are adjudicated in military courts, making
Israel the only country in the world where children automatically face military
trials. According to DCIP, 75 percent of those children experience physical
violence from Israeli forces and 80 percent are strip-searched. They are then
typically placed in solitary confinement for an average of 16 days to extract a
confession establishing their guilt, for which their families are often forced
to pay a fine of several hundred dollars — in a region where the average daily
wage is $37, according to the U.S. Department of State.
Like Palestinian
adults, Palestinian children have also faced greater threats from Israeli
forces since October. According to Cleland, near-nightly raids by Israeli
forces into the West Bank have resulted in a record number of Palestinian
children, 75, currently being held by IPS under administrative detention. IPS
has also cut off nearly all prison visitation for adults and children alike,
curtailing the ability of advocates like DCIP to reach children, to say nothing
of their families. Despite such challenges, DCIP continues to collect testimony
on prison conditions for children through those recently released, who report
overcrowding, hunger, denial of bathrooms, showers and time outside their
cells, as well as physical violence from Israeli soldiers and even canine
units.
Since October,
Israeli forces have also been acting in contravention of Israeli law defining
children as younger than age 12. According to Cleland, Israeli forces would
occasionally harass and detain younger children for a short period of time
prior to October 7, but even that has worsened. Recently, DCIP documented the
case of Bahaa, a 7-year-old Palestinian boy detained and beaten by Israeli
soldiers in June. The soldiers responded to Bahaa throwing stones at their
heavily armored military vehicles by firing back with live ammunition before
catching, cuffing and beating the boy. Altogether, the soldiers held Bahaa for
more than three hours, eventually releasing him half a mile away to make his
way home.
“I have not left
the house since the incident because I am scared of the Israeli soldiers,”
Bahaa told DCIP, “and I do not want to get arrested again.”
“Look What I
Have Done”
By such
accounts, Barghouti’s experience is representative of those faced by other
Palestinian detainees. After being arrested in February, Barghouti was beaten
by Israeli forces while being transferred to one interrogation center, then
another. Blindfolded and handcuffed, she was verbally abused by a dozen male
and female soldiers for hours, before being strip-searched by one of the female
soldiers, who threatened to expose her, naked, to the others if she did not
repeat the words she was told. She was forced to say “Am Yisrael Chai” — Hebrew
for “the People of Israel Live” — over and over again, as she realized that the
soldier was recording her.
“I heard her
standing in front of me, sending a voice message,” Barghouti told Truthout,
“telling her mom: ‘Mom, listen to what the terrorist said. Look what I have
done.’”
Altogether,
Barghouti was held under administrative detention for three months. Prior to
October 7, detainees were able to have visitors, as well as access to
television and radio. But Barghouti, like other detainees held since October,
had no contact with the outside world, no visits from family and no access to a
lawyer until her trial. The amount of food provided was so small and of such
poor quality that she lost 20 pounds. With only two sets of clothes, she and
the other female prisoners did their laundry by hand in the shower for the 15
minutes to hour that they were let out of their cells each day.
Still, they
considered themselves lucky: The men had only one set of clothes, and the food
they received was so much worse that her husband has lost 70 pounds, as
Barghouti eventually learned after he received a rare visit from a lawyer.
Outside of her arrest and interrogation, Barghouti also says she wasn’t beaten.
Meanwhile, she learned from detainees recently released from the same prison
where her son is being held that torture there is rampant.
Barghouti faced
trial in March, via video conference in an office at the prison where she was
being held. The judge and prosecutor were both soldiers, and the proceedings
were conducted in Hebrew, which her lawyer translated for her. The prosecutor
accused her of being involved in activities that threatened the security of the
state and requested her administrative detention be renewed for three months.
When her lawyer asked if she wanted to defend herself, she took the
opportunity.
“The streets of
Tel Aviv are full of families of Israeli prisoners,” she told the judge. “You
feel that they have the right to ask for the freedom of their family members —
but I was arrested for asking for the freedom of my family members.”
No verdict was
announced to her, but following an appeal in May, Barghouti was released. After
being freed, she learned that her husband, Mahmoud, is scheduled to be released
later this month, following two consecutive years of administrative detention, the
renewal of which was finally curtailed by an appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court.
