Administrative detention is arrest without charge based on secret evidence brought forward during military tribunals, to which neither the detainee nor his/her lawyer have access to. Administrative detention is indefinitely renewable under military regulations. One of the longest Palestinian administrative detainees remained in custody for over 8 years, without ever being charged. The Israeli Prison Service holds around 3,500 each year, many of which are women (sometimes pregnant) and children. According to Addameer, Palestinian female prisoners are mainly held in two prisons located inside Israel, HaSharon and Damon, in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention regulating the detention of prisoners.
(A captive person detained without charge, used to bargan in deals, as happened in the Shalit case and Gaza war, is better defined as a hostage than a prisoner.)
Timeline
2002 - From March 2002 to October 2002, Israeli occupying forces arrested over 15,000 Palestinians during mass arrest campaigns, rounding up males in cities and villages between the ages of 15 to 45. In October 2002, there were over 1,050 Palestinians in administrative detention.
2003 Abductions - 2003 Abductions - (Quds Press) In 2003, occupation forces started a heavy abduction campaign among the wives of resistance fighters and women affiliated to university groups, with the aim of dampening the determination of the abducted fighters or to extract information.
Khawla al-Azraq - Al-Azraq is a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council. Since the age of 14, she has been arrested by Israeli forces four times for her involvement with Fatah and taking part in protests against the Israeli occupation. When she was only 18, she was sentenced to three years in prison.
Shireen Issawi - Lawyer, Shireen Issawi, arrested in 2014, spent 5 years in Israeli prison, including 4 for transferring money to Palestinian prisoners.
Khitam Saafin - Khitam Saafin, the leader of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees; spent three months in administrative detention without charge from 2020 to 2022.
In November 2023, Palestinian prisoners were released in a hostage exchange, three of which were interviewed by Btselem. According to their testimonies, they were removed from their homes violently in the middle of the night without charges, blindfolded and painfully handcuffed, then transferred between prisons. The testimonies include, being lectured about October 7, beating, spitting, choking, threats of rape, strip searching, deprival of food, water and sanitary sanitary needs, sleep deprivation applying handcuffs and tying hands to the point of discomfort. Then a female soldier came and took me to another room with more female soldiers, who told me: “Welcome to hell.” The testimonies mention multiple other girls being subjected to the same conditions, and similarities on those making the arrests. (𓃠)
In 2023, the IPS informed human rights group HaMoked that as of 1 November it held 6,809 Palestinian prisoners.
HaMoked found that between Oct 1 and Nov 1, the total number of Palestinians held in administrative detention, without charge or trial, rose from 1,319 to 2,070.
Fadi Bakr - Law student, Fadi Bakr was captured by Israeli soldiers after getting caught in crossfire while searching for flour.
Rushdi al Zhaza, who was detained along with his family, was released without being disclosed of the whereabouts of his wife or children.
In an interview with Radio Asham, the head of the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, Qadura Fares, said that since Oct. 7 Israel has arrested 153 women in Gaza, including pregnant women and those who are being detained with their babies.
Al-Aqqad abductions - A report by GLAN’s open-source investigations team with skynews has revealed that Palestinian mother and daughter, Aisha Bakr Ahmed Al-Aqqad (77) and Huda Mohammed Assouli Al-Aqqad (41) were abducted by Israeli soldiers from Khan Younis in late 2023 and have since vanished. Their fate remains unknown. The treatment of the Al-Aqqad family violates several fundamental guarantees towards civilians in times of war provided for in the Geneva Coventions, including the right to due process and humane treatment.2024 - At the end of March 2024, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was holding 3,615 Palestinians in administrative detention.
Hiding evidence
Since October. 7, journalists and human rights organisations have been blocked from accessing detention facilities. The reason for this should become abundantly clear.
Rape and torture (of hostages)
UN report - A UN report released on 19 February 2024 states: "We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence."
They also noted that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online.
Adult male detainee, aged 41 years: ''They made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire - I have burns [in the anus]. The soldiers hit me with their shoes on my chest and used something like a metal stick that had a small nail on the side...They asked us to drink from the toilet and made the dogs attack us... 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.''
