A Year After Genocide: Israeli Prisons Are “Hell” for Gaza Prisoners (Report)

During a year of genocide practiced by Israel in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, the Israeli army has arrested thousands of Palestinian civilians from the Strip, which it has besieged for the eighteenth consecutive year.

The prisoners included children, women, medical and civil defense personnel, and civilian men, and were arrested by the Israeli army since the start of its ground battles in Gaza on October 27.

A few of these prisoners were released in separate batches, while the rest are still being held captive on the grounds that they “support the resistance” or even simply because they are “men of fighting age.”

The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reported in a series of reports on prisoners who were released in batches that Israel is following a systematic structural policy of abuse, torture, and medical neglect against all prisoners.

Many prisoners, according to the organization, were subjected to “severe, repeated and arbitrary violence, sexual assault, humiliation, deliberate starvation, sleep deprivation, and denial of medical treatment.”

B'Tselem reported in an August 2024 brief that 12 detention facilities - both civilian and military - have been transformed into quasi-camps whose primary purpose is to abuse Palestinians.

This brief was titled “Welcome to Hell,” a phrase used by an Israeli jailer to welcome prisoners from Gaza, and included a summary of some of what was happening inside those crowded and inhumane Israeli camps.

In total, there were approximately 9,623 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons in July 2024, almost double the number on the eve of the October 7 events, including 4,781 “administrative detainees,” that is, without trial or even charge.

There is no official Palestinian or Israeli estimate of the number of prisoners from Gaza since the beginning of the war, while Israeli media reported that the army arrested more than 4,500 Palestinians from the Strip.

In addition to the prisoners, the US-backed Israeli genocide resulted in more than 138,000 Palestinian deaths and injuries, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine that claimed the lives of dozens of children, in one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world.

Dam Timan

Among the Israeli detention facilities, the Sde Teiman prison between the Negev and the Gaza Strip is the most abusive of prisoners, and the army has detained hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza on suspicion of being “illegal combatants.”

The Israeli Association for Civil Rights in Israel documented in a report compelling evidence of “physical and psychological abuse” committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians in this notorious army detention center.

Among the violations are: “tying the hands of detainees in painful positions, performing surgeries without anesthesia, leaving them blindfolded for long periods, beatings, and severe medical neglect,” according to the report.

On July 29, 10 Israeli soldiers were arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a Palestinian prisoner from Gaza in Sde Teiman, which sparked sharp criticism of Tel Aviv regionally and internationally.

Refusing to investigate these soldiers, Yemeni extremists stormed the Sde Teiman and Beit Lid camps, and clashes broke out between the protesters and army personnel.

On August 13, the soldiers were transferred to house arrest and are being investigated without indictment, in a move that Israeli human rights organizations consider to be an approach that enables soldiers and army commanders to escape punishment.

Among those who stormed Sde Teiman were Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu of the extremist Otzma Yehudit party, and Knesset (parliament) members Nissim Vaturi of the Likud party (leader of the ruling coalition), and Zvi Sukhot of the Religious Zionism party.

Meanwhile, Israeli human rights activists called for an investigation into what they described as “suspicions of torture” of Palestinian prisoners, warning that it would cause international harm to Tel Aviv that could reach the International Court of Justice, according to the Israeli website “i-24.”

For their responsibility for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, requested the issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its Defense Minister Yoav Galant.

48 killed

According to Haaretz newspaper on July 29, “the army is investigating soldiers in 48 cases of Palestinian deaths, most of whom were prisoners arrested from Gaza, including 36 who were in Sde Teiman.”

On September 18, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected a request by civil society organizations to close Sde Teiman, despite its record of violations.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has been pressing for the prison not to be closed, calling on July 8 to keep it open despite its overcrowding, claiming that “overcrowding prisons with Palestinian detainees is a good thing.”

On June 30, Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, called for “executing Palestinian detainees by shooting them in the head, instead of giving them water and food.”

Ben Gvir did not stop there, as on September 12, he demanded additional financial budgets to build 5,000 detention centers, in light of the doubling of the number of prisoners since the beginning of the war on Gaza.

On the same day, the Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said that "the prison crisis is one of the most sensitive security issues since the beginning of the war and remains unresolved."

In addition to Sde Teiman, Megiddo Prison is “one of the prisons that always witnesses horrific crimes and systematic torture” against Palestinian prisoners, according to Haaretz.

The newspaper revealed leaked documents from this prison relating to the many cases of horrific assault and abuse of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and the use of dogs to humiliate them.

Naked prisoners

The Israeli army added to its record of wartime violations by filming prisoners “half-naked” in December 2023, as social media users in Israel circulated photos and videos of half-naked people lying on the ground in Gaza.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (based in Geneva) confirmed in a report at the time that these photos were real and belonged to Palestinian civilians who were trapped inside shelters in the town of Beit Lahia, north of the Gaza Strip.

He explained that "they were stripped, tortured and photographed naked," while Tel Aviv claimed that they were "Hamas fighters, and that stripping them was a security measure to ensure that they were not carrying weapons or explosives."

Haaretz also published videos of prisoners without clothes on their upper bodies, after the jailers forced them to lie on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, while the jailer and a dog walked over their heads.

The newspaper quoted an unnamed senior official in the Israeli Prison Service on December 7, 2023, saying that “the procedures applied to Palestinian prisoners in Megiddo are routine.”

These procedures, which the Israeli official described as "routine," are based on rabbinical fatwas that permit the army to torture and kill Palestinian prisoners.

For example, Rabbi Meir Mazuz, a powerful figure in Israeli politics, blessed soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian prisoner in Sde Teiman.

A video clip of this lawyer was circulated on social media during his meeting with one of the accused soldiers, blessing him and saying that they should have been “honored” instead of “arrested.”

Anatolia