Israeli prisons are operating as a system of torture camps. Palestinians detained by Israel since October 7 have made such claims for months, their words backed up by extreme weight loss after being released from Israeli custody. Now, a haunting and exhaustive report by Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem released this week backs those claims up with evidence from fifty-five Palestinian detainees following their release from Israeli prisons. The majority of those interviewed were never tried for any crimes.
The report’s title, “Welcome to Hell,” is a quote from an Israeli soldier. Fouad Hassan, a forty-five-year-old Palestinian from Qusrah, told investigators that this was the greeting he and his fellow detainees received upon disembarking from a bus at Megiddo Prison.
“Hell” is no exaggeration. As the report details, Palestinians who have been held in Israeli prisons and detention centers since the beginning of the war on Gaza are subject to torture, sexual abuse, violence, humiliation, starvation, sleep deprivation, and denial of adequate medical treatment. The report lists sixty cases of Palestinian prisoners dying since the start of the war, including forty-eight Gazan prisoners who died at army detention facilities and twelve who died in Prison Service custody; many of the report’s testimonies refer to the Prison Service’s Keter unit, which operates as a specialized force for controlling riots.
“Their testimonies reveal the outcomes of the rushed transformation of more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, military and civilian, into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy,” B’Tselem notes in introducing the report. “Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.”
The testimonies are worth reading in full, but they include: an inmate beaten to death by guards for asking if there was a…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Alex N. Press