Younis al-Hamlawi testimony - According to detainee Younis al-Hamlawi, during the interogation of Mr. Bakr a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with “unbearable pain.” According to a leaked draft of an UNRWA report read by the NYT, a 41-year-old detainee recounted interrogators me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,” and also said that another detainee “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus. (𓃠,𓃠)
Sexual violence against children - Some children have reported violence of a sexual nature, and some are transferred to court or between detention centres in small cages, the London-based child rights organisation said.
Mustafa Dirani - In 1994, Lebanese guerrilla leader, Mustafa Dirani, was detained in Israel. After a prisoner swap in 2004, he testified that Israeli interrogators tortued him in a round-the-clock effort to extract information on a missing Israeli aviator. Dirani testified that interrogators kept him naked and shackled in a secret facility for a month as six men tortured him, splashing him with hot and freezing water, that he had his testicles squeezed he felt he ''would die,'' that he was shackled and pushed down onto a bench and raped, then later was, again raped, this time with a baton, and that they forced him to drink castor oil, which made him incontinent, and gave him large diapers as his only clothing.
“It’s impossible to describe the pain. I yelled to high heaven.”
2003 Abductions - (Quds Press) In 2003, occupation forces started a heavy abduction campaign among the wives of resistance fighters and women affiliated to university groups, with the aim of dampening the determination of the abducted fighters or to extract information. Palestinian sources: “These arrests have been accompanied by aggressive physical assaults and rape attempts, which is an unprecedented dangerous move.” The wife of Falah Nada, a resistance fighter, was taken away from her seven children and dragged to prison cells, where she was tortured in front of her husband to force him to confess to fabricated crimes. Asma Hamed, wife of wanted Palestinian fighter Ibrahim Hamed, was taken away from her two children Ali and Salma and dragged to prison where they tortured her to force her to give information about the whereabouts of her husband. They threatened that she will be sent to Jordan because she doesn’t possess an Israeli identity. Ibtihal Youssef, from the village of Kharbatha Bani Hareth, student of the Al Quds University was subjected to a violent and humiliating interrogation. Amany Saeed, from the village of Al Yamoun, and student in the same university was also put in administrative detention.
Khawla al-Azraq - Khawla al-Azraq, who was a teenager at the time: “I remember he brought his chair closer, opened his legs and sat very close to me. It was something ugly for me. It made me feel that he was trying to attack my body... They would sit in a way to be very close to us, to touch our bodies. I remember it was terrible for me at that age,” Al-Azraq is a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council. Since the age of 14, she has been arrested by Israeli forces four times for her involvement with Fatah and taking part in protests against the Israeli occupation. When she was only 18, she was sentenced to three years in prison. “When I was a mother, it was so difficult. I can’t express in words how I was feeling at the time,” al-Azraq said of her 25-day interrogation in 1991 for her participation in protests during the First Intifada. According to al-Azraq, during the same period her sister-in-law was killed by Israeli forces. Al-Azraq said that some women she knows, who had been raped in Israeli custody in the early 1970s, still struggle to talk about their experiences. “Sometimes they feel shame, even though we know that they are our enemy and they do this to break us,”
Sahar Francis - Sahar Francis, director of Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ rights group: “The torture, ill treatment, and degrading treatment start from the first moment of the arrest... The interrogator will shout in their faces, try to intimidate them with some sexual words and insults, or start teasing them if they’re married, asking her what her husband is doing while she is imprisoned... It’s not something that’s done by an individual soldier who decided to humiliate or mistreat [the prisoners],” she said. “It’s part of the process, part of the policy, in order to affect the entire society and put it under pressure… because they are aware that [gender] is a sensitive subject in Palestinian society.”
Francis also highlighted rarer cases of imprisoned pregnant women, saying that at least two Palestinians had given birth while in Israeli custody: “It is a very humiliating process. Imagine that they tie you to the bed right until you’re about to give birth and immediately after giving birth, they will handcuff one hand and one leg back to the bed... They won’t allow a family member to be present. Imagine a stranger, a policewoman, is standing beside your bed while you’re giving birth.” Francis added that children under the age of two can accompany their mothers in prison, yet there are few arrangements made for the children’s well-being.
