August 12, 2024
On June 26,
2023, President Joe Biden declared: “Torture is prohibited everywhere and at
all times. It is illegal, immoral, and a stain on our collective conscience.”
Israeli
police form a barricade in front of a military court building as far
right Israelis and relatives of soldiers protest against the arrest of
nine soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at Sde
Teiman prison, in Netanya, Israel, on July 30, 2024. Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty ImagesYet since last
October, Israel, emboldened by Biden’s “ironclad support,” has tortured to
death at least 60 Palestinians, according to a new report by Israel-based human
rights group B’Tselem. The report comes barely 10 days after Congress gave
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more than 60 standing ovations, with
U.S. lawmakers leaping to their feet at Netanyahu’s claim that the genocide the
world is witnessing is merely a “clash between barbarism and civilization.”
The report,
titled, “Welcome to Hell,” offers a dystopian glimpse into Israel’s network of
military prisons and detention centers — which B’Tselem characterizes as
“torture camps” — where Israel holds thousands of Palestinians prisoner in
inhumane and degrading conditions. Drawing on testimonies collected from 55
released prisoners, the report reveals a policy of “institutionalized abuse,”
which includes sexual violence, severe beating, extreme hunger, humiliation and
deprivation of basic human needs such as, water, daylight and sanitation,
including soap and menstrual pads.
The quoted
testimonies demonstrate “a systemic, institutional policy focused on the
continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners,” the report adds.
“Such spaces, in which every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe,
relentless pain and suffering, operate in fact as torture camps.” The report
concludes: “Given the severity of the acts, the extent to which the provisions
of international law are being violated, and the fact that these violations are
directed at the entire population of Palestinian prisoners daily and over time
— the only possible conclusion is that in carrying out these acts, Israel is
committing torture that amounts to a war crime and even a crime against
humanity.”
Because probes
of war crimes committed by Israeli soldiers are virtually nonexistent in
Israel, where “all state systems, including the judiciary, have been mobilized
in support of these torture camps,” B’Tselem calls on the International
Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate individuals suspected of planning,
directing and committing these crimes. “We appeal to all nations and to all
international institutions and bodies to do everything in their power to put an
immediate end to the cruelties meted out on Palestinians by Israel’s prison
system, and to recognize the Israeli regime operating this system as an
apartheid regime that must come to an end,” the report concludes.
The Palestinian
Prisoner’s Society has also called on the United Nations to carry out an
international investigation into the “systematic torture of Palestinian
detainees” who are held in Israeli prisons and detention facilities.
One primary
perpetrator is Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who
oversees the prison system. Under Ben-Gvir’s direction, the report notes,
“torturing Palestinians has become an integral part of Israel’s detention
system.” Ben-Gvir himself has made no secret of these cruelties. He recently
confirmed that conditions inside Israeli prisons “have indeed worsened,”
adding, “I am proud of that.” Dismissing basic rights as “perks” for
Palestinian detainees, he boasted that he “dramatically reduced” shower time
and introduced a “minimal menu” for Palestinian prisoners. Ben-Gvir reportedly
takes special sadistic pleasure in watching Palestinian prisoners being
tortured. “We are live-streaming it for Ben-Gvir,” one soldier recalled.
Ben-Gvir also supports a bill to execute Palestinian prisoners to solve
overcrowding, stating, “They should be killed with a shot to the head, and the
bill to execute Palestinian prisoners must be passed in the third reading in
the Knesset.”
Israel holds
nearly 10,000 Palestinian prisoners. These include some 1,500 hostages who have
been kidnapped from Gaza since October and detained without charge or trial.
Many of the captives are languishing in the Sde Teiman concentration camp,
which was built in the Negev desert for Palestinian detainees from Gaza.
Palestinian prisoners and legal observers have compared Sde Teiman to notorious
torture camps like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
“It’s more
horrific than Abu Ghraib,” Palestinian lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, who had access
to the camp, told Israel-based +972 Magazine in June. He continued:
I have been in this profession for 15 years…. I
never expected to hear about rape of prisoners or humiliations like that. And
all this is not for the purpose of interrogation — since most prisoners are
only interrogated after many days of detention — but as an act of revenge. To
take revenge on whom? They are all citizens [civilians], young people, adults,
and children.
