Tamara Nassar
The Electronic Intifada / September 13, 2024
When Israelis rioted in July in support of 10 soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner, there was disgust and shock around the world.
But the horrifying sexual attack was far from an aberration.
Firsthand testimonies reveal that Israeli personnel are systematically inflicting rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and cruel abuse on thousands of Palestinians held in a network of prison camps.
While Israel has perpetrated these kinds of attacks on Palestinians in its prisons for decades, they have increased dramatically in quantity and intensity since 7 October, amid an atmosphere of state-sanctioned and directed revenge.
B’Tselem is aware of at least 60 Palestinians deaths in Israeli detention since 7 October, though the figure could be higher.
And while Israel’s claims of rapes and sexual assaults by Palestinians on 7 October lack even a single identified victim or firsthand testimony, any forensic evidence or credible eyewitnesses, the rapes and other sexual attacks on Palestinians are documented with a large and growing body of horrifying and consistent victim accounts and witness statements.
In the case that prompted the so-called “right to rape” riots, a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman concentration camp in the Negev desert, east of the Gaza Strip, had been gang-raped and severely injured by a group of Israeli soldiers.
Ten soldiers were initially arrested on suspicion of participating in the assault. Five of them have been released. Five are in home detention.
Ruptured bowel, broken ribs
The Palestinian detainee, who has not been identified, is from Gaza.
He had “suffered from a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs,” Tel Aviv daily Haaretz reproted, citing information it had obtained.
The doctor who treated the detainee, Yoel Donchin, “confirmed that something round had been inserted deep into the detainee’s rectum,” according to The Times of Israel.
The prosecutor in the case said that two reservists and their commander woke the detainee up from sleep and beat him for at least 15 minutes before dragging him across the floor.
The detainee was electrocuted with a taser, according to Haaretz.
One of the soldiers then inserted an object into his rectum. Haaretz said 100 different testimonies contributed to the evidence.
This appears consistent with leaked surveillance footage from Sde Teiman shows over 30 people lying face down, some shirtless, in what appears to be a warehouse-like area surrounded by barbed wire. Their hands appear restrained behind their heads.
Two Israeli soldiers lift one of the men lying face-down and move him to another side of the room, where other soldiers are holding transparent anti-riot shields. Another camera angle shows at least five soldiers, three of them holding shields, doing something to the man, though exactly what is unclear as the video is blurred.
The video is said to show the rape of the Palestinian detainee.
The arrest of the soldiers ignited protests at the Beit Lid military base where they were held for questioning. Lawmakers and members of the public rallied to defend the accused soldiers and their right to rape and torture Palestinians.
Far from representing only an extreme fringe, in Israel’s already radically anti-Palestinian society, the protests represent broader public sentiment among Israeli Jews that abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity, including sexual assault, is justified, or at least excusable.
Two-thirds of Israeli Jews believe that the soldiers should only be disciplined at the military command level, not criminally prosecuted, even if there is strong evidence of their guilt, according to a poll published by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University on 18 August.
One of the Israeli rape suspects went on live national television to defend his actions. He was wearing his military uniform and a mask showing only his eyes.
He then posted a video online proudly revealing his face to the world.
‘Welcome to hell’
As noted, this case is far from unique.
Israeli guards repeatedly inflicted sexual violence on detainees, according to a number of testimonies since 7 October. Though they echo previous allegations as well.
This includes blows to the genitals and bodies of naked prisoners, including with metal tools and batons, photographing them naked, grabbing genitals and performing strip searches “for the sake of humiliation and degradation,” B’Tselem found in its report, titled “Welcome to Hell.”
The report’s title is derived from a remark made by an Israeli soldier to a Palestinian prisoner upon his arrival at Megiddo prison. The same phrase was also posted on a sign at the entrance of a wing at Ketziot prison, according to another testimony.
Testimonies also detailed gang sexual violence and assault against prisoners by guards or soldiers.
