Mohammed al-Hajjar & Nader Durgham
Middle East Eye / August 8, 2024
The man in the famous photo, Ibrahim Salem, spent eight months in Israeli detention, where rape, electrocution and beatings were routine.
Editor’s note: This article contains distressing details
Blindfolded, arms behind his head and standing by the barbed wire fence of the Israeli Sde Teiman detention camp.
It was one of the first photos leaked from the notorious army base, where thousands of Palestinian prisoners were held without charge and routinely tortured.
The man in the picture, Ibrahim Salem, was released last week after nearly eight months of detention.
He told Middle East Eye that the photo, first published by CNN, was just the tip of the iceberg of his horrific experience in detention, which included rape, electrocution and frequent beatings.
“Most of the prisoners will come out with rectum injuries [caused by the sexual assault],” Salem, 36, told MEE.
The prisoners will tell each other it is haemorrhoids, he added, but most are just avoiding admitting they had been raped, sometimes by female soldiers.
In the following eyewitness account, Salem recalls his ordeal, starting from his arrest at a hospital in Gaza until his release.
The abduction
Salem was in the intensive care unit in northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital when Israeli forces raided the facility in December 2023.
He stayed beside his children, who were severely wounded in an Israeli strike on their home.
His siblings, along with several of their children, were killed in the attack.
“When the army came in, they asked for all the men to go down to the square,” Salem said.
But the doctor handed him his children’s reports and instructed him to stay with them in the ICU to explain their critical condition to the soldiers if they came.
“The army came in and asked me: ‘What are you doing here?’ So I gave them the reports and told them in Arabic: ‘Those are my children; they cannot move in the ICU.’ And they were truly in a coma, two of them and the third one was burned,” he recalled.
“Another soldier held the reports, read them and told them ’take him’.”
As Salem was taken alongside many other men, Israeli soldiers ordered them to take off their clothes before being placed in a big hole at an unknown location.
There, under the rain, soldiers started beating and insulting the Palestinians, who had their hands and legs tied.
Salem says the insults included “we fucked the Nukhba [an elite unit in Hamas’ military wing]” and “we fucked your mother”.
“They went to the man near me and told him: ‘Raise your head.’ So, he did that and they told him: ‘Say, I am the son of a whore. Say, my sister is a whore.’ And things like that, and the man would repeat after them.”
Eventually, the group of roughly 100 men was taken to a detention centre in the Negev desert.
They were left in their underwear while it rained for two nights before being given light overalls and taken to the barracks, he said.
“Of course, your hands are tied behind your back, your legs are also tied and you are blindfolded.”
In the cell, the prisoners’ legs were untied but they were left without food for two days. One small bottle of water was shared among all of them.
Afterwards, they were called in one by one for interrogations.
Sde Teiman
One day, Salem complained, asking the soldiers why he was detained and what he might have done.
That is when he was taken to Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base doubling as a detention camp for Palestinians taken from Gaza since Israel launched its ground invasion of the besieged enclave in October of last year.
“It was the worst nightmare,” Salem said about the 52 days he spent at Sde Teiman.
Detainees were punished regularly there and constantly insulted by guards in what he called an attempt to “harm you mentally”.
“Anyone who moves in a certain way gets punished. If you ask to go to the bathroom, you get punished,” he explained.
“You stand on one leg for two hours, then they would tell you: ‘Do you want me to help you?’ And when you say yes, they tell you to say, ‘I am the son of a whore, I am the brother of a whore’, to say ‘Netanyahu fucked my sister, am Yisrael chai [the people of Israel live]. Now repeat after me, am Yisrael chai! Am Yisrael chai! A hundred times’.”
“They would say: ‘No, I didn’t like that, repeat it once more.’ And you keep repeating it hundreds of times and then you see that you have been standing for two hours, so all this was for nothing.”
Then there was the beating, he said.
“I remember a chair was broken on my chest. While I was tied and handcuffed, he slammed a chair [on me] and it broke on my chest. I do not know [why].”
During that incident, the soldier was on the phone with his girlfriend, Salem added.
He turned the screen to him and had his girlfriend insult him as well.
