Israeli prison abuse against Palestinians is a stain on the world's conscience

Israeli soldiers gather at the gate to the Sde Teiman military base, as people protest in support of soldiers being questioned for detainee abuse, on July 29. AP

The video is painful to watch. The reality of what it reveals, unbearable. In early July, Israeli soldiers at the Sde Teiman detention camp, a former army base in the Negev desert, allegedly sexually assaulted a Palestinian detainee so brutally that he was later taken to a civilian hospital with severe internal injuries. Doctors and nurses deemed his situation “life threatening”.

The video of the detainee, leaked by a whistleblower, opened a window of truth regarding what happens to Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israel.

Israel’s leading human rights group B’Tselem recently published a disturbing report titled Welcome to hell: The Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps.

The testimonies were often taken from prisoners who were never tried. The conclusion: Israel holds an institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of Palestinian prisoners.

“We were taken to Megiddo,” one detainee later reported. “When we got off the bus, the soldier said: 'Welcome to hell.'”

Since Hamas’s heinous attack on Israel last October, Israel has responded with brute force. Collective punishment in Gaza has taken the form of a scorched earth policy, wanton destruction of civilian dwellings, schools, universities, hospitals. Starvation is used as a tool of war. Deportation and expulsion are daily occurrences. The misery – as we see in photos and videos every day – is appalling. But that is what we see.

What happens inside the walls of secret prisons, where suspected Hamas followers are taken, has so far been hidden from public view. Last month’s video showed the brutal rape; but B’Tselem reports other horrors inflicted by Israeli soldiers: humiliation and degradation; starvation, sleep deprivation, punitive measures for religious worship, denial of medical treatment.

These are crimes we do not get to see.

Over the years, Israel has incarcerated hundreds of thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Since October 7 last year, the number has doubled: 9,623 people, half of whom were detained without trial. These detainees were picked up on mere suspicion and have been held without the right to defend themselves, under a colonial-era law known as administrative detention.

Administrative detention allows for powers stipulated in the Emergency (Defence) Regulations that are a throwback to the British mandate. These arbitrary laws let Israelis respond not to an actual act committed – but to something that might be committed. A Palestinian can be arrested, held and tortured even if they are neither an accused nor a suspect.

They can be held for up to 90 days without legal representation or communication with the outside world. Their location is withheld from rights groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Legal experts call this a contravention of international law. Some inmates at Sde Teiman were jailed simply for expressing sympathy for the plight of Palestinians.

Mohammed Al Kurdi, a 38-year-old ambulance worker held at Sde Teiman, was held for 32 days after his ambulance convoy tried to pass through an Israeli checkpoint in November in Gaza. “My colleagues didn’t know if I was dead or alive,” he told the New York Times in June.

The Times reported that since October, of the 4,000 detainees at Sde Teiman, 35 have died either at the site or after being taken to hospital. B’Tselem quotes a higher figure: “No less than 60”, including a 24-year-old diabetic denied insulin treatment, which he needed to stay alive, who was found dead in his cell.

According to a CNN report released in May, doctors in the prison sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from handcuffing. Instead of surgeons, underqualified medical interns were said to have operated on patients. The prison was described in CNN’s report as a “paradise for interns where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds.”

Israel, of course, is not alone in prison brutality.

They have learnt from their benefactors. The US, which gives Israel more than $3.3 billion to fight their wars, water boarded suspects and used other torture methods at the notorious prison camp, Guantanamo Bay.

There, in the former naval base near Cuba, suspected terrorists in America's so-called “war on terror” were held without trial and subjected to inhuman conditions. Some have been released after decades with no evidence of their crimes. Mansoor Adayfi, then an 18-year-old Yemeni researcher accused of being a part of Al Qaeda, was held for 20 years at Guantanamo.

“We could not talk, we could not stand, we could not pray, we could not even look at the guards,” he later said.

My mentor was the great German-Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer, who died in 2018. She devoted her life to defending political prisoners from the West Bank and Gaza.

Langer was a Holocaust survivor. My first encounter with her, during the first intifada, (“uprising”) in 1989 changed my life.

Langer was one of the first to accuse the Shin Bet (a part of Israel’s intelligence apparatus) of torturing detainees. She introduced me to many released Palestinian prisoners, who gave me testimonies of what had happened to them in Israeli prisons. I could not believe that people were capable of such cruelty to other human beings.

Torture is inherently morally wrong. It destroys the soul, not just of those who endure it, but of those who inflict it.

Israel’s practices – which they claim are legitimate in their fight against Hamas – will harm not just the Palestinian community. Langer, and others in the human rights community in Israel, have pointed out that a country that abuses the human rights chips away at their own collective humanity. What happens inside the walls of Sde Teiman and other prisons is likely to harm Israeli society as well.

Legal battles for human rights lawyers in Israel are Sisyphean. I watched Langer continue her work, at times in tears, knowing that she was fighting an often-impossible battle. But she believed firmly in the law and justice. She believed, above all, in giving a voice to the disempowered.

In The New York Times report, which took three months to compile, an Israeli doctor said Israeli soldiers had captured inmates who were entirely unlikely to have been Hamas fighters. One man weighed 300 pounds; another was paraplegic; a third breathed through a tube in his neck since childhood.

“Why they brought him, I don’t know,” military doctor Prof Yoel Donchin said. “They take everybody.”

In July, Israeli military police arrested 10 soldiers on suspicion of the rape in the video. Hard-line Israeli nationalists and family members of the soldiers protested, demanding their release and implying anything done to Hamas suspects was legitimate. Two government ministers demanded their release.

Five of these soldiers are no longer under suspicion. The Israeli military has not commented on the video, but military prosecutors stated that evidence brought forth in the case indicates “a reasonable suspicion of the commission of the acts”, the Israeli military said on Tuesday.

Last week, after months of Israeli rights’ groups urging, an Israeli court heard a bid to finally close Sde Teiman.

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