Shireen Issawi - Lawyer, Shireen Issawi who spent 5 years in Israeli prison, including 4 for transferring money to Palestinian prisoners: “Sometimes the interrogator will talk to us in a sexual way, and they will use her (the female soldier) to say that we are lying when we say they beat us... When I had my period, they just gave me paper tissues... They didn’t take into consideration that we have special needs, that our bodies are not like men’s. I didn’t have any rights as a woman... We took the role of the nurse, the doctor, the social worker... When the children came to prison, we took care of them, we gave them clothes. Sometimes they called us ‘mamma’.”
Khitam Saafin - Khitam Saafin, the leader of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees; spent three months in administrative detention without being charged; accused Israeli soldiers of taking photos of her on their phones, as well as strip-searching her, during her arrest. She describes the process as being part of Israeli policy: “They are exhausted; they suffer a lot; they are alone without any older people to take care of them and they are the ones mostly targeted with sexual harassment,”
Israa Jaabis’s - Due to a car accident, 65% of her body was burned and eight of her fingers needed to be amputated: “The prison system says it offers the basic medical service, but honestly we think not, because the main treatment they offer for anything is a painkiller, unless you reach a really serious condition...”
2016 report - A 2016 report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), an Israeli human rights organisation, estimated that some 4% of male respondents had been subjected to some form of sexual torture.
The Committee to Protect Journalists - The Committee to Protect Journalists surveyed 59 Palestinian journalists who had been released by the Israeli authorities after Oct. 7. 3% said they had been raped and 29% said they had endured other forms of sexual violence.
Fadi Bakr - Law student, Fadi Bakr was captured by Israeli soldiers after getting caught in crossfire while searching for flour. According to detainee Younis al-Hamlawi, during the interogation of Bakr a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with “unbearable pain.” Accoring to a leaked draft of an UNRWA report read by the NYT, a 41-year-old detainee recounted interrogators me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,” and also said that another detainee “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus. (𓃠,𓃠)
Muhammad Arab - (𓃠) Journalist, Muhammad Arab, to lawyer, Khaled Mahajneh: ''Arab also testified to his lawyer that Israeli guards sexually assaulted six prisoners with a stick in front of the other detainees after they had violated prison orders. “When he talked about rapes, I asked him, ‘Muhammad, you’re a journalist, are you sure about this?’” Mahajneh recounted. “But he said he saw it with his own eyes, and that what he was telling me was only a small part of what was happening there.”
Save the Children - Save the Children statistics reveal that 86% of children in administrative detention experienced beatings, 70% faced threats of harm, 60% endured solitary confinement, and an equal percentage suffered physical assaults with sticks or guns. Shockingly, 69% reported being strip-searched during interrogation, with some disclosing incidents of sexual violence. Children were denied adequate food or healthcare, 70% said they suffered from hunger and 68% said they didn’t receive any healthcare. (𓃠)
2017 article - Torture, Israeli-style - as Described by the Interrogators Themselves'' (𓃠)
Investigation by B'Tselem and HaMoked - Report based on the testimonies of 73 Palestinian residents of the West Bank who were arrested between July 2005 and January 2006.
The testimonies include the use of conditions of imprisonment as a means for weakening the body, such as preventing physical activity; inadequate food supply; shackling in the "shabah" position; (painful binding of the detainee's hands and feet to a chair) Sleep deprivation for over 24 hours (15 cases); "Dry" beatings (17 cases); Painful tightening of handcuffs, sometimes while cutting off blood flow (5 cases); Sudden pulling of the body while causing pain in the hand joints which are cuffed to the chair (6 cases); Sudden tilting of the head sideways or backwards (8 cases); The "frog" crouch (forcing the detainees to crouch on tiptoes) accompanied by shoving (3 cases); The "banana" position - bending the back of the interrogee in an arch while he is seated on a backless chair (5 cases).
Abu Ma'amar - In 2006, 24 hours before the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit, IDF soldiers broke into the home of Mustafa Abu Ma'amar in Rafah, arresting him and his brother in their respective homes.