In multiple cases, as per firshand and witness testimonies, Israeli authorities attempted to, or did in fact, rape detainees using different objects.
The many testimonies documenting torture and sexual violence at Sde Teiman reveal a “grim pattern of abuse,” Palestinian prisons group Addameer said.
One 41-year-old man told of his sexual assault by Israeli personnel to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA.
“They made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire – I have burns [in the anus],” he told UNRWA under the condition of anonymity.
“They asked us to drink from the toilet and made the dogs attack us,” he added.
“There were people who were detained and killed – maybe nine of them. One of them died after they put the electric stick up his [anus]. He got so sick; we saw worms coming out of his body and then he died.”
The man featured in a now infamous picture published by CNN told reporters he had also been raped by his Israeli captors at Sde Teiman.
Ibrahim Atif Salem said female soldiers touched his private parts, according to Middle East Eye, and he had objects inserted into his rectum.
Salem said this was not uncommon, but that it was tough for Palestinians to speak about this – as it would be for anyone – especially when detainees were raped by female Israeli soldiers, often teenagers.
Israeli female personnel participate in sexual attacks
Salem told the story of a fellow prisoner in his forties who opened up to him about his own rape by a female Israeli soldier.
“It was common practice for soldiers to strip detainees naked, insert objects into their rectum and grab their genitals aggressively when they changed,” MEE reported.
“He told me he was raped by a female soldier,” Salem told MEE.
The prisoner told Salem that he would be handcuffed and bent over a desk. A female Israeli soldier would insert her fingers and other objects into his rectum in the presence of another soldier.
A Palestinian resident of Hebron who had been detained since April 2022 told B’Tselem how his Israeli captors tried to rape him with a carrot.
Identified as A.H., the husband and father had been held in Ketziot prison in the southern Naqab region. He described an incident on 29 October 2023 when a special Israeli prison force raided his wing.
He said prisoners had poured water on the floor of the cell to mop, but Israeli forces assumed they had done so in order that guards would slip. They dragged detainees out of the cell and beat them.
“Two of them stripped me like the other prisoners, and then threw me on top of the other prisoners. One of them brought a carrot and tried to shove it in my anus,” A.H. told his B’Tselem interviewer.
“While he was trying to shove the carrot in, some of the others filmed me on their cell phones. I screamed in pain and terror. It went on like that for about three minutes.”
Buried deep in a New York Times report is a firsthand testimony describing a female soldier ordering a metal rod to be inserted into the rectum of a Palestinian detainee.
Younis al-Hamlawi, 39, a senior nurse abducted by Israeli forces in November after leaving al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told the Times how he was raped by his Israeli captors
A female Israeli officer ordered two soldiers to lift al-Hamlawi and “press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground,” The New York Times reported.
“Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with ‘unbearable pain.’”
Systemic abuse
Since 7 October, Israeli authorities converted “more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, both military and civilian” into a “network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates,” B’Tselem said.
While extensive reports highlighted abuse at Sde Teiman, the B’Tselem report reveals that a similar pattern of abuse was widespread in Israeli detention centers across historic Palestine.
Testimonies by former detainees “uncover a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners.”
Prisoners are “treated as a homogenous, faceless mass,” whether they are doctors, teenagers or members of the armed wing of a Palestinian group.
“All are deemed ‘human animals’ and ‘terrorists’ simply because they are behind bars, whether their detention was justified or arbitrary, lawful or not. This is how abuse, degradation and the violation of rights becomes permissible,” B’Tselem wrote.
It is “worst time in the history of Palestinians in Israeli prisons,” said Sami Khalil, a 41-year-old resident of Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank who had been imprisoned since 2003. He was held in the Ketziot prison in the southern Naqab region.
The abuse consistently described “is so systemic, that there is no room to doubt an organized, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities,” B’Tselem said.
After 7 October, “the prison administration collectively punished us on a regular basis,” S.B., a resident from Jerusalem, told B’Tselem.
