August 7, 2024
What democracy
would accept a member of parliament agreeing that it was permissible and
acceptable for its soldiers to sexually abuse political prisoners by “putting a
stick up their rectum” and reinforcing this torture and war crimes by saying,
“Yes, with these people everything is acceptable. Everything”. That so called
“democracy” is Israel. It has for years boasted about it’s military being the
“most moral army in the world” when in fact it is now the most immoral army in
the world run by a fascist, brutal, extremist, rogue government dominated by
messianic settlers.
July 3rd was
Palestinian Prisoners Day and hundreds of thousands of people across the world
remembered the plight of Palestinian prisoners under Israel’s brutal and
illegal incarceration regime. Highlighting these latest abuses and war crimes
is the UN, among many reports, detailing the abuse of Palestinian prisoners by
Israel. The report was released on July 29 2024, by the United Nations Office
of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), (Thematic Report: Detention
in the context of the escalation of hostilities in Gaza). This report has
detailed the horrific conditions that Palestinian prisoners are being subjected
to, both at the SdeTeiman detention facility in the Negev for prisoners from
Gaza, and in the prisons in Israel that are illegally detaining thousands of
Palestinian prisoners, men, women and children. The detention centres include
ad hoc facilities inside military barracks in Israel, such as SdeTeiman, Zikim
and others including Ketziot in the Negev desert under the military, while others
include the Ofer and Damon prisons in Israel under the control of the extremist
Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The UN report
detailed that thousands of Palestinian prisoners from Gaza have been subjected
to brutal and sadistic forms of torture or other ill-treatment. These include
“severe beatings, electrocution, being forced to remain in stress positions for
lengthy periods, prolonged blindfolding and to being shackled for long
periods”. The report detailed that prisoners are held in “cage-like” military
centres, shackled and forced to wear nothing but diapers and refused access to
toilets. They have been held in the cold in humiliating situations, and
tortured using waterboarding, sleep deprivation, the release of dogs on them in
some cases resulting in attacks and bites, deprivation of food, sleep and
water, lack of medical attention and being burnt with cigarettes, being
suspended from the ceiling, being forced to kneel on gravel, deliberate
humiliation, blackmailing, and given hallucinogenic pills. There have been
extensive reports by both men and women of sexual and gender-based violence and
OHCHR received consistent reports of ISF personnel inserting objects into
detainees’ anuses. The torture and ill treatment has been so extreme that
fifty-three detainees have died in custody.
These are
extreme war crimes and this is a so called democratic government that the
Australian government still calls a “friend”.
There are also
reports that the ISF committed acts of sexual and gender-based violence against
detained men and women in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, descriptions
of which included the forced nudity of both men and women; beatings while naked,
including on the genitals; electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced
to undergo repeated humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and
threats of rape; and the inappropriate touching of women by both male and
female soldiers. There are testimonies of victims as well as video material,
that some almost naked, blindfolded and tightly handcuffed male detainees were
filmed and photographed in deliberately humiliating positions.
All of this
detailed horrific and barbaric torture is considered a war crime and a crime
against humanity and our government remains silent.
Male
Palestinians interviewed by OHCHR believed they lost between 25kg to 55kg of
body weight while in custody, in part as a result of denial of access to
adequate food.
The OHCHR
reports that Dr. Adnan Ahmad Ateya Al Bursh, a 50-year-old Head of the
Orthopedic Department at Al Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, reportedly died
on 19 April in Ofer Prison, an Israeli detention facility run by IPS and
located in the West Bank. The OHCHR report details that “the ISF detained him
on 18 December 2023 at Al Awda Hospital, North Gaza, along with several other
doctors and personnel of the hospital. According to a witness detained with Dr.
Al Bursh interviewed by OHCHR, Dr. Al Bursh was in good health before being
detained, despite a minor injury sustained a few days before, and was
performing his normal duties at the hospital. The testimony of Palestinians
detained with him raise serious concerns that he died following torture or
mistreatment at the hand of Israeli authorities.”
