Yousef M. Aljamal
Mondoweiss / August 20, 2024
Ibrahim Salem was detained by Israeli forces in Gaza and held for 8 months, including 52 days at the now infamous Sde Teiman torture facility. Salem recounts the torture he endured, including physical abuse, starvation, and electrocution.
Israeli forces arrested Ibrahim Salem, age 35, in December 2023 from the Kamal Edwan Hospital in Jabalia in the Gaza Strip. He was with his children who were in the intensive care unit after an Israeli airstrike targeted his family home, killing some of his siblings, nephews, and nieces. After his arrest, he was stripped naked for two days, put in an underground hole in an unknown location, and transferred to the Negev prison. After complaining to his interrogators about why he was arrested, he was moved to the Sde Teiman detention center, where he lived through “a nightmare” for 52 days that included being subjected to torture, electrocution, beating, humiliation, and rape.
A viral photo of him was leaked to CNN, in which he appears to be standing with his hands on his head as a punishment, which happened after he argued with an Israeli soldier about why he allowed an elderly man to urinate in his clothes rather than allowing him to use the toilet.
The following is an exclusive interview conducted with Ibrahim Salem on August 11, 2024, by Yousef Aljamal, who works for the American Friends Service Committee’s Palestine Activism Program.
Thank you for speaking to me. Please, introduce yourself and describe how you were arrested.
My name is Ibrahim Atef Salem, born in Jabalia refugee camp in 1989. I was arrested on December 11 at the Kamal Adwan Hospital. I chose not to evacuate to the South [after October 2023]. Two days before my arrest, my house was directly bombed between 7:30 and 8 in the morning while my sisters and children were sleeping. One of my sisters, Ahlam, was martyred*, and my children were injured. When I was able to look for my children, I found them in terrible condition. My son Waseem was injured and in a coma from his concussion. My daughter Nana had many injuries, including a complete fracture of her skull. Of course, she was in a coma as well. My daughter Fatima, my wife, and another sister were injured, I was with them at the hospital. Afterward, I was able to bury my sister and our relatives in the hospital yard.
The next day, the Israeli army came to the hospital and called for all of the men to go downstairs. They went downstairs, but I didn’t. After two to two and a half hours, the army came upstairs. They asked me what I was doing. I told them my story and showed them the medical report I had. Before the army ordered the men to go downstairs, the doctor had written a report about the condition of my children, stating that they were not allowed to move and that they needed treatment. The soldier said, “Don’t move,” and he called another soldier. When he read the report, he said, “Take him.” They took me, I don’t know why; they took me, and that was it. After that, we went downstairs. I walked for a while with some other men, and a soldier said to us, “Stop and take off your clothes and put them on the ground.” That was the beginning of the oppression, the beginning of the psychological humiliation that shakes me up [to this day]..
They made us undress and took us to an unknown place, where they left us naked for two days. In the morning, they took us to the detention camp, which was part of a military barrack. We stayed there in the cold and rain, with all our clothes removed.
How was torture carried out in prison, how long did it last and how many hours were you allowed to sleep
We couldn’t sleep. For example, at Sde Teiman detention camp, they let us sleep at midnight and gave us useless blankets that didn’t warm our bodies. They were dirty and full of insects. At 4:00 a.m., and sometimes earlier depending on the mood of the soldiers, we were woken from sleep by drums, noise, shouting, and jumping on the metal sheets, which made us jump out of our sleep. Whoever woke up late was punished.
How did they punish you there ?
There were different types of torture. Being in prison itself is torture because they force you to kneel from 4:00 a.m. until midnight. That is torture. If you sit on your butt or your side, they will immediately take you out and hang you. You have to stay on your knees. Keeping someone on their knees for 20 hours is torture.
There was psychological torture as well, where the soldiers cursed and humiliated me, my mother, and my sister. They made us curse our sisters, they made us curse our mothers, they made us curse ourselves and our wives. Once, when I was being investigated, the officer said to me, “Ibrahim, I’m sorry, but I have some bad news to tell you.” I said to him, “Tell me.” He told me that my son Waseem had died. May God have mercy on him [weeping].
Once, during torture and interrogation, a soldier asked me in a very vicious manner where my children were and where they had taken me from. I told him I was taken from Kamal Adwan. He asked what I was doing there, and I said I was burying my sister. He then asked where I had buried my sister, and I replied that it was in Kamal Adwan. He wanted to know the exact location, so I showed him where I had buried her. Then, he showed me a picture of a bulldozer that was carrying the bodies. It turned out that the bulldozers had dug up the entire area and carried the bodies away.
He asked me, “How many bodies were there?” I replied, six. Then he showed me a picture, which had three bodies in the bulldozer blade and three on the ground. I pointed to the bodies in the bulldozer and said, “Those three are my sister and her two sons. I buried them and I know them.” I asked, “What do you want from these bodies? Why did you take them?” I cried and cried. He then said, “You people are bastards and liars. How can you cry over a corpse but when I told you your son had died, you didn’t react?” I responded, “This corpse has its own sanctity and holiness for us, which means it is forbidden to even touch it.”
How much space do you have to move around in prison ?
At Sde Teiman, there is no space. I was not even allowed to go to the toilet; the guards would keep stalling when I asked. In the Negev, there’s only one break, and I could only move during that time. I used to go out at 1:30 p.m. for the break. Normally, in [Israeli detention centers] prison, there are three breaks: one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening.
We were given an hour-long break at 1:30 p.m., the hottest and worst time of the day, and they wouldn’t allow us to stay away from the sun even though we didn’t have the energy to walk at all. If we didn’t walk, we were punished. We had to walk around the whole detention camp, about one dunam (1,000 square meters), with tents scattered everywhere. We ended up walking in an area of about 200 meters.
