Ghada Ageel
Middle East Eye / July 12, 2024
Palestinians who manage to survive Israeli military attacks risk being abducted from their homes and taken from the open-air prison of Gaza to Israeli detention and torture centres.
When darkness falls in Gaza, no one can be certain if they will live out the night.
If they do survive this collective punishment, Palestinians also risk being abducted and disappeared from their homes during the night.
As the world marked the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture on 26 June, reports of widespread torture and abuse were emerging from all corners of Gaza and Israeli detention and torture centres in the desert.
In observance of the occasion, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated: “Torturers must never be allowed to get away with their crimes, and systems that enable torture should be dismantled or transformed.”
Yet the institutions meant to prevent such crimes against humanity are either feckless or indifferent. Thirty-seven years after the convention against torture came into effect, violations of human dignity not only persist but have escalated.
In Gaza today, Palestinians are subjected to two types of mass torture: the first is the abduction from their homes by Israeli soldiers during night-time military raids – stripping them down of “anything that resembles human beings” in Israeli torture camps. The second is the infliction of such horrific levels of violence on the entire civilian population that it constitutes torture.
‘Free-for-all’
It was early February when Israel launched an incursion into the southern city of Khan Younis. The Abu Sultan family tried to flee their home during the day but were not fast enough. Israeli tanks had encircled their neighbourhood of al-Amal, sealing off any chance of escape.
A group of soldiers and their menacing dog stormed the home of Saada Abu Sultan, an elderly woman who stood frozen in fear in the hallway alongside her brother, Mohammed, and husband, Abdel Karim.
In what appears to have become a trend, the dog pounced on 72-year-old Saada, savagely mauling her as her brother tried to intervene. Mohammed was shot in the chest and left bleeding on the floor.
As confirmed this week in +972 Magazine, Israel’s “free-for-all” directive allowed soldiers to open fire and commit summary executions of civilians – a clear violation of the laws of war.
In the Abu Sultan home, the soldiers applied their “freedom” with vigour, spraying bullets indiscriminately and injuring several family members, including young children, who were taking cover on the ground floor.
Amid the pandemonium and terrified screams of women and children, the soldiers ordered the family to lie down on the ground.
The room erupted in gunfire, and the soldiers detained three of Saada’s adult children: her eldest daughter, Nisreen, 52, and her two sons, Husam, 50, and Mohammed, 45, who was named after his uncle.
After an hour of horror, the soldiers left the house.
Bleeding profusely and unable to move, Saada’s brother, Mohammed, who had been sheltering at his sister’s home since December 2023, pleaded for medical help.
Saada did not want to leave her brother behind but reluctantly agreed to get him emergency care.
In a journey that would have normally taken 20 minutes on foot but extended to an agonizing four hours – as they dodged bullets and hid from relentless shelling – Saada, her sister-in-law and their children finally reached Nasser Hospital.
Fuelled by adrenaline and the urgency to save her brother’s life, Saada couldn’t think of the severity of her own injuries. The dog attack had torn the flesh and smashed the bones in her arm, requiring extensive medical treatment, including platinum implants.
Torture compounded
Although Saada immediately notified aid workers from the Red Crescent of Mohammed’s dire situation, they were unable to access the area until months later when the Israeli military withdrew from Khan Younis. By then, Mohammed’s body had decomposed in a city left in total ruins.
After spending a week in a hospital that was also besieged and violently attacked by Israeli forces, Saada was discharged from the Nasser medical complex. Weeks later, rescuers would unearth hundreds of bodies, including those of children, women, and the elderly, from the courtyard of the Khan Younis hospital.
Saada and her surviving family members relocated to Rafah, where her youngest son, Ali, 42, had been sheltering with his in-laws.
Her detained children, Nisreen and Mohammed, had endured three days of torture and deprivation in an unknown location before being released and joining their family in Rafah.
Husam, however, remained in detention.
Overwhelmed with grief over her brother being left to bleed out and ultimately killed for simply trying to protect her and for her abducted son held hostage by Israel, Saada’s health rapidly declined.
On 23 February, after the family concluded their Friday prayers, her son Mohammed decided to take her to the hospital along with some of the children with him to help find transportation.