Mahajneh
recounted to Al Jazeera that Israeli soldiers gang-raped six Palestinian
prisoners in front of the other prisoners at Sde Teiman.
Recently, Sde
Teiman has been the subject of a political storm and civil unrest in Israel
after Israeli police stormed into the camp and arrested nine soldiers accused
of raping and torturing a Palestinian hostage so severely that he had to be
hospitalized. The unnamed hostage was transferred to the hospital with gruesome
injuries that required surgery. Israeli media outlets reported that the victim
lost his ability to walk. On July 30, Israel’s Channel 12 released horrific
footage showing a group of Israeli soldiers gang-raping the Palestinian
hostage. Aware of the security cameras, the soldiers, who belong to a military
unit known as Force 100, are seen raping the hostage while holding shields in
an attempt to obscure their actions. The video shows dozens of other hostages
laid on the floor, blindfolded and handcuffed. (One can only imagine the
unspeakable horrors that unfold when the camera is off.)
“It was pretty
horrifying. It’s just setting the bar so low that I don’t know how we can
deteriorate more morally. I was aware things like that could happen but I’ve
never witnessed anything like that,” an Israeli medical staffer told the Wall
Street Journal. Yoel Donchin, a doctor at Sde Teiman who attended to the
victim, said he “could not believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a
thing. If the state and Knesset [parliament] members think there’s no limit to
how much you can abuse prisoners, they should kill them themselves, like the
Nazis did, or close the hospitals.… If they maintain a hospital only for the
sake of defending ourselves at the Hague, that’s no good.”
Despite the
reported atrocities, Israeli politicians and journalists have rushed to defend
the soldiers, hailing them as “heroes,” stating openly that it’s “legitimate”
to rape Palestinian detainees, and arguing that torture and rape of
Palestinians must be regulated and made official policy in Israel. In a panel
discussion following the footage release, Israeli journalist Yehuda
Schlesinger, of Israel Hayom newspaper, said: “The only thing that is a problem
for me here is that there is no regulated policy by the state for abusing the
detainees, because, first of all, they deserve it, and it’s great revenge, and
should serve us as a deterrent.”
“Instead of
absolute condemnation, some Israeli far-right leaders have rallied to support
the suspects of abuse, which is emblematic of the root causes that enable such
abuse to happen in the first place,” the Public Committee Against Torture in
Israel stated. The group, which has condemned the rape of the Palestinian
hostage, said: “Since the beginning of the war, we claimed that the Sde Teiman
was operating as an ‘ex-territory’, and the soldiers stationed there were
acting outside any law — first in their treatment of detainees, and now towards
military law enforcement agents.” The Israeli group describes a culture of
“revenge” and “pervasive violence” throughout Israeli military prisons, where
soldiers and prison guards act with total impunity, enjoying the “backing of
the policymakers, and the lack of accountability.”
Indeed, as this
author has reported in Jacobin,
Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, praised
the soldiers as “heroic warriors,” demanding their immediate release. Israel’s
national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has hailed the soldiers as “our
best heroes” and denounced their arrest as “nothing less than shameful.”
Knesset members from the Likud ruling party are stating openly that it’s
“legitimate” to rape Palestinian detainees.
Despite being
widely reported in the Israeli media, the story has been largely ignored by the
U.S. mainstream media. Meanwhile, that same media continues to devote resources
to longform reports on what they call the “weaponization of sexual violence” by
Hamas on October 7 — even as claims about systematic gender-based violence have
been widely called into question.
Israel has a
long history of torturing Palestinians. Human rights organizations in Israel
describe Israeli military prisons as acting outside the law, in reference to
Israel’s extrajudicial detentions and torture of Palestinians. These military
prisons have been the site of unparalleled cruelty, including the Ofer military
prison in the West Bank, where some Palestinian detainees have attempted
suicide due to the “brutality of jailers” — an extreme measure given that
suicide is strictly prohibited in Islam. Physicians for Human Rights Israel has
documented the deaths of at least 13 Palestinian prisoners from the West Bank
and Israel in Ofer military prison since October. In April, Adnan al-Bursh, a
leading surgeon from Gaza, was tortured to death in the Ofer prison.
