‘Welcome to hell’: What happens to Palestinians in Israeli prisons

ISRAEL: Israeli media outlet Channel 12 on August 6 released a harrowing video showing soldiers at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, a secretive Israeli military detention centre in the Negev desert in southern Israel, gang-raping a Palestinian detainee.

The video shows the soldiers accompanied by a dog, picking up a man, from a group of Palestinian detainees made to lie on their faces on the ground, blindfolded and hands bound backwards. The man is seen being dragged to a corner, where the soldiers sexually assault him while covering their faces from surveillance cameras using riot shields.

The attack was so brutal that, according to Israeli media reports, the man ended up with “a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage, broken ribs and unable to walk.”

Ten soldiers were arrested on July 29 after Israel’s military advocate general ordered an investigation into the incident.

“The investigation was launched after a detained terror suspect was brought from the base to a hospital with signs of serious abuse, including to his anus,” The Times of Israel reported.

The footage released by Channel 12 is reportedly taken from evidence used in the investigation.

The video sparked widespread condemnation from rights groups, the UN and even Israel’s close ally, the US.

“We have seen the video, and reports of sexual abuse of detainees are horrific…There ought to be zero tolerance for sexual abuse, rape of any detainee, period,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller when asked by reporters about the video.

However, days after the video surfaced, one of the accused soldiers was invited by Israeli media outlet Channel 14 to defend himself and his co-accused in the case.

Criticising Israeli journalists for publishing the video, he said, “Why did you slander our name in front of the world?”

Alleging that the video was “edited,” he said the journalists are “illegitimate” as far as he is concerned.

Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister of the country in a post on X on Thursday, demanded “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.”

According to Israel media outlet Haaretz, the detained soldiers belong to the Force 100 unit of the Israel army, which is tasked with guarding the Sde Teiman prison.

Several Israeli lawmakers had earlier, immedietly after the arrest, come out in defence of the soldiers and the horrific act they committed. A far-right mob including ministers and politicians stormed the military base at Beit Lid, where the arrested soldiers were held for investigation.

In a meeting of lawmakers called to discuss the incident on July 31, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, was asked by his colleague whether it was legitimate, “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum?”

“If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!” was his response.

The far-right National Security Minister of Israel, Ben-Gvir, who is also in charge of prison service, told Israeli media on the day of the arrest that it was “shameful” for Israel to arrest “our best heroes”, reported Al Jazeera.

Rape, torture and abuse as a matter of policy

“It was common practice for soldiers to strip detainees naked, insert objects into their rectum and grab their genitals aggressively when they changed,” Ibrahim Salem, a Palestinian detainee who spent nearly eight months in Sde Teiman told The Middle East Eye.

Salem’s picture was one of the first images to be leaked from the notorious prison where thousands of Palestinians picked up and sometimes allegedly kidnapped from war-torn Gaza are being held.

In the widely circulated image first published by the American media outlet CNN, Salem is seen standing behind the barbed wire fence of the detention camp, blindfolded and his arms behind his head. Many detainees, similarly bound and blindfolded can be seen behind him.

According to 36-year-old Salem, the picture showed just the “tip of the iceberg” of his horrific experience in detention, which included “rape, electrocution and frequent beatings.”

“Most of the prisoners will come out with rectum injuries [caused by the sexual assault],” Salem told The Middle East Eye.

Salem was in the intensive care unit of northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, taking care of his children who were seriously injured in an Israeli bombing, when the military came in and took him away.

According to Salem, Israeli soldiers ordered him and the other Palestinian men, picked up from the hospital, to take off their clothes before being placed in a “big hole at an unknown location.”

Images of Palestinians, naked, bound, blindfolded and sometimes piled up on top of each other being transported in army trucks were widely circulated on social media, mostly through the profiles of Israeli soldiers.

Salem recounted being beaten and insulted while his hands and legs were tied, all while being naked in the rain, before being transported to the Sde Teiman detention camp.

“It was the worst nightmare,” Salem said about the 52 days he spent at Sde Teiman.

“You stand on one leg for two hours, then they would tell you: ‘Do you want me to help you?’ And when you say yes, they tell you to say, ‘I am the son of a whore, I am the brother of a whore’, to say ‘Netanyahu fucked my sister, am Yisrael chai [the people of Israel live]. Now repeat after me, am Yisrael chai! Am Yisrael chai! A hundred times’,” Salem recounted.

