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Israeli Soldiers Accused of Rape and Torture of Palestinians

By
Seraj Assi

The accusations of abuses by the Israel Defense Forces against Palestinian detainees in Sde Teiman are growing more gruesome. Last month: dozens of deaths. This week: gang rape.

Far-right Israelis and relatives of the soldiers gather in front of the military court building and stage a protest against the arrest of nine soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman Prison in the Negev desert, in Netanya, Israel, on July 30, 2024. (Mostafa Alkharouf / Anadolu via Getty Images)

A host of shocking reports on Monday revealed that Israeli soldiers in the Sde Teiman detention facility are accused of raping a Palestinian detainee.  The allegation comes after Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in June that at least thirty-six Palestinian captives from Gaza may have been tortured to death by Israeli soldiers at the same facility.

Haaretz reports that nine IDF soldiers have been detained by the police for gang raping the Gazan detainee so severely that he had to be hospitalized. The victim arrived at the hospital with gruesome injuries, including “a serious wound in his rectum area.” Israeli media outlets report that the victim has lost his ability to walk.

Footage shows Israeli military police breaking into Sde Teiman to arrest the gang rapists, where they clashed with the soldiers, who reportedly barricaded themselves into the facility and used pepper spray to defend themselves, before being ultimately taken into custody.

The Israeli Knesset, which is in summer recess, is holding an emergency discussion tomorrow to defend the detained soldiers, according to Ynet. Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, praised the soldiers as “heroic warriors,” demanding their immediate release. Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has hailed the soldiers as “our best heroes” and denounced their arrest as “nothing less than shameful.” Knesset members from the Likud ruling party are stating openly that it’s “legitimate” to rape Palestinian detainees. An Israeli mob has descended on the Sde Teiman concentration camp in a mass protest in solidarity with the rapist soldiers, while dozens of Israeli officials have stormed the camp to protest the arrests. The officials include several Knesset members and heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu.

A violent mob of hundreds of Israelis stormed the Israeli military court in Beit Lid in support of the Israeli soldiers under investigation and to demand their immediate release.

The story has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media, despite being widely reported in the Israeli media. Meanwhile, US media continues to report obsessively on “Hamas mass sexual atrocities” and “weaponization of sexual violence” on October 7 — claims that have been widely debunked. The New York Times hired a former IDF soldier and genocide cheerleader, with no background in journalism, to report on “Hamas sexual violence” on October 7, freely spreading baseless claims of sexual assaults and sparking internal criticism from staffers, according to the Intercept. US politicians from Joe Biden to Antony Blinken, and most obsessively Hillary Clinton, have been tirelessly parroting baseless sexual-violence claims against Hamas. Those claims of mass sexual violence have been widely refuted by the Intercept, Mondoweiss, and the Electronic Intifada, among other outlets.

Israel holds nearly 10,000 Palestinian captives in inhumane conditions, most of whom have been kidnapped from Gaza since last October. Many are languishing in the Sde Teiman concentration camp, which was built in the Negev desert for Palestinian detainees from Gaza. Israeli military prisons have been the site of unparalleled cruelty, including the Ofer military prison in the West Bank, where some Palestinian detainees have attempted suicide due to the “brutality of jailers” — an extreme measure given that suicide is strictly prohibited in Islam. Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) has documented the deaths of at least thirteen Palestinian prisoners from the West Bank and Israel since October. Released prisoners describe routine beatings, raping, assaults by dogs, sleep deprivation, and forced starvation. Some prisoners claim to have lost more than fifty pounds. An amateur Palestinian bodybuilder claimed he had lost more than one hundred pounds in nine months, during which he was sexually assaulted with a broom by prisoner guards.

In April, Adnan al-Bursh, a leading surgeon from Gaza, was tortured to death in the Ofer prison.

Widely circulated videos show tortured Palestinian captives in Gaza resembling bare skeletons, visibly brutalized and traumatized. One of the most horrifying stories features a young Palestinian man named Badr Dahla, who returned to Gaza from an Israeli detention facility in a horrified state, wide-eyed and trembling in fear. He was so traumatized he could not recognize his only daughter.

Palestinian human rights organizations like Addameer, an organization supporting Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, have reported countless cruelties against Palestinian prisoners, including humiliating and degrading conditions and routine torture with electricity,  mock executions, and rape with metal rods and fire extinguishers. Eyewitnesses claim that guards routinely raid the overcrowded cells, handcuff the inmates, and beat them brutally. Some tortured detainees have suffered from paralysis, or lost their ability to speak, or their memory. Others had their legs amputated due to constant cuffing. Citing a doctor at a field hospital for detained Palestinians at Sde Teiman, Haaretz reported in April that “routine” amputations were recorded due to handcuff injuries. Some of these cruelties were reported by the New York Times in June.

The Washington Post has recently reported on the “deadly abuse in Israeli prisons.” Citing eyewitness accounts, former prisoners, lawyers, and medical evidence, the report details the deaths of several Palestinian prisoners, including one who suffered a ruptured spleen and broken ribs after being beaten by Israeli prison guards. One prisoner “screamed for hours before dying.” The report describes a culture of “rampant violence and deprivation” in Israel’s prison system, calling it Israel’s “Guantanamo.” The Post quotes Israeli human-rights groups who describe a culture of “revenge” and “pervasive violence” pervading Israeli military prisons, where soldiers and prison guards act with total impunity, enjoying the “backing of the policymakers, and the lack of accountability.”

“It’s more horrific than Abu Ghraib,” Palestinian lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, who had access to the camp, told the Israeli-based +972 Magazine in June:

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 [civilians], young people, adults, and children. There are no Hamas members in Sde Teiman because they are in the hands of the Shabas [Israel Prison Service].

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Mahajneh recounted that Israeli soldiers gang raped six Palestinian prisoners in front of the other prisoners.

Human-rights organizations in Israel describe Israeli military prisons as “acting outside the law,” in reference to Israel’s extrajudicial detentions and torture of Palestinians. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