"One or two days later, three interrogators came to where I was held at 6 A.M. They didn't ask me anything, just started kicking and hitting me while an interrogator named Moti grabbed me by the neck and throttled me until I thought I was going to die. The other two grabbed me and forcibly removed me." The interrogators used the "exercise technique," as Abu Ma'amar calls it. "They forced me to hold my legs to the chair legs, with the back of the chair to my right and nothing supporting my back. They pushed my back backwards and told me to 'exercise.' It made my stomach muscles cramp up and caused unbearable pain,"
The interrogators asked about the tunnels that he had helped dig, "while cursing me and my mother and father and threatening to demolish my house if I didn't cooperate. They also told me they had arrested my brother and were torturing him."
The Shin Bet interrogators then told him to stand on his toes and then "bend my legs and bring the lower part of my body downward .... It's very difficult and painful. They forced me to stand like that for hours on end, and each time I brought my foot to the floor or moved up or down I got hit..." (𓃠)
Sde Teiman - The IDF released a third of Palestinians who had be detained after Oct. 7, realising they had no connection to Hamas, not before raping and torturing them though...
Dr. Yoel Donchin, a doctor at Sde Teiman, told the NYT, it was unclear why Israeli soldiers had detained many of the people he treated, some of whom were “highly unlikely to have been combatants involved in the war” based on pre-existing physical ailments or disabilities. Those present on the grounds of being Hamas included a paraplegic, and someone with a Tracheostomy since childhood.
Lawyer, Khaled Mahajneh: “I have been in this profession for 15 years … I never expected to hear about rape of prisoners or humiliations like that. And all this is not for the purpose of interrogation — since most prisoners are only interrogated after many days of detention — but as an act of revenge. To take revenge on whom? They are all citizens, young people, adults, and children. There are no Hamas members in Sde Teiman because they are in the hands of the Shabas [Israeli Prison Service].”
According to Haaretz, detainees 36 at Sde teiman have died since October. 7.
An Israeli working at Sde teiman snapped two photographs of a scene that he says continues to haunt him. Rows of men in gray tracksuits are seen sitting on paper-thin mattresses, ringfenced by barbed wire. All appear blindfolded, their heads hanging heavy under the glare of floodlights.
A putrid stench filled the air and the room hummed with the men’s murmurs, the Israeli who was at the facility told CNN. Forbidden from speaking to each other, the detainees mumbled to themselves. “We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.” Guards were instructed “to scream uskot” – shut up in Arabic – and told to “pick people out that were problematic and punish them,” the source added. They paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.
"We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold." “They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” said one whistleblower, who worked as a medic at the facility’s field hospital.
“(The beatings) were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” said another whistleblower.
The testimonies of eight former detainees at Sde Teiman prison interviewed by the New York Times detail abuses including beating, being forced to wear only a diaper during interrogation, and electrocution torture. Being forced to sit handcuffed in silence on a mat for up to 18 hours a day in the rain, sleep and deprivation.
According to a whistleblower, procedures in Israeli military hospitals are “routinely” carried out without painkillers, causing “an unacceptable amount of pain” to detainees. Another whistle-blower said painkillers were used “selectively” and “in a very limited way” during an invasive medical procedure on a Gazan detainee in a public hospital. One detainee told the BBC his leg had to be amputated because he was denied treatment for an infected wound.
Patients at the Sde Teiman hospital are kept blindfolded and permanently shackled to their beds by all four limbs, according to several medics responsible for treating patients there. They are also made to wear daipers, rather than use a toilet. Witnesses, including the facility’s senior anaesthiologist, Yoel Donchin, say both the use of daipers and handcuffs are universal in the hospital ward. “The army create the patient to be 100% dependent, like a baby,” he said. “You are cuffed, you are with diapers, you need water, you need everything – it’s dehumanisation”. One doctor with knowledge of conditions there said prolonged cuffing to beds would cause “huge suffering, horrible suffering”, describing it as “torture” and saying patients would start to feel pain after a few hours. Others have spoken of the risk of long-term nerve-damage. Also, according to Dr Donchin, a prisoner was gang-raped by Israeli soldiers so much that he endured severe anal trauma, fractured ribs, and a ruptured bowel, necessitating immediate surgery. (𓃠)
A whistle-blower who worked at the Sde Teiman field hospital said a doctor once refused his request that an elderly patient be given painkillers while they were opening up a recent, infected amputation wound. “[The patient] started trembling from pain, and so I stop and say ‘we can’t go on, you need to give him analgesia’,” he said. The doctor told him it was too late to administer it. The witness said such procedures were “routinely done without analgesia” resulting in “an unacceptable amount of pain”.