Coincidentally, her son, Basel, was scheduled to be released the same week, but
his detention was renewed until December.
“It is not easy
for me as a mother and a wife to know that my husband and my son, my most
beloved family members, are being tortured and are hungry,” Barghouti told
Truthout. “When breaking news comes, reading that one Palestinian prisoner
passed away — do you know the feeling of being frozen? Afraid of knowing the
name? Or knowing the name of the prison where this detainee has passed away?
Expecting that you will see the name of your husband or the name of your son?
This is how thousands of Palestinian families are living these days.”
Yousef M. Aljamal
Israeli forces arrested Ibrahim
Salem, age 35, in December 2023 from the Kamal Edwan Hospital in Jabalia in the
Gaza Strip. He was with his children who were in the intensive care unit after
an Israeli airstrike targeted his family home, killing some of his siblings,
nephews, and nieces. After his arrest, he was stripped naked for two days, put
in an underground hole in an unknown location, and transferred to the Negev
prison. After complaining to his interrogators about why he was arrested, he
was moved to the Sde Teiman detention center, where he lived through “a
nightmare” for 52 days that included being subjected to torture, electrocution,
beating, humiliation, and rape.
A viral photo of him was leaked to
CNN, in which he appears to be standing with his hands on his head as a
punishment, which happened after he argued with an Israeli soldier about why he
allowed an elderly man to urinate in his clothes rather than allowing him to
use the toilet.
The following is an exclusive
interview conducted with Ibrahim Salem on August 11, 2024, by Yousef Aljamal,
who works for the American Friends Service Committee’s Palestine Activism
Program.
Thank you for speaking to me.
Please, introduce yourself and describe how you were arrested.
My name is Ibrahim Atef Salem, born
in Jabalia refugee camp in 1989. I was arrested on December 11 at the Kamal
Adwan Hospital. I chose not to evacuate to the South [after October 2023]. Two
days before my arrest, my house was directly bombed between 7:30 and 8 in the
morning while my sisters and children were sleeping. One of my sisters, Ahlam,
was martyred*, and my children were injured. When I was able to look for my
children, I found them in terrible condition. My son Waseem was injured and in
a coma from his concussion. My daughter Nana had many injuries, including a
complete fracture of her skull. Of course, she was in a coma as well. My
daughter Fatima, my wife, and another sister were injured, I was with them at
the hospital. Afterward, I was able to bury my sister and our relatives in the
hospital yard.
The next day, the Israeli army came
to the hospital and called for all of the men to go downstairs. They went
downstairs, but I didn’t. After two to two and a half hours, the army came
upstairs. They asked me what I was doing. I told them my story and showed them
the medical report I had. Before the army ordered the men to go downstairs, the
doctor had written a report about the condition of my children, stating that
they were not allowed to move and that they needed treatment. The soldier said,
“Don’t move,” and he called another soldier. When he read the report, he said,
“Take him.” They took me, I don’t know why; they took me, and that was it.
After that, we went downstairs. I walked for a while with some other men, and a
soldier said to us, “Stop and take off your clothes and put them on the
ground.” That was the beginning of the oppression, the beginning of the
psychological humiliation that shakes me up [to this day]..
They made us undress and took us to
an unknown place, where they left us naked for two days. In the morning, they
took us to the detention camp, which was part of a military barrack. We stayed
there in the cold and rain, with all our clothes removed.
How was torture carried out in
prison, how long did it last and how many hours were you allowed to sleep
We couldn’t sleep. For example, at
Sde Teiman detention camp, they let us sleep at midnight and gave us useless
blankets that didn’t warm our bodies. They were dirty and full of insects. At
4:00 a.m., and sometimes earlier depending on the mood of the soldiers, we were
woken from sleep by drums, noise, shouting, and jumping on the metal sheets,
which made us jump out of our sleep. Whoever woke up late was punished.
How did they punish you there?