Salem also recounted being raped by female soldiers who would insert fingers and objects inside his rectum.

“Though it was rampant, inmates rarely spoke about it to each other. It was embarrassing for many to admit, especially when they were raped by female soldiers, who were sometimes in their teens,” Salem said.

Salem said he was electrocuted when he confronted a soldier about killing his children.

“I noticed that he was gluing something on me. Then I started shaking. He was electrocuting me. He electrocuted me in sensitive spots and hit me in these spots,” Salem said.

In another incident Salem recounted a chair being broken on his chest.

“I remember a chair was broken on my chest. While I was tied and handcuffed, he slammed a chair [on me] and it broke on my chest. I do not know [why],” he said adding that during the incident, the soldier was on the phone with his girlfriend.

According to a CNN investigative report ,citing Israeli whistleblowers including a medical staff at the field hospital which is a part of the Sde Teiman detention centre, Palestinian detainees wounded during Israeli bombing or the abuse at the detention centres were further tortured at the medical facility.

The medical staff said that wounded Palestinian detainees were kept blindfolded, naked, diapered and chained to the hospital beds while being tortured at the medical facility.

“If you imagine yourself being unable to move, being unable to see what’s going on, and being completely naked, that leaves you completely exposed… I think that’s something that borders on, if not crosses to, psychological torture,” CNN quoted one of the medics as saying.

Another medic revealed that they were ordered to “learn how to do medical procedures” on the detainees, often without anaesthesia.

“I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise,” he said, adding that this was frequently done without anaesthesia.

He also revealed that he witnessed an amputation being performed on a Palestinian detainee who sustained injuries due to the constant zip-tying of hands.

Another doctor at the field hospital had earlier in a letter addressed to defence minister, health minister and the attorney general of Israel revealed that he witnessed multiple amputations on Palestinian detainees due to such injuries.

“Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event,” the doctor said, as reported by Haaretz.

He also revealed that medical negligence and improper treatment at the facility have led to complications and the death of many Palestinian detainees.

However, torture of Palestinian prisoners is not reportedly limited to a single detention centre, it has become more of Israel’s policy towards Palestinians arrested from Gaza and elsewhere.

According to a report titled ‘Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps’ released by Israeli rights group B’Tselem, the country’s prison facilities, military and civilian, have transformed into “a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy.”

The report details abuse and torture against Palestinians, particularly exacerbating after the October 7 attack.

“The guards turned very violent after the war broke out. One day, I heard shouts from the inmates in the next cell. Later, I found out that one of them asked a guard if there was a ceasefire or any sort of solution because we weren’t getting any news from the outside, and in response to that question, they beat him to death,” the report quoted 18-year-old Muhammad Nazzal who was lodged in the Negev Prison as saying.

Another prisoner, 50-year-old Firas Hassan, lodged in the same prison witnessed one of the inmates being abused sexually while it was live-streamed for Israel’s National Security Minister Ben Gvir.

“They took some clothes away from inmates. They dragged some of us on the floor and forced others to kiss one of the officer’s shoes. I saw them grab some inmates by the testicles, and the inmates screamed and cried. The officers also pressed their batons against the genitals of some inmates. The stream of insults didn’t stop: “motherfuckers,” “sons of bitches,” “dogs,” “ISIS.” Some of the forces filmed us with cell phones and cameras. I heard the officer tell the others in Hebrew: “We’re livestreaming for Ben Gvir,” Hassan recounted.

Several accounts of Palestinians released from these prisons and military detention centres tell similar stories of extreme torture and sexual abuse. Torture and physical, sexual and mental abuse are reportedly being systematically used against the detainees sometimes to break them, otherwise for mere vengeance. Israel continues to commit these crimes, while it stands as stark violation of several international laws concerning human rights and the rights of prisoners.

Amnesty International has previously called on Israel to end the “rampant torture” taking place in its prisons, saying the rights group had documented 31 cases where it found credible evidence of widespread use of torture.

As one of the prisoners was reportedly told by a soldier at the gates of the Meggido prison, Israeli prisons are indeed “hell” for Palestinians, even as the world remains a mute spectator.