On another occasion, he was asked by a suspected Hamas fighter to intercede with the surgical team to increase the levels of morphine and anaesthetic during repeated surgeries. The message was passed on, but the suspect again regained consciousness during the next operation and was in a lot of pain. The witness said both he and other colleagues felt there was a sense in which it had been a deliberate act of revenge.
A second whistle-blower (Yoni) said the situation at Sde Teiman was only part of the problem, which extended into public hospitals. The BBC is calling him “Yoni” to protect his identity. “There were instances where I heard staff discuss whether detainees from Gaza should get painkillers. Or ways to perform certain procedures that can turn the treatment into punishment.” “I have knowledge of one case where painkillers were used selectively, in a very limited way, during a procedure,” he told the BBC. “The patient did not receive any explanation of what was going on. So, if you put together [that] someone is undergoing an invasive procedure, which involves even incisions, and doesn’t know about that, and is blindfolded, then the line between treatment and assault thins out.”
Haaretz published allegations made by a doctor at the Sde Teiman site that leg amputations had been carried out on two prisoners, because of cuffing injuries. The allegations were made, the paper said, in a private letter sent by the doctor to government ministers and the attorney-general, in which such amputations were described as “unfortunately a routine event”. “From the first days of the medical facility’s operation until today, I have faced serious ethical dilemmas,” said the letter addressed to Israel’s attorney general, and its health and defense ministries, according to Ha’aretz. “More than that, I am writing (this letter) to warn you that the facilities’ operations do not comply with a single section among those dealing with health in the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law.” (𓃠)
Whistleblower to CNN: “I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise,” he said, adding that this was frequently done without anesthesia. “If they complained about pain, they would be given paracetamol,” he said, using another name for acetaminophen. The same whistleblower also said he witnessed an amputation performed on a man who had sustained injuries caused by the constant zip-tying of his wrists. The account tallied with details of a letter authored by a doctor working at Sde Teiman published by Ha’aretz in April.
Journalist, Muhammad Arab treatment at Sde Teiman, according to lawyer, Khaled Mahajneh: Mahajneh told +972 that Arab was nearly unrecognizable after 100 days in the detention facility; his face, hair, and skin color had changed, and he was covered with dirt and pigeon droppings. The journalist had not been given new clothes for nearly two months, and was only allowed to change his pants for the first time that day because of the lawyer’s visit. According to Arab, detainees are continually blindfolded and tied up with their hands behind their backs, forced to sleep hunched over on the floor without any bedding. Their iron handcuffs are removed only during a weekly, minute-long shower. “But the prisoners began refusing to shower because they don’t have watches, and going beyond the allotted minute exposes prisoners to severe punishments, including hours outside in the heat or rain,” Mahajneh said. All detainees, Mahajneh noted, face deteriorating health conditions due to the poor quality of the daily prison diet: a small amount of labaneh and a piece of cucumber or tomato. They also suffer from severe constipation, and for every 100 prisoners, only one roll of toilet paper is provided per day. “The prisoners are prevented from talking to each other, even though more than 100 people are kept to a warehouse, some of them elderly and minors,” Mahajneh told +972. “They are not allowed to pray or even read the Qur’an.” Arab also testified to his lawyer that Israeli guards sexually assaulted six prisoners with a stick in front of the other detainees after they had violated prison orders. “When he talked about rapes, I asked him, ‘Muhammad, you’re a journalist, are you sure about this?’” Mahajneh recounted. “But he said he saw it with his own eyes, and that what he was telling me was only a small part of what was happening there.”
UN report - A UN report released on 19 February 2024 states: "We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence."
They also noted that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online.