“He would tell me: ‘We will play football with your heads in Gaza. We will turn Gaza into a football field to play with your heads and your women’s heads.”
Electrocution
Some of the worst forms of torture took place during interrogations.
One time, when Salem confronted a soldier over the killing of his young nephews, his punishment was electrocution.
“He asked me where the rockets were and where the hostages were. You are asking me? What do I have to do with the hostages and how am I supposed to know where they are anyway?”
“I was in Kamal Adwan [Hospital]. You killed my siblings; you bombed our home. How am I supposed to know where the hostages are?”
When Salem said this to his interrogator, the soldier replied: “We don’t kill children.”
“What about my sister’s children, aged three and five, are those soldiers?” Salem replied.
“This is not a soldier. The kid was five. My sister wanted to just shower her children on a Friday. Is she a fighter? And what about my kids? What did they do to you? Did they participate in the 7 October attack? You kill children.”
The soldier then brought a chair, got someone to blindfold Salem and tied his hands as he asked him why he spoke like that.
“I noticed that he was gluing something on me. Then I started shaking. He was electrocuting me.
“He electrocuted me in sensitive spots and hit me in these spots.”
Raped by female soldiers
Another traumatic episode for many prisoners like Salem was the sexual abuse.
Though it was rampant, inmates rarely spoke about it to each other, he said. It was embarrassing for many to admit, especially when they were raped by female soldiers, who were sometimes in their teens.
It was common practice for soldiers to strip detainees naked, insert objects into their rectum and grab their genitals aggressively when they changed.
When word got around that a prisoner in his 40s was raped, Salem kept getting close to him until he told him what happened to him.
“He told me he was raped by a female soldier,” Salem told MEE.
When he asked him how it happened, the prisoner explained it would take place in the presence of another soldier in the room.
The prisoner would be bent over a desk with his hands placed in front of him, handcuffed.
The female soldier, standing behind him, would insert her fingers and other objects into his rectum.
When he reacted or moved back, the soldier standing in front of him would hit him in the head and force him to bend again.
It was one of many stories he heard in detention, Salem added.
Salem said he was also touched in his private parts by a female soldier and had objects inserted in his rectum at some point.
‘Exposing the occupation’
Salem spent 52 days in Sde Teiman, a few nights in Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank and most of his detention in the Negev.
He was released along with 14 other detainees last week, left at a checkpoint near Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
Initially, he thought the war might have been over, but a soldier told him: “The war will not end until we kill you all.”
They were warned that anyone looking back would be shot and soldiers started shooting when Salem slowed down to help a released woman.
They eventually made it to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
When asked about the photo that went viral, Salem said it was taken during a five- or six-hour punishment he was enduring, as he heard a camera click at the time.
He had argued with a soldier after they let a prisoner urinate himself by preventing him from using the bathroom.
Salem was made to remain in that position for long hours, a punishment that, he said, does not begin to describe the ordeal he faced in detention.
“There are greater punishments, greater beatings,” he said.
“Nothing was more humiliating than when they made me take off my clothes, or when they inserted this object into my butt, or when a young female soldier kept [touching my penis].”
“But it is good that people saw the reality of the occupation and I insist on exposing the occupation.
“This is the message of every prisoner I have spoken to.”
Earlier this week, Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the Israeli government has been conducting a policy of institutionalized torture against all Palestinian detainees since 7 October.
Torture was recorded in civilian and military detention facilities across Israel, leading to the deaths of at least 60 Palestinians while in Israeli custody in less than 10 months.
The systematic nature of the abuse across all facilities left “no room to doubt an organized, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities”.
The policy has effectively turned Israeli prisons into “torture camps,” the rights group said.
In its 182-page report, B’Tselem said the torture prisoners faced included: “frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation, deliberate starvation; forced unhygienic conditions; sleep deprivation, prohibition on, and punitive measures for, religious worship; confiscation of all communal and personal belongings; and denial of adequate medical treatment.”
The Israeli violations against Palestinian detainees amounted to war crimes and even a crime against humanity, B’Tselem said.
Mohammed A Alhajjar is a Palestinian photojournalist based in Gaza-City
Nader Durgham is a Lebanese journalist based in Beirut
