'It was like hell': How Israeli prisons became torture camps for Palestinians

Fady Bakr, a Gazan recently released from an Israeli prison, said he was blindfolded for most of the 45 days he was unlawfully detained. The little he was allowed to see, or made to see, he says, will haunt him forever.

Since the war on Gaza began in October, Israel has conducted a systematic policy of torture and abuse of Palestinians illegally detained in its prison system.

Testimonies from prisoners and reports from Palestinian and international rights groups say the horrifying acts of violence range from sexual abuse, electrocution, and waterboarding to sleep deprivation, playing loud music until prisoners’ ears bleed, and gang rape.

According to UN estimates, at least 53 Palestinian detainees are known to have died in Israeli military facilities and prisons since October.

Bakr, a law graduate, was captured by Israeli soldiers on 5 January. He had been with three friends looking for flour and food in Tal Al-Hawa in Gaza City when they were fired at by Israeli soldiers.

Two of his friends were immediately killed, the third was wounded, and Bakr was detained after he sustained wounds to his left leg, right arm, and abdomen.

He says the whole duration of his incarceration was “horrid”, but one particular incident of abuse will never leave him.

“A dog raped another hostage before my eyes,” Bakr told The New Arab in clear distress, his eyebrows immediately clinching.

Handcuffed and blindfolded, Bakr was among three prisoners pulled out of a cell and led into an asphalt yard, where they were ordered to stand in line, he recalled.

“The man on my right was called to step forward, he was forcefully undressed by between 10 to 12 soldiers, who shoved him onto all fours, his wrists and legs tied,” Bakr told The New Arab.

“They then poured some liquid on his behind and the animal immediately attacked him and raped him. There was immediate panic. The prisoner - helpless, shocked, and in pain - screamed and shouted in horror, tried to jolt and push the dog away but couldn’t, and neither could we. We too were screaming that this must stop. We were unable to do anything. Unable to believe what was happening,” narrated the traumatised witness and survivor.

“Eventually, his shouts stopped as he lost consciousness. We were then brutally beaten and returned to our cells, in a complete state of anguish, disbelief, and shock,” Bakr added. “This was the only time they allowed us to be without the blindfolds,” he recalls.

The sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli jails has been widely documented by countless Palestinian testimonies, independent human rights groups, and UN experts since October.

The Israeli military has been accused of using military dogs not only to attack civilians during military operations in Gaza but also to intimidate and sexually assault detained Palestinians.

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented at least one incident of military dogs being used to allegedly rape detainees.

Muneer Al Barsh, Director of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, and Qaddura Fares, Head of the Commission of Detainees Affairs in Palestine, have both reported the use of military dogs to sexually abuse Palestinians unlawfully detained by Israel.

Despite the widely documented torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners since October, dozens of Israelis - backed by Israeli politicians – last month protested the arrest of soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman facility.

In response to a recent report by B’Tselem documenting the systematic abuse and torture of Palestinians, a spokesperson for the Israel Prison Service (IPS) said all prisoners were treated according to the law and all basic rights were fully applied by professionally trained guards.

"We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility," the spokesperson added.

'It was hell'

Talking to TNA, Bakr said mistreatment was the norm in Israeli prisons. He recalled how he was intentionally beaten on wounds that were never treated properly and was shot at to terrorise him into confessing to accusations he knew nothing about. “I kept saying I’m a civilian,” he said.

Israeli authorities have rounded up hundreds of Palestinian civilians from Gaza without producing any evidence for their arrest or following any minimum due process, rights groups say. They are then held incommunicado in secret facilities where they have no access to a lawyer or monitoring groups such as the Red Cross.

“I was stripped naked, and hung from all fours, upside down in a truck that drove on bumpy roads within Gaza, and my body was made to hit the sides of the truck as it moved, and I ended up with a deep cut on my head,” Bakr said, pointing to the wound.

