"Welcome to hell": Israel's torture camps

Israeli human rights organisation says "the Israeli apartheid regime must come to an end"

B’Tselem, the main Israeli human rights organisation, has just published a horrifying report, tellingly titled Welcome to Hell, on the systematic abuse and torture in Israeli prisons since October 7. The report, based on the testimonies of several Palestinian inmates, reveals

a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners. This includes 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. These descriptions appear time and again in the testimonies, in horrifying detail and with chilling similarities. The prisoners’ testimonies lay bare the outcomes of a rushed process in which more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, both military and civilian, were converted into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates. Such spaces, in which every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering, operate in fact as torture camps.

The report stresses that many Palestinians, including children, are held without trial — i.e., they are effectively hostages of the Israeli state — and that this was already the case long before October 7:

Over the years, Israel has incarcerated hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in its prisons, which have always served, above all, as a tool for oppressing and controlling the Palestinian population. The stories presented in this report are the story of thousands of Palestinians, residents of the Occupied Territories and citizens of Israel, who have been arrested since the beginning of the war, as well as Palestinians already incarcerated on 7 October who experienced the massive increase in hostility from prison authorities since that day.

In early July 2024, there were 9,623 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and detention facilities almost double the number just before the war began. Of these, 4,781 were detained without trial, without being presented with the allegations against them, and without access to the right to defend themselves, in what Israel terms “administrative detention”. Some were jailed simply for expressing sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians. Others were taken into custody during military activity in the Gaza Strip, on the sole grounds that they came under the vague definition of “men of fighting age”. Some were imprisoned over suspicions, substantiated or not, that they were operatives or supporters of Palestinian armed groups. The prisoners form a wide spectrum of people from different areas, with varying political opinions and only thing in common — being Palestinian.

The report further notes that the torture regime is “so systematic, that there is no room to doubt an organized, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities”.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the report explains that the Israeli incarceration and torture regime cannot be separated from Israel’s wider settler-colonial project:

The current situation, as horrifying as it may be, cannot be fully understood without examining the key role this project has played in the social and political oppression of the Palestinian collective throughout the years.

The prison system is one of several means of control and oppression used by the Israeli apartheid regime to preserve Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. For decades, Israel has used the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from all walks of life to undermine and unravel the social and political fabric that binds the Palestinian population. According to various estimates, since 1967, Israel has imprisoned over 800,000 Palestinian men and women from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, which accounts for about 20% of the total population and about 40% of all Palestinian men.

The scale of this incarceration project means there are hardly any Palestinian families without a member who has been through the Israeli prison system. The project is underpinned by the same repressive logic found elsewhere in Israeli apartheid. Here, too, Palestinians are completely dehumanized and treated as a homogenous, faceless mass, stripped of any individual identity. All are deemed “human animals” and “terrorists” simply because they are behind bars, whether their detention was justified or arbitrary, lawful or not. This is how their abuse and degradation, and the violation of their rights, become permissible.

The incarceration project is one of the most brutal and extreme manifestations of Israel’s system of control over the Palestinians. The released prisoners who spoke to B’Tselem for this report described a wide range of measures used for control and oppression. The value of their testimonies goes beyond providing an account of the appalling reality inside Israeli prisons and detention facilities since October 7. They are a window into a much broader reality.

Given the severity of the acts, the extent to which the provisions of international law are being violated, and the fact that these violations are directed at the entire population of Palestinian prisoners daily and over time — the only possible conclusion is that in carrying out these acts, Israel is committing torture that amounts to a war crime and even a crime against humanity.

We appeal to all nations and to all international institutions and bodies, including the International Criminal Court, to do everything in their power to put an immediate end to the cruelties meted out on Palestinians by Israel’s prison system, and to recognize the Israeli regime operating this system as an apartheid regime that must come to an end.

B’Tselem’s findings were also corroborated by a UN report released yesterday that denounces the “widespread abuse, torture, sexual assault and rape” that has become the norm in Israeli prisons, with at least 53 Palestinians apparently dying as a result in 10 months:

Countless testimonies by men and women speak of detainees in cage-like enclosures, tied to beds blindfolded and in diapers, stripped naked, deprived of adequate healthcare, food, water and sleep, electrocutions including on their genitals, blackmail and cigarette burns. In addition, victims spoke of loud music played until their ears bled, attacks by dogs, waterboarding, suspension from ceilings and severe sexual and gender-based violence.

“Allegations of gang-rape of a Palestinian detainee, now shockingly supported by voices in the Israeli political establishment and society, provide irrefutable evidence that the moral compass is lost”, the experts said.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

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