Palestinian
human rights organizations like Addameer, an organization supporting
Palestinians in Israeli jails, have reported countless cruelties against
Palestinian prisoners, including humiliating and degrading conditions, routine
torture with electricity, mock executions and rape with metal rods and fire
extinguishers. “Most of the prisoners will come out with rectum injuries
[caused by the sexual assault],” one former prisoner told the Middle East Eye.
Released prisoners describe routine beatings, rape, assaults by dogs, sleep
deprivation and forced starvation. Eyewitnesses claim that guards routinely
raid the overcrowded cells, handcuff the Palestinians and beat them brutally.
Some tortured detainees have suffered from paralysis, or lost their ability to
speak, or their memory. Others had their legs amputated due to routine handcuff
injuries. One prisoner “screamed for hours before dying.” These cruelties are
part and parcel of the brutality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and the
reality of its apartheid system in the West Bank. The dehumanization of
Palestinians has been normalized in Israel to the extent that Israeli lawmakers
and military leaders are now pushing to legalize the torture of Palestinians,
while using sham “investigations” to avoid ICC persecutions. In fact, a top
Israeli military leader reportedly referred to the investigation of torture of
Palestinian detainees as an “effort to shield them and the armed forces from
international tribunals.”
As thousands of
Israelis continue to riot for “the right to rape,” Israel’s Channel 14 invited
a masked IDF solider accused of raping a Palestinian hostage at Sde Teiman to
defend his actions live on TV, where the soldier hailed IDF as “the healthiest
army.” He later removed his mask proudly and defiantly. These soldiers will
likely escape justice, given Israel’s pathetic record of persecuting war crimes
against Palestinians, according to Israeli rights group Yesh Din.
U.S. officials
have expressed confidence in “the IDF’s investigation” into Sde Teiman.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials demand a probe of the IDF rape video – but only to
find out who leaked it.
Meanwhile, the
Biden administration has allowed Israel to act with unmatched brutality toward
thousands of Palestinian prisoners, depriving them of human rights and
stripping them of their basic humanity and dignity. This inhumanity reflects a
growing culture of impunity in Israel marked by unhinged violence and desire
for revenge.
What we are
witnessing is not merely impunity, but the U.S.-backed disintegration of the
entire supposedly rules-based international order, which the U.S. itself helped
establish in the post-war period. The continued existence of Sde Teiman, funded
partly with U.S. tax dollars, defies basic, century-old principles of prisoner
treatment.
The U.S. has
allowed Israel to carry out these atrocities despite overwhelming evidence of
“a preventable crime against humanity,” to cite UN experts. U.S. politicians
have gone to unimaginable extremes to shield their genocidal allies from
accountability, with some even threatening to dismantle the international legal
system altogether. They passed laws to sanction the ICC over Israel, and even
threatened to retaliate against the court’s chief prosecutor if he issues
arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. As long as U.S. officials continue to
undermine the international legal system to cover for Israel’s war crimes, it’s
hard to see what will make Israel stop torturing Palestinians.
In his
International Day in Support of Victims of Torture speech last year, Biden
condemned Ukraine and North Korea for torturing prisoners. Meanwhile, the U.S.
president had nothing to say about Israel’s decades-long torture and
dehumanization of Palestinians. While Biden has said that he supports closing
Guantánamo, he has refused to take meaningful steps to rein in Israel’s
brutality, let alone pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire that would ensure
the closing of “Israel’s Guantánamo” and the return of Palestinian captives
unlawfully kidnapped and detained by Israel.
As the U.S.
political class continues to overlook Israel’s sexual violence and torture of
Palestinian prisoners, one wonders: What is the limit to the brutality and
violence that U.S. politicians are willing to support?