“On at least one occasion, Palestinian women detained in Gaza were allegedly kept in a cage in the rain and cold, without food.” (𓃠)
Muazzaz Abayat - Bodybuilder, Muazzaz Abayat: ''My detention was cruel. They beat the prisoners. They kill the prisoners. They beat us with metal rods and chains and used all kinds of torture.''
Khalil Abayat - Boxer, Muazzam Khalil Abayat: "My brothers are dying in the Negev jail. Three thousand prisoners. They beat us every night. They don't give us food. There is no bathroom..."
Khalil al-Zamaira - 16 when he was detaineds; he said Palestinian prisoners are being mistreated and beaten in prison, and there is no different treatment for children. "They didn't differentiate between old and young... Two teens were transferred from Ofer prison with broken ribs. They were unable to move."
Omar al-Atshan - Palestinian teen, Omar al-Atshan: "The mistreatment was indescribable..." He told Al Jazeera during a live coverage of the arrival of released prisoners in the occupied West Bank on Sunday. He said that they were routinely beaten and humiliated in prison, and that water and food were scarce. During their release, Israeli soldiers ordered them to lower their heads, and then beat them, he said. "Our happiness is not complete because there are other captives still in detention," he said, adding that one captive, which he identified as Thaer Abu Assab, was beaten to death in custody. "He was subjected to too much beating. We cried for help, but doctors arrived after an hour and a half after he was already dead from torture... He was tortured because of a question; he asked the warden whether there was a truce. Then he got beaten to death."
Osama Marmash - 16; told Al Jazeera that four Palestinian captives were tortured to death in Megiddo,a and that he himself sustained wounds to his foot and back from beating. "My prison clothes were white but then turned red from blood stains," The food was very little, he said, and was often "inedible". "The road was difficult. They turned off the air conditioner on the bus. We were suffocating,"
Sufian Abu Salah Testimony - Sufian Abu Salah, a 43-year-old taxi driver from Khan Youis, was one of dozens of men detained during raids by Israel's army and taken to a military base for questioning. He said soldiers carried out severe beatings during the journey and also on arrival at the base, where he was denied treatment for a minor wound on his foot, which then became infected. “My leg got infected and turned blue, and as soft as a sponge,” he told the BBC. After a week, he said, the guards took him to hospital, beating him on his injured leg on the way. Two operations to clean his wound did not work, he told the BBC. “Afterwards, they took me to a public hospital, where the doctor gave me two options: my leg or my life.” He chose his life. After they amputated his leg, he was sent back to the military base, and later released back to Gaza. (𓃠)
Omar Abu Rios - National team goal keeper Omar Abu Rios was arrested at age 23 for allegedly being part of an attack on Israeli troops at the Amari Palestinian refugee camp near Ramallah.
Muhammad Nimr - National team striker Muhammad Nimr had his house destroyed by the IDF and was then jailed without charges being filed.
Zakaria Issa - National team striker Zakaria Issa was jailed for sixteen years before being released in 2013 when he was struck with terminal cancer.
Mahmoud Sarsak - National team defender Mahmoud Sarsak was jailed without charges while trying to cross a checkpoint in order to join his teammates.
Jawad Abu Nassar - Eighteen-month-old, Jawad Abu Nassar was returned to his family in central Gaza by Israeli forces with injuries and circular burn marks on his legs consistent with cigarette torture.
Abu Foul - 28-year-old Abu Foul was arrested from Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya in late December and imprisoned in Israeli detention facilities, where he says guards tortured and beat him so severely that he lost his sight.
Heba Morayef testimony - “Over the last month we have witnessed a significant spike in Israel’s use of administrative detention – detention without charge or trial that can be renewed indefinitely – which was already at a 20-year high before the latest escalation in hostilities on 7 October. Administrative detention is one of the key tools through which Israel has enforced its system of apartheid against Palestinians. Testimonies and video evidence also point to numerous incidents of torture and other ill-treatment by Israeli forces including severe beatings and deliberate humiliation of Palestinians who are detained in dire conditions,” said Heba Morayef, Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Video 1 - In a video first published on social media on 31 October and analysed by Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab, nine detained Palestinian men can be seen, some stripped naked and others half-naked, blindfolded and handcuffed, surrounded by at least 12 soldiers. One of the soldiers is seen kicking one of the detainees in the head.