There were different types of
torture. Being in prison itself is torture because they force you to kneel from
4:00 a.m. until midnight. That is torture. If you sit on your butt or your
side, they will immediately take you out and hang you. You have to stay on your
knees. Keeping someone on their knees for 20 hours is torture.
There was psychological torture as
well, where the soldiers cursed and humiliated me, my mother, and my sister.
They made us curse our sisters, they made us curse our mothers, they made us
curse ourselves and our wives. Once, when I was being investigated, the officer
said to me, “Ibrahim, I’m sorry, but I have some bad news to tell you.” I said
to him, “Tell me.” He told me that my son Waseem had died. May God have mercy
on him [weeping].
Once, during torture and
interrogation, a soldier asked me in a very vicious manner where my children
were and where they had taken me from. I told him I was taken from Kamal Adwan.
He asked what I was doing there, and I said I was burying my sister. He then
asked where I had buried my sister, and I replied that it was in Kamal Adwan.
He wanted to know the exact location, so I showed him where I had buried her.
Then, he showed me a picture of a bulldozer that was carrying the bodies. It
turned out that the bulldozers had dug up the entire area and carried the
bodies away.
He asked me, “How many bodies were
there?” I replied, six. Then he showed me a picture, which had three bodies in
the bulldozer blade and three on the ground. I pointed to the bodies in the
bulldozer and said, “Those three are my sister and her two sons. I buried them
and I know them.” I asked, “What do you want from these bodies? Why did you
take them?” I cried and cried. He then said, “You people are bastards and
liars. How can you cry over a corpse but when I told you your son had died, you
didn’t react?” I responded, “This corpse has its own sanctity and holiness for
us, which means it is forbidden to even touch it.”
How much space do you have to move
around in prison?
At Sde Teiman, there is no space. I
was not even allowed to go to the toilet; the guards would keep stalling when I
asked. In the Negev, there’s only one break, and I could only move during that
time. I used to go out at 1:30 p.m. for the break. Normally, in [Israeli
detention centers] prison, there are three breaks: one in the morning, one in
the afternoon, and one in the evening.
We were given an hour-long break at
1:30 p.m., the hottest and worst time of the day, and they wouldn’t allow us to
stay away from the sun even though we didn’t have the energy to walk at all. If
we didn’t walk, we were punished. We had to walk around the whole detention
camp, about one dunam (1,000 square meters), with tents scattered everywhere.
We ended up walking in an area of about 200 meters.
What about the way prison guards
treated Palestinian prisoners?
It was horrible. At the Negev
prison, during our one-hour break, if the guards saw two people going to the
toilet or doing anything while they were up in the watchtower, they would
urinate in a bottle and pour it on us. They stop us and pour it on us. They
would tell us to stand up and look at them, and the moment we looked at them,
they would pour the urine on us and swear at us. If someone cursed them back or
even asked why they were doing this, they would punish us by ordering us to
stay in a standing position for more than two or three hours, depending on how
lucky we were.
How was the quality of the food you
were given?
There was almost no food. We hardly
ever saw any. Some of the prisoners would manage to get food from the warden.
We would prevent prisoners who had food from coming near us because it would
often be foul. The food would sometimes come with cigarette butts in it. The
bowls that the food was served in seemed like they hadn’t been washed for
months. At one point, we asked to wash them ourselves, but the soldiers refused
and fought about it with us.
How did you communicate with your
family? How did you know their news?
I had no contact with my family and
didn’t know anything about them [while I was detained]. When I was released and
got off the bus in Khan Younis, I asked, “Where are we?” They replied, “You’re
on the border between Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah, in the Khan Younis area.”
I said, “I am from the north; I have nothing to do here. Why have you brought
me to Khan Younis?” I asked if I could go to the north, and the soldier said,
“No, there is a checkpoint on the way; you cannot go there.”
I told him I didn’t want to get off
the bus here. How could I see my children? I wanted to see my children and my
house. Then the soldier next to me punched me in the ear and said, “You get off
here, it’s none of my business.” As soon as I got off the bus, I called my
family and my wife. I first asked about the children. My wife told me that
Waseem had come out of a coma the previous month, meaning he had been in a coma
for over six months. I thanked God and asked how he was. She said, “Thank God,
he is fine, but he needs treatment and surgery. Nana is fine, Fatima is fine,
thank God, but they also need surgical operations.”