The OHCHR report
also details that “Israeli medical personnel and whistleblowers have reported
that injured detainees from Gaza were held at a field hospital established in
the Sde Teiman compound, where they were blindfolded at all times, their arms
and legs shackled to their beds, and they were fed through a straw. In early
April 2024, an Israeli doctor reported that two Palestinian detainees from Gaza
had had their legs amputated there in what he called “a routine event”, due to
injuries caused by harsh shackling by the IDF”. Supporting the OHCHR report,
Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) reported that it’s doctors observed
the autopsies of five Palestinian men who had died in IPS detention as of 20
March 2024. In two of the five cases, PHRI reported visible signs of physical
violence including fractured ribs, and in a third case assessed that the
specific cause of death was medical neglect.
Why are
Australian media bodies silent over these atrocious violations and war crimes
against medical personnel In Gaza?
In the Occupied
West Bank, as at the end of June 2024, Israel’s prison service held more than
9,400 so called “security detainees” and some have been held in secret without
access to lawyers or respect for their legal rights. Most of these are men
although adolescent boys were also detained. Among them were 295 women and 630
children including a woman over 80 years of age with Alzheimer’s disease, and
girls without any apparent link to armed groups. Amnesty International reports
on five Palestinian women who were held incommunicado for over 50 days.
Initially they were held in a “women-only detention camp at Anatot military
detention centre, in an illegal Israeli settlement near Jerusalem, then in
Damon prison for women in northern Israel under the control of the Israeli
Prison Service.” According to the OHCHR monitoring, “there have been regular,
at times daily, raids of prison cells, removal of personal items, and limited
access to personal hygiene items, including menstrual hygiene”. Israel’s
Minister of National Security has stated that Palestinian “terrorists” were to
be deliberately subjected to harsh treatment.
Since 7 October,
Israel has suspended the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)’s
access to all Palestinian detainees.
Why are our
governments, state and federal, and all other western governments silent about
this horrific torture and ongoing multiple war crimes against Palestinians
prisoners? Why are they still supporting this fascist, brutal, extremist,
messianic government by setting up Friends of Israel support groups as happened
in Victoria recently with a former state premier and member of the current
federal government proudly joining in? Is this group not aware of Israel’s
present war crimes so clearly identified by the ICJ and now also by the OHCHR,
the world’s peak human rights organization?
The
Palestinian Health Ministry accused Israel on 7 August of preventing the entry
of over a million desperately needed polio vaccines into the Gaza Strip.
“The
Gaza Strip needs 1.3 million doses of polio vaccine … Israel is still refusing
to allow vaccines into the Strip,” said Musa Abed, Director of Health Care at
the ministry.
“The
risk of the spread of the polio virus in the Gaza Strip still exists in light
of the ongoing Israeli aggression and the deprivation of the population of
public hygiene tools. Any delay in the supply of vaccines would exacerbate the
already poor health conditions and have serious repercussions on the health of
children and vulnerable groups such as the elderly and the sick,” Abed added.
Infectious
diseases have been spreading rapidly across the Gaza Strip as a result of
Israel’s genocidal war and the internal displacement of nearly two million
Palestinians.
“There
is an imminent epidemiological catastrophe in the Gaza Strip as a result of the
outbreak of waterborne or respiratory diseases. There are more than 100,000
cases of epidemic hepatitis … in the year before the [Israeli] aggression there
were only 85 cases in the entire Gaza Strip,” Palestinian Health Minister Majed
Abu Ramadan warned on 4 August.
“The
most dangerous thing we are suffering from is the possibility of an epidemic
outbreak of Polio in the Gaza Strip,” the health minister added.
Thursday’s
health ministry warning came after the World Health Organization (WHO) said it
would send one million polio vaccines to the devastated enclave.
On
18 July, the Health Ministry released a statement warning of poliovirus in
Gaza, which was found in sewage sampling tests undertaken in coordination with
UNICEF. The ministry said that the presence and spread of poliovirus is caused
by the overcrowding of displaced persons, the destruction of health and
sanitation infrastructure, and the shortage of medical and cleaning supplies.
It warned that this poses a threat to thousands of Gazans and called for an
immediate end to the war, the provision of safe water, and the repair of sewage
lines that were destroyed by Israeli forces.
Days
later, the Israeli army announced a campaign to provide its troops in Gaza with
polio vaccines while leaving Palestinians unprotected from the disease.
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