Video 2 - Another video analysed by Amnesty’s Crisis Evidence Lab uploaded to platform X (formerly Twitter) on 31 October shows a blindfolded person, along with an Israeli army sergeant mocking the prisoner and dancing around him.
Amnesty International - A recently released Palestinian detainee from occupied East Jerusalem, who spoke to Amnesty International on condition of anonymity, said how Israeli interrogators subjected him and other detainees at the Russian Compound (al-Maskoubiyeh), a detention center in Jerusalem, to severe beatings which left him with bruises and three broken ribs. He also highlighted how Israeli police interrogators beat them continuously on their heads yelling at them to always keep their heads down, while ordering them to “praise Israel and curse Hamas.” He added: “even when one of the 12 detainees with us in the cell did that, the beating and humiliation did not stop.” Amnesty International also spoke to two women who were arbitrarily detained for 14 hours at a police station in occupied East Jerusalem where they were humiliated, strip-searched, mocked and asked to curse Hamas. They were later released without charges.
Hassan Abadi testimony - Palestinian lawyer Hassan Abadi, who has been visiting at least four detainees every week since 7 October, told Amnesty International that Palestinian detainees have been denied their right to outdoor exercise and that one of the forms of humiliation to which they are subjected during inmate count is being forced to kneel on the floor. He added that Palestinians in detention have had all their personal belongings confiscated and at times burned, including books, diaries, letters, clothes, food and other items. Palestinian women prisoners in al-Damon prison have had their sanitary pads confiscated by prison authorities. According to Abadi, a client he is representing told him that when she was detained and blindfolded at Kiryat Arba police station near Hebron an officer threatened her with rape.
Dr. Mohammed al-Ran testimony - He was stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where, he said, the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert. A prisoner who committed an offense such as speaking to another would be ordered to raise his arms above his head for up to an hour. The prisoner’s hands would sometimes be zip-tied to a fence to ensure that he did not come out of the stress position. For those who repeatedly breached the prohibition on speaking and moving, the punishment became more severe. Israeli guards would sometimes take a prisoner to an area outside the enclosure and beat him aggressively, according to two whistleblowers and al-Ran. A whistleblower who worked as a guard said he saw a man emerge from a beating with his teeth, and some bones, apparently broken. That whistleblower and al-Ran also described a routine search when the guards would unleash large dogs on sleeping detainees, lobbing a sound grenade at the enclosure as troops barged in. Al-Ran called this “the nightly torture.” “While we were cabled, they unleashed the dogs that would move between us, and trample over us,” said al-Ran. “You’d be lying on your belly, your face pressed against the ground. You can’t move, and they’re moving above you.” The same whistleblower recounted the search in the same harrowing detail. “It was a special unit of the military police that did the so-called search,” said the source. “But really it was an excuse to hit them.
Salah Fateen Salah Testimony - On the morning of October 8, one day after Hamas’s attack, Israeli special forces units raided the cells of Gilboa prison and violently beat Palestinian prisoners held there. “They shouted through the speakers telling all the prisoners to get inside their rooms, kneel down on their knees, put their hands on their heads, and to face away from the door, so you have no idea what’s happening behind you when they open the door,” explained 23-year-old Salah. “Then they came in and started beating people, several rooms at once, with their hands, feet and batons, including metal ones,” he said. “They unleashed their dogs on us. “They beat a prisoner who has diabetes and takes three injections a day. He was throwing up so much blood … we were worried sick for two hours that he would be martyred from the amount of blood that he was throwing up,” said Salah. Israeli forces also “cut open the forehead of another man who was my cellmate,” he said, noting “there was blood all over the prison floors”. The beatings, said Salah, went on for days. “They have no humanity. Those who beat elderly and sick people have no humanity. The head of the prison himself was making death threats against us.” (𓃠)
Children
Israel has the distinction of being the only country in the world that automatically and systematically prosecutes children in military courts that lack fundamental fair trial rights and protections. Under military regulations in force in the occupied teretories, a child over the age of 16 is considered an adult, contrary to the defined age of a child as under 18 in the Convention of the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory. In practice, Palestinian children may be charged and sentenced in military courts beginning at the age of 12. Between the ages of 12-14, children can be sentenced for offences for a period of up to six months – meaning that a child accused of throwing a stone can be sent to prison for six months; After the age of 14, Palestinian children are tried as adults, in violation of international law; There are no juvenile courts and children are often held and serve their sentences in cells with criminal prisoners, not separated from adults. Israel prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year. Testimonies received by Euro-Med reveal that the Israeli army regularly detains and transfers Palestinian children without disclosing their whereabouts.