What about the way prison guards treated Palestinian prisoners ?
It was horrible. At the Negev prison, during our one-hour break, if the guards saw two people going to the toilet or doing anything while they were up in the watchtower, they would urinate in a bottle and pour it on us. They stop us and pour it on us. They would tell us to stand up and look at them, and the moment we looked at them, they would pour the urine on us and swear at us. If someone cursed them back or even asked why they were doing this, they would punish us by ordering us to stay in a standing position for more than two or three hours, depending on how lucky we were.
How was the quality of the food you were given ?
There was almost no food. We hardly ever saw any. Some of the prisoners would manage to get food from the warden. We would prevent prisoners who had food from coming near us because it would often be foul. The food would sometimes come with cigarette butts in it. The bowls that the food was served in seemed like they hadn’t been washed for months. At one point, we asked to wash them ourselves, but the soldiers refused and fought about it with us.
How did you communicate with your family? How did you know their news ?
I had no contact with my family and didn’t know anything about them [while I was detained]. When I was released and got off the bus in Khan Younis, I asked, “Where are we?” They replied, “You’re on the border between Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah, in the Khan Younis area.” I said, “I am from the north; I have nothing to do here. Why have you brought me to Khan Younis?” I asked if I could go to the north, and the soldier said, “No, there is a checkpoint on the way; you cannot go there.”
I told him I didn’t want to get off the bus here. How could I see my children? I wanted to see my children and my house. Then the soldier next to me punched me in the ear and said, “You get off here, it’s none of my business.” As soon as I got off the bus, I called my family and my wife. I first asked about the children. My wife told me that Waseem had come out of a coma the previous month, meaning he had been in a coma for over six months. I thanked God and asked how he was. She said, “Thank God, he is fine, but he needs treatment and surgery. Nana is fine, Fatima is fine, thank God, but they also need surgical operations.”
I said to her, “Give me one of my siblings to talk to, just anyone nearby.” Then, I asked my father, “Dad, I want to ask you something.” He said yes, and I asked him about the bodies of my siblings, Ahlam and Muhammad. He said, “My son, the Israeli soldiers took them from Kamal Adwan.” I recalled when the jailer showed me the pictures, the nightmare became a reality. It was a nightmare for me; I was truly afraid of it.
Did you get to know anyone in prison and their stories ?
Of course, I got to know some prisoners. We talked while we were at the Negev, where we lived together and conversed. In the barracks in Sde Teiman, we got to know each other but we were blindfolded, so we could not see each other.
Everyone has their own story. My photo that went viral, in which I was tortured by being forced to stand for six hours with my hands on the top of my head just because I protested a jailer who forced an elderly Palestinian to pee in his pants. The scene captured in the photo was nothing compared to the other punishments we experienced. The outrage over it—of course, people should be outraged–but there are more severe things that happened. For example, the insults we endured, they stripped us of our dignity! Sitting on our knees for 20 hours— isn’t that a greater punishment? The electric shocks we endured, the cold that nearly incapacitated us.
I had been interrogated maybe 10 or 12 times—the same questions were asked, and the same things were repeated each time. Every time I went to the interrogator, the Israeli soldiers made me strip off my clothes and then put them back on. When you enter the room, you have to take off your clothes, and when you come back to the room, you have to take them off again. Isn’t that insulting and disgraceful?
There are female soldiers who hit us on sensitive parts of our body, and other prisoners refused to talk about it, perhaps out of embarrassment. Once, a guy sat next to me and opened up to me. I asked him, “What happened to you?” He replied, “You should ask what didn’t happen to me! Everything happened to me; they did everything to me.” That was enough for me to understand what he had been through.
What caused the physical weakness in your body ?
Lack of food, torture, and beatings—there was a lot of torture. My ribs are broken, my teeth are broken. What do you think we ate? They don’t even bring us enough food. The food that came was distributed among 150 people in the Negev. I swear to God, the portion that was meant for 150 people wouldn’t be enough for just five people. But we had to share it among ourselves.
We learned that you were taken to hospital in prison. Why ?
My ribs broke one day because of the beatings and torture. Even after my ribs were broken, the guards would deliberately hit me there. I had also undergone an operation on my kidney before I was arrested, and the wound was visible. When I undressed, they would see the wound and deliberately hit me there. One day, they struck me extremely hard with a stick — it was a murderous blow. I was exhausted, very tired; I stayed that way for two or three days, unable to get up or do anything, and I was urinating blood. The sergeant told a guard that I was in such poor condition that if I stayed there, I might die or something terrible might happen to me.
After about three days, they agreed to take me to the clinic. When I got there, the doctor told me I needed surgery and that they would perform an endoscopic procedure to assess my condition. They did the endoscopic procedure on me, or at least that’s what they called it. I don’t even know for sure because even the doctor would beat and humiliate me. When I asked the doctor questions, he wouldn’t answer.
I left the hospital two days later and was taken in for interrogation. I wondered, “What did I do? I am a civilian, a barber. What is my sin? Please explain so that I can understand. Why all this torture, humiliation, and beating? Why have I been imprisoned for so long? What is my charge?” In the end, the judge couldn’t find any charges against me. Everyone else with me was accused of being “unlawful combatants,” but I was never told what my charge was.
Ibrahim Salem now lives in a tent in Khan Younis. He suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and avoids being close to fences. His body is thin. He lived through a nightmare that was photographed and leaked, leaving his surviving family members to wake up one day to a photo of him being tortured at Sde Teiman. Ibrahim wants to learn about his medical condition and know what operation the Israeli doctors performed on him. Ibrahim’s dream is to be united with his children in northern Gaza.
Yousef M. Aljamal is the Gaza Coordinator at the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).