Detainees are held in severely overcrowded cells and rarely let out to shower. They are denied access to the yard, some “for their entire incarceration, which sometimes lasted six months or more,” B’Tselem reported.
“For 191 days, I didn’t see the sun,” Thaer Halahleh, a 45-year-old father of four from Kharas, near Hebron in the West Bank, told B’Tselem.
Increasingly frequent roll calls and searches provide guards an opportunity to carry out beatings. But guards need no excuse to abuse prisoners.
“Prisoners are brutally attacked at every stage of detention and incarceration,” B’Tselem found.
Israeli soldiers, prison guards and prison special forces all participated in this violence, beating prisoners with clubs, metal batons, gun barrels, brass knuckles and sticks. They punched, kicked and set dogs on prisoners. These attacks caused severe injuries, including loss of consciousness, broken bones and death.
A 53-year-old father of five from Hebron, Ashraf al-Muhtaseb, described an attack by members of a special unit under the pretext of searching the cell for a radio.
“I couldn’t move or breathe for half an hour. Everyone around me was screaming in pain, and some inmates were crying. Most were bleeding. It was a nightmare beyond words,” he told B’Tselem.
A 30-year-old father of two from Gaza City, said he was electrocuted in the neck by a female soldier during interrogation.
Israel used sleep deprivation, a form of torture, as part of the routine abuse of Palestinians as well. Prison authorities also established an environment of systemic abuse by isolating Palestinian prisoners from the outside world.
Family visits were barred, access to lawyers was restricted and media coverage was effectively prohibited, leaving prisoners with almost no external contact.
This created a climate of isolation: prisoners received minimal news of the outside world, often relying on newly detained Palestinians for updates.
At the same time, the isolation created a blackout: Conditions inside Israeli detention centers were largely hidden from external observation, enabling prison authorities to mistreat, torture and abuse detainees with minimal oversight and maximum impunity.
“Prisoners seem to vanish off the face of the earth once taken into custody,” B’Tselem said.
As hearings were primarily conducted remotely, Israeli judges were seldom exposed to signs of abuse on Palestinian prisoners. In the rare instances when prisoners dared to tell the judges, Israeli guards beat them in revenge, testimonies given to B’Tselem document.
Before 7 October, there were nearly 5,200 Palestinians in Israeli detention.
By last month, the number of Palestinians in Israeli captivity exceeded 9,600 Palestinians, with almost half held without charges, without trial, without being informed of the evidence or allegations against them and without access to legal defense.
Israel in recent months “disappeared thousands of Palestinians,” B’Tselem said, and “many of them are still missing at the time of publication.”
The struggle of prisoners
In July, Israel’s high court issued a conditional order to shutter the Sde Teiman camp in connection with another lawsuit.
The state reportedly responded to the high court by saying there were now only 28 Palestinians remaining at the Sde Teiman camp.
The terrible reality endured by Palestinian prisoners underscores why Hamas insists on securing the release of a number of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli custody in exchange with Israeli captives taken on 7 October.
“The prison system is one of the most violent and oppressive state mechanisms that the Israeli regime uses to uphold Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” B’Tselem said.
The numbers speak for themselves.
“Since 1967, Israel has imprisoned over 800,000 Palestinian men and women from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, which accounts for about 20 percent of the total population and about 40 percent of all Palestinian men,” B’Tselem stated.
Independent UN human rights experts said in August that “most Palestinian detainees are de facto hostages of an awful occupation,” referring to the legal opinion of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s occupation.
Israel’s policy of mass detentions since 7 October has undoubtedly been partly spurred by a desire to increase the number of prisoners to use in any exchange.
Indeed, “an amiable police officer” admitted as much during a briefing to recruited Israeli soldiers, according to a female reservist who spoke to Haaretz on condition of anonymity.
“It’s important for you to understand, for the return of the hostages we need to return prisoners, so we’re holding them for the deals. At the moment, they are a strategic asset of the [Israeli military],’” she recalled the officer saying.
Tamara Nassar is associate editor of The Electronic Intifada