I said to her, “Give me one of my
siblings to talk to, just anyone nearby.” Then, I asked my father, “Dad, I want
to ask you something.” He said yes, and I asked him about the bodies of my
siblings, Ahlam and Muhammad. He said, “My son, the Israeli soldiers took them
from Kamal Adwan.” I recalled when the jailer showed me the pictures, the
nightmare became a reality. It was a nightmare for me; I was truly afraid of
it.
Did you get to know anyone in prison
and their stories?
Of course, I got to know some
prisoners. We talked while we were at the Negev, where we lived together and
conversed. In the barracks in Sde Teiman, we got to know each other but we were
blindfolded, so we could not see each other.
Everyone has their own story. My
photo that went viral, in which I was tortured by being forced to stand for six
hours with my hands on the top of my head just because I protested a jailer who
forced an elderly Palestinian to pee in his pants. The scene captured in the
photo was nothing compared to the other punishments we experienced. The outrage
over it—of course, people should be outraged–but there are more severe things
that happened. For example, the insults we endured, they stripped us of our
dignity! Sitting on our knees for 20 hours— isn’t that a greater punishment?
The electric shocks we endured, the cold that nearly incapacitated us.
I had been interrogated maybe 10 or
12 times—the same questions were asked, and the same things were repeated each
time. Every time I went to the interrogator, the Israeli soldiers made me strip
off my clothes and then put them back on. When you enter the room, you have to
take off your clothes, and when you come back to the room, you have to take
them off again. Isn’t that insulting and disgraceful?
There are female soldiers who hit us
on sensitive parts of our body, and other prisoners refused to talk about it,
perhaps out of embarrassment. Once, a guy sat next to me and opened up to me. I
asked him, “What happened to you?” He replied, “You should ask what didn’t
happen to me! Everything happened to me; they did everything to me.” That was
enough for me to understand what he had been through.
What caused the physical weakness in
your body?
Lack of food, torture, and
beatings—there was a lot of torture. My ribs are broken, my teeth are broken.
What do you think we ate? They don’t even bring us enough food. The food that
came was distributed among 150 people in the Negev. I swear to God, the portion
that was meant for 150 people wouldn’t be enough for just five people. But we
had to share it among ourselves.
We learned that you were taken to
hospital in prison. Why?
My ribs broke one day because of the
beatings and torture. Even after my ribs were broken, the guards would
deliberately hit me there. I had also undergone an operation on my kidney
before I was arrested, and the wound was visible. When I undressed, they would
see the wound and deliberately hit me there. One day, they struck me extremely
hard with a stick — it was a murderous blow. I was exhausted, very tired; I
stayed that way for two or three days, unable to get up or do anything, and I
was urinating blood. The sergeant told a guard that I was in such poor
condition that if I stayed there, I might die or something terrible might
happen to me.
After about three days, they agreed
to take me to the clinic. When I got there, the doctor told me I needed surgery
and that they would perform an endoscopic procedure to assess my condition.
They did the endoscopic procedure on me, or at least that’s what they called
it. I don’t even know for sure because even the doctor would beat and humiliate
me. When I asked the doctor questions, he wouldn’t answer.
I left the hospital two days later
and was taken in for interrogation. I wondered, “What did I do? I am a
civilian, a barber. What is my sin? Please explain so that I can understand.
Why all this torture, humiliation, and beating? Why have I been imprisoned for
so long? What is my charge?” In the end, the judge couldn’t find any charges
against me. Everyone else with me was accused of being “unlawful combatants,”
but I was never told what my charge was.
Ibrahim Salem now lives in a tent in
Khan Younis. He suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and
avoids being close to fences. His body is thin. He lived through a nightmare
that was photographed and leaked, leaving his surviving family members to wake
up one day to a photo of him being tortured at Sde Teiman. Ibrahim wants to
learn about his medical condition and know what operation the Israeli doctors
performed on him. Ibrahim’s dream is to be united with his children in northern
Gaza.
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