According to witnesses, Israeli soldiers were seen stopping a 12-year-old girl with blonde hair. After the girl’s parents attempt to intervene, the soldiers then informed them that she would be taken away under the suspicion of being an Israeli detainee, even though she was speaking Arabic and with her parents.
After the death of officer Harel Itach, a friend of his disclosed that he had kidnapped a Palestinian infant from Gaza after killing her family, and that the girl’s whereabouts remain unknown. (𓃠)
Sahar Francis - Sahar Francis, director of Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ rights group, who was incarserated in Israel, reported that children under the age of two can accompany their mothers in prison, yet there are few arrangements made for the children’s well-being.
Hassan Tamimi - In 2018, Hassan Tamimi was arrested stones at occupation soldiers. The Israeli prison authorities denied Hassan his medication, which made him fall into a coma and lose his eyesight.
Mahmoud Sarsak - National team defender Mahmoud Sarsak was jailed without charges while trying to cross a checkpoint in order to join his teammates.
DCI-P testimonies - Between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2022, Defense for Children International - Palestine collected sworn affidavits from 766 child detainees detained from the occupied West Bank and prosecuted in Israeli military courts describing their arrest, interrogation, and detention experiences. 59% were arrested at night; 86% were not informed of the reason for their arrest; 97% had their hands bound; 89% were blindfolded; 75% were subjected to physical violence; 58% were subjected to verbal abuse, humiliation, or intimidation during or after their arrest; 54% were transferred from the place of their arrest on the floor of a military vehicle; 80% were strip searched; 42% were denied adequate food and water; 31% were denied access to a toilet; 66% were not properly informed of their rights; 97% were interrogated without a family member present; 55% were shown or made to sign a paper in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not understand; 36% were threatened or coerced; 25% were subjected to stress positions; 23% were detained in solitary confinement for interrogation purposes for a period of two or more days.
Save the Children - Save the Children statistics reveal that 86% of children in administrative detention experienced beatings, 70% faced threats of harm, 60% endured solitary confinement, and an equal percentage suffered physical assaults with sticks or guns. Shockingly, 69% reported being strip-searched during interrogation, with some disclosing incidents of sexual violence. Children were denied adequate food or healthcare, 70% said they suffered from hunger and 68% said they didn’t receive any healthcare. (𓃠)
''Some children report violence of a sexual nature and some are transferred to court or between detention centres in small cages.''
Josh Paul - According to former US State Department official Josh Paul, after he and his colleagues received credible evidence that Israeli forces had raped a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in Al-Moskibiyya detention center, Israel raided the offices of the human rights group that passed the information on to the State Department, later declaring it a terrorist organization. (𓃠)
Pregnant women in Israeli prisons
In an interview with Radio Asham, the head of the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, Qadura Fares, said that since Oct. 7 Israel has arrested 153 women in Gaza, including pregnant women and those who are being detained with their babies.
Anhar al Deek - Anhar al Deek, who was released during her ninth month of pregnancy, reports that she was interrogated, kept under harsh conditions and subjected to solitary confinement during her detention in an Israeli jail.
Sahar Francis - Sahar Francis, director of Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ rights group, who was incarserated in Israel, reports that at least two Palestinians had given birth while in Israeli custody: “It is a very humiliating process. Imagine that they tie you to the bed right until you’re about to give birth and immediately after giving birth, they will handcuff one hand and one leg back to the bed... They won’t allow a family member to be present. Imagine a stranger, a policewoman, is standing beside your bed while you’re giving birth.”
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By: If Americans Knew, Uprooted Palestinians, Ryan Dawson, The UN, EuroMed, Save the children...
Destroyed by: Otto Heckel
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