“I was taken by a military tank to some location and was ordered to lie down. I believe what I was made to lie down on was a decomposed body of a dead person, based on the smell and texture of it against my skin. Then another round of beating began,” he recalled.

“It was nothing but humiliation and terror,” he said, with cigarettes put out on prisoners’ bodies, food and water being denied to them despite the heat, and loud music played to the point that his left ear began bleeding.

The mistreatment also continued with his transfer to another prison, which was hours away. There, he was made to wear diapers for days and was electrocuted extensively until his leg swelled and an abscess burst, causing him to lose consciousness from the pain.

“I woke up to a doctor by my side, who gave me a painkiller and a sip of water. This was it. But for days, I was writhing in pain and finally, a doctor operated on my leg without anaesthesia. There was a soldier next to him who struck me with a plastic rod each time I screamed in pain,” he said.

“This wasn’t a prison. It was hell - a military base purely for revenge. In prisons, the minimum amount of rights are guaranteed to those held captives.”

"This wasn't a prison. It was hell - a military base purely for revenge"

Brutality in Israeli prisons

Loay Al-Astal, a paramedic in Khan Younis’ Nasser Medical Health Complex, was detained on 16 February during the Israeli siege of the facility. He was among 110 staff members who were rounded up.

From the beginning, those imprisoned were humiliated by being made to strip naked and left that way for hours, recalled the 33-year-old. “When I was called to come forward, and I identified myself as a paramedic, the beating and torture began,” Al-Astal said.

Left naked in February and without food or water for hours, Al-Astal wept as he recalled how a soldier urinated in his mouth when he asked for water. Blindfolded, he was told to open his mouth, and he did, believing he would be given water to drink.

He was struck hard in the back of the head right after this incident and was kicked in his ribs, resulting in fractures on both sides. He said he was neither medicated nor offered any painkillers despite the immense pain.

Al-Astal also recounts how he was transferred to another prison, a detention centre in northern Gaza, where he was kept for 13 days before he was taken to another facility. Throughout the roughly two months in which he was imprisoned, Al-Astal said he was blindfolded and tied up.

“Insults and slurs never stopped. Beatings and abuse never stopped. Hunger and thirst never stopped. And all this began from day one, even before I was questioned or investigated. When I denied charges of transporting Israeli hostages or Hamas fighters, I was beaten up even more,” he said.

Not allowed to use the bathroom, Al-Astal said he ended up soiling himself multiple times. Food portions they were given weren’t enough to feed a two-year-old, he added, and no clothes or bed covers were provided, despite the cold weather at night.

He said he had seen prisoners die from the torture and abuse. “They let dogs attack us in the middle of the night or during interrogations to make us confess to things we haven’t done,” he said. 

'Worse than Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo'

Yasser Abdel Ghafour, deputy director of field research at the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), says that the group has documented more than 40 types of torture used against Palestinian prisoners.

These include beatings, being hung from the ceiling, nudity, violence, sexual harassment of men, women, and children, deprivation of food, water, and medicine, denial of toilet access, and electrocution.

According to one prisoner's testimony, a Palestinian detainee was raped using an Israeli soldier’s rifle muzzle.

"We received dozens of testimonies from released detainees, including women and children, who recounted shocking incidents and types of torture that made what we used to hear about Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo seem trivial compared to what is happening, and some of them are forms of torture that are outdated," he told TNA.

This despicable treatment of Palestinians is because the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) has entrusted the army with the handling of detainees, he said.

"Those detained include children and people who are over 80 years old. We’ve also received testimonies from former female hostages who described abuses they faced, which we are ashamed to talk about in front of the media,” he stated, adding that the centre has documented about 18 cases of deaths from torture.

“The legal description of this is deliberate killing without justification,” he said, adding that both the arbitrary arrests and conditions of abuse and torture in Israeli jails are "part of the crime of genocide”.

Mohamed Solaimane is a Gaza-based journalist with bylines in regional and international outlets, focusing on humanitarian and environmental issues

This piece is published in collaboration with Egab.