When they returned, the house in which they were sheltering in the so-called “safe zone” of Rafah was targeted in an air strike, killing Saada, her husband, Abdel Karim, and her daughter, Nisreen. Three members of the host family, including two women and a child, were also killed, while many others were wounded and rushed to the hospital.
‘Unimaginable’ conditions
Months later, Husam remains in Israeli captivity with no news of his fate or location. His wife and children are imagining the unimaginable.
The stories emerging from Israeli prisons have been grim.
CNN exposed Israel’s harrowing treatment of dozens of Palestinian prisoners from Gaza held hostage in the Sde Teiman desert camp-turned-detention centre.
In the report, which sparked widespread condemnation, Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the Sde Teiman desert camp revealed that Palestinian hostages were subjected to “revenge” beatings, amputation of limbs due to injuries sustained from “constant handcuffing”, and “extreme physical restraint” in an environment overwhelmed by the “smell of neglected wounds left to rot”.
While disturbing, in Israel, such methods and abuse are not an aberration but were, in fact, devised and codified as standard legal practice 37 years ago.
In 1987, just months after ratifying the Convention Against Torture among 174 countries, Israel became the first – and, at the time, only – country in the world to legalize torture.
Following the death of two Palestinian prisoners, the government-sponsored Landau Commission, tasked with inquiring into the investigation methods of Israeli interrogators, issued a report that sanctioned the use of “moderate physical and psychological pressure” against Palestinian “suspects”.
The Commission was headed by former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau, whose interrogation guidelines were endorsed by the Israeli cabinet in 1987 and upheld by Israel’s top court in 1999 and as recently as 2024.
In practice, it meant that Palestinian detainees could be “lawfully” subjected to extreme physical contortions and sleep deprivation – and coerced into false confessions – as standard procedure.
Detainees may also be shackled to a wall or pipes with their arms extended above their heads for days on end; each time they fell asleep, a bucket of ice-cold water would be thrown on top of them.
Alternatively, prisoners may be bent backwards sideways across a chair with their arms and legs handcuffed to the legs of the chair, prohibiting movement for extended periods. This brutal practice came to be known as the “Palestinian chair” and was adopted by the US military during the Iraq war.
In 1994, the UN Committee Against Torture condemned the Landau Report and its authorization of torture practices as “completely unacceptable to this Committee”.
Disrespecting laws
Torture is prohibited in both international humanitarian and human rights law through the Geneva Conventions, especially Article 27 of Geneva IV, and the Convention Against Torture, which reinforced prior international agreements prohibiting torture, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.
In the absence of any enforcement of international laws and conventions, Israel has become emboldened to escalate its mass torture and abuse of Palestinians.
Following his release from detention, the head of Gaza’s largest hospital described the “almost daily torture” to which he and others were subjected.
Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, who was held for seven months without charge after his arrest at Al-Shifa Hospital last November, reported extensive and repeated “assaults with batons and dogs, deprivation of food and medicine, as well as physical and psychological humiliation”.
Even after nine months, Palestinians in Gaza ask themselves every day how the world can witness the constant torture, abuse, mass killing, maiming, and starvation and refuse to hold Israel accountable.
And not only do they refuse to intervene to stop a genocide, but the US, UK and much of Europe are actively supporting it.
As Craig Mokhiber, a former UN human rights official who resigned from his job in protest of the organization’s inaction and complicity, observed, not only are these countries “refusing to meet their treaty obligations” under the Geneva Conventions, but they are also arming Israel’s genocide while providing political and diplomatic cover for it.
The Geneva Conventions mandate that all states “have an obligation to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) in all circumstances”.
But in the case of Israel’s genocide, torture, and humiliation of Palestinians, the reverse has been true: western countries are disrespecting and actively undermining IHL and the institutions designed to defend it.
We are witnessing an era of ineffectual, if not hypocritical and immoral, global leadership that allows the savage slaughter and oppression of a people to continue when it must end now.
Ghada Ageel is a visiting professor at the University of Alberta Political Science Department (Edmonton, Canada), an independent scholar, and active in the Faculty4Palestine-Alberta
