Friday, May 10, 2024

New CNN report of horrific torture of Palestinians imprisoned without charges in Israel

Palestinians imprisoned en masse without charges by Israeli forces are subject to constant torture, amputations due to prolonged confinement, and “revenge” beatings in an Israeli prison camp established after October 7, a harrowing new report by CNN reveals.

Three Israeli whistleblowers spoke of the horrific conditions imposed by Israeli soldiers at the Sde Teiman camp, which is located in the desert, 18 miles from Gaza. There, among other detention facilities, Palestinians are constantly blindfolded and handcuffed with zip ties. In one facility, they are forced to sit on the ground in painful positions; in a field hospital, they are forced to strip down, blindfolded and are strapped to beds wearing only diapers.

The whistleblowers described horrific, inhumane conditions in the prisons. Sometimes, Palestinians are forced to have limbs amputated due to injuries sustained from being handcuffed for long periods of time. These and other medical procedures are often done without anesthesia and by people without training, the report found. The camp — which is said to smell of wounds left to rot by unqualified medics — has a reputation for being “a paradise for interns.”

The soldiers incessantly dehumanize the prisoners, sources said, often holding them for weeks or more, even if they are eventually cleared to leave after Israeli guards find them to have no connections to Hamas in interrogations. While imprisoned, Palestinians face severe beatings for infractions such as speaking or moving.

The beatings “were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” one whistleblower told the outlet. “It was punishment for what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”

The warehouse-style room where Israeli forces detain Palestinians looks like an animal pen, CNN said. A leaked photo obtained by the outlet shows prisoners sitting on an extremely thin mat on the ground with their heads down, the facility surrounded by barbed wire.

At night, troops at the prison unleash “large dogs” on the prisoners while they are sleeping and barge into enclosures while releasing sound grenades, a whistleblower told CNN.

At night, troops at the prison unleash “large dogs” on the prisoners while they are sleeping and barge into enclosures while releasing sound grenades, a whistleblower told CNN.

This account was corroborated by Mohammed al-Ran, a Palestinian who formerly headed the surgical unit at Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital in the north. In December, Al-Ran was arrested, blindfolded and handcuffed, and sent to a detention camp in the desert, where prisoners were forced to endure desert heat in the day and cold in the night. After being cleared of links to Hamas, al-Ran was picked to be a prisoner representative to act as a liaison between prisoners and guards.

For this, al-Ran was allowed to take off his blindfold — but this was another form of anguish, he said.

“Part of my torture was being able to see how people were being tortured,” al-Ran said. “At first you couldn’t see. You couldn’t see the torture, the vengeance, the oppression. When they removed my blindfold, I could see the extent of the humiliation and abasement … I could see the extent to which they saw us not as human beings but as animals.”

Al-Ran was released after weeks of being the prison liaison, but was mute for a month due to the emotional trauma of the detention. When he was about to be released, he said, another prisoner asked him to find his wife and children when he returned to Gaza. “He asked me to tell them that it is better for them to be martyrs,” al-Ran said. “It is better for them to die than to be captured and held here.”

Al-Ran’s and the whistleblowers’ accounts of the prisons line up with other reports on the conditions that Israeli troops are imposing on Palestinian prisoners who they have arrested arbitrarily. Israeli forces have detained and imprisoned thousands of Palestinians since October.

Other reports have found that Israeli troops routinely beat and humiliate prisoners; some Palestinians who have been released say that Israeli officers urinated on them, refused them medication they needed, and killed prisoners. One human rights expert said that what rights groups have seen from Israeli prisons has led them to believe that torture is a policy of these facilities.

by Sharon Zhang, Truthout/ 5/10/2024

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The much longer CNN Report (which contains disturbing images and interviews) can be read here.

CNN also published the following video report covering much of what is contained in the more detailed written one. (It is ~7 minutes and contains disturbing scenes).

 

Note: These detainees are rounded up arbitrarily. They are not held on the basis of any evidence, and they are not charged with any crimes. Indeed, this has already been reported on by Human Rights groups and media outlets in the middle east, as CNN acknowledges. However, the details had not been confirmed by Israeli whistleblowers coming forward with photographic evidence until now.  Further, CNN focuses on only one detention center. There are at least 2 other military bases that are functioning as detention camps in Israel.  As the CNN report itself states:  

"The Israeli military has acknowledged partially converting three different military facilities into detention camps for Palestinian detainees from Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel...These facilities are Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, as well as Anatot and Ofer military bases in the occupied West Bank." 

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Additionally, while some detainees are released back into Gaza after 45 days, others are incarcerated in Israel's prison system which has long been known for holding hundreds of uncharged Palestinians indefinitely. Israeli Human Rights organization B'Tselem placed the number of  "administrative detainees" (those imprisoned without charges and indefinitely)  at 1,310 as of Sept. 2023-- before the Hamas attack of October 7. BBC, in an article last month, stated that administrative detainees were up to 3,600--NOT including those being held in separate military facilities, such as the one described in this OP by CNN. BBC, in a harrowing article on bruises, broken bones and deaths in Israeli prisons,  then stated:

"Israel currently holds more than 9,300 security prisoners, the vast majority of whom are Palestinians according to the Israeli rights group HaMoked, including more than 3,600 people in administrative detention.

These figures do not include detainees from the Gaza Strip being held in separate facilities by the Israeli military. [such as the one described by CNN in this post]"

The BBC article can be found here, for those interested.

Related links/sources:

>>A Human Rights Watch report released on May 8, 2024, details the dramatic rise in the IDF's "unlawful killings of Palestinians" in the West Bank. According to the report:

"Israeli forces in 2023 killed 492 Palestinians, including 120 children, in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). That figure is more than twice as many as in any other year since the UN began systematically documenting fatalities. About 300 were killed in the nearly three months following the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, though the increase in killings dates back to 2022. Between January 1 and March 31, 2024, Israeli forces killed 131 Palestinians in the West Bank....

Between October 7, 2023, and March 18, 2024, Israeli forces conducted a monthly average of 640 search-and-arrest and other operations in the West Bank, nearly double the 340 such operations during the first nine months of 2023, according to OCHA. These operations resulted in the killing of 304 Palestinians, out of a total of 409 killed by Israeli forces during this period."

An alarming proportion of the victims, according to the study are unarmed children. 

>>BBC released an investigative on-the-ground report from the West Bank showing some of the violence and intimidation of both Palestinian children and adults in the West Bank. It is called "The Other War -  2024"and can be viewed (for now at least) here on youtube free. 

>>Meanwhile, as I write,  Israel's newspaper of note, Haaretz, says that 300,000 people have evacuated Rafah ahead of the Israeli invasion there. They are being told to go to Mawasi, a thin and barren strip of coastal land with a few makeshift tents. There is no food or medical help there. Nor is there room for all those fleeing. The Rafah crossing-- vital to humanitarian aid getting in-- has been closed by Israel, as airstrikes and ground operations increase.

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