The existence of
Sde Teiman and other Israeli “torture camps,” with U.S. complicity, is a stain
on humanity. To cite the B’Tselem report, “This reality is unacceptable and
fills us, Israelis and Palestinians who believe in justice, freedom and human
rights, with shame, anxiety and rage.”
Dave DeCamp
August 11, 2024
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav
Gallant has told Secretary of Defense Lloyd Autin that Iranian military
preparations show Iran is preparing for a large-scale reprisal attack against
Israel, Axios reported on Sunday.
The report said that a new Israeli
intelligence assessment says that Iran is likely to launch an attack in
response to the Israeli killing of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in
the coming days. Israel previously thought Iran might have been rethinking the
attack due to US pressure.
Last week, Israeli officials
discussed the possibility of launching a “preemptive strike” on Iran if they
had intelligence that an Iranian reprisal attack was coming, which would just
escalate the situation further.
Sources told Axios that Israeli
intelligence believes Iran might launch the reprisal attack before Thursday,
the day the US, Qatar, and Egypt said they wanted hostage negotiations between
Israel and Hamas to restart.
Iran’s mission to the UN said Sunday
that Tehran is hoping its reprisal attack will not impede ceasefire
negotiations. “We hope that our response will be timed and conducted in a
manner not to the detriment of the potential ceasefire,” the mission said.
The US is vowing to defend Israel
from any Iranian attack and has deployed military assets to the region as a
threat to Iran and its allies. Austin reiterated the pledge to Gallant,
according to a Pentagon readout of the call.
“Secretary Austin reiterated the
United States’ commitment to take every possible step to defend Israel and
noted the strengthening of US military force posture and capabilities
throughout the Middle East in light of escalating regional tensions,” Austin
said.
The readout said the deployment of
the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group to the Middle
East would be “accelerated.” It said Austin also ordered the deployment of the
USS Georgia, a guided-missile submarine.
The Iranian reprisal attack might be
coordinated with Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and potentially the Shia
militias that operate in Iraq and Syria.
Tareq S. Hjjaj
Zainab
al-Jaabari, 79, sits a few dozen meters in front of the scene of the massacre.
She is waiting for her family members to return from checking for her seven
sons and grandchildren, who were in the prayer hall praying Fajr at the time it
took place.
Her family
members arrived to see the reality of the massacre with their own eyes: more
than a hundred people were killed, and their bodies were now scattered and
mixed in the prayer hall in the Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City. It is possible
their delay in returning now is due to their horror at what they found, or
perhaps because they can’t imagine how to tell Zainab that her seven sons and
grandchildren have been killed.
At dawn on
Saturday, August 10, the Israeli army bombed a mosque while dozens of displaced
people were praying the Fajr prayer, the daily Islamic prayer offered in the
early morning. The bombing killed more than a hundred people, most of whom were
dismembered or destroyed beyond recognition. For this reason the identification
of the bodies has so far been incomplete.
The majority of
the martyrs in this latest massacre are first- or second-degree relatives
because the prayer hall that the Israeli army bombed belongs to a school
housing displaced families from Gaza City. The decimated prayer hall belongs to
the Tabi’in School, and is only used by the displaced people sheltering in the
school.
At the time of
the bombing the prayer hall was filled with men. Now, many women who may have
become widows and many children who may have become orphans, are sitting in
front of the classrooms that were not reached by the bombing waiting to be told
the fate of their families.
The Israeli army
said that it bombed the prayer hall because there were armed elements from the
Islamic Jihad movement and Hamas there, but the displaced people in the school
confirmed that there were no armed men among them. Hamas also denied the Israeli
allegations and issued a statement saying that there were no armed men in the
school.
“We live in the
school, more than a hundred families, there are no fighters among us, there are
no armed men among us, they are all children,” Zainab al-Jaabari told
Mondoweiss.
“The Israeli
army left us nothing; they burned the trees, destroyed the houses, killed the
people, and destroyed the land; what can we do? There is nothing we can do; we
are children and women here; we cannot fight. Have you ever seen a country do
all these criminal acts? Have you ever seen people who have all these crimes
happen to them?” she says.
“All we have is
prayers; we pray against America that helps Israel to slaughter us, and we pray
against everyone who watches us being slaughtered and does nothing to help us.”
“We no longer
have anything, and there is nowhere to go; the only thing we have is the sea,
and even there, we will find death.”
Al-Jaabari’s
daughters went to the Baptist Hospital near the bombed school so they could
identify their siblings. “I can’t move much. I sent my daughters to the
hospital to check on the rest of my children, but none of them have returned
yet; all my sons and grandchildren were praying at the time of the bombing.”
Hours after the
massacre, the names of the martyrs who were identified were announced, and
among the names were seven martyrs from the Al-Jaabari family. They are
Zainab’s sons and grandchildren.
Every 70
kilograms of remains is considered a martyr
In the mosque,
people stand in a row close to each other as they pray, and after the bombing,
the worshipers remained intermingled as well, as remains and corpses. Large
numbers of martyrs were not able to be identified, and entire families were
wiped out.
Survivors of
this massacre are describing a new and horrifying experience they are being
forced to endure in aftermath of Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip: they cannot
even identify the remains of their loved ones.
Because the
rescue teams couldn’t identify many of the human remains collected due to the
intensity of the bombing, the doctors at Baptist Hospital were not able to
identify each martyr individually. Instead, the doctors have started collecting
body parts in plastic bags and giving 70 kilos of remains to the family of a
martyr who has gone missing.
Hassan Ahmad
told Mondoweiss that he searched extensively for the body of his 6-year-old son
Ali, and after hours of searching, he did not find a trace of him. He then went
to the Baptist Hospital to ask about his son, or to find any part of his body
so I could identify him and bury him. After a long search that did not yield
any results, the doctors at the Baptist Hospital gave him a plastic bag
containing 18 kilograms of human remains and told him, “This is your son; go
and bury him.”
“I don’t know if
this is my son or not, I don’t know what I’m carrying in this bag. They said
he’s my son, and I don’t know anything, and I don’t see anything of my son in
this bag,” Ahmad explained.
“I collect my
husband’s body parts.”
Manar Al-Zaim’s
voice is hoarse from screaming. She is still trembling from fear. Al-Zaim, 43,
recounted to Mondoweiss how she rushed to the prayer hall immediately after the
bombing to look for her husband.
“People were
praying there; they bombed them with three missiles when the bombing started,
and I saw the fire; I couldn’t control myself; my husband was among them. I ran
like crazy to find my husband; I entered the prayer hall, and the fire was
burning in it; I found a large number of young men whose bodies were on fire, I
tried to put out the fires in their bodies, then I started looking for my
husband, I didn’t find him, I found some of his remains and recognized them,
but I didn’t find my husband in full.”
“We are all
civilians here, fleeing from death, bombing, and destruction, we no longer have
a safe place, we no longer have any place to go, here is the Israeli army
killing hundreds in the mosque while they were praying, and what did the world
do after this crime?”
I saw my
father’s carnage
Muhammad Hamida,
12, recounted to Mondoweiss how he found his father, who had been torn apart in
the Israeli attack. He says that he went with his older brother to the prayer
hall after the bombing to rescue their father, who was praying at the time.
“When we
arrived, we couldn’t enter because of the intensity of the fire, blood, and
body parts, but we wanted to check on my father. Moments later, we could enter
the prayer hall but we couldn’t bear the scene.”
“People were cut
up, there was a lot of blood on the ground, and body parts and small pieces of
worshipers’ bodies were scattered everywhere. We found my father lying on the
ground there. We recognized him, and our relatives helped us drag him out of
the prayer hall. We found a human head stuck between his feet when we took him
out. I was stunned with fear. I have never seen scenes like this in my life. I
hope I never see them again.”
“They will kill
us all; we are here alone; no one cares about us. They killed my father, and a
month ago, they killed my two uncles, and they will kill everyone who remains
in Gaza.”
Fatima Hassona
conducted the interviews for this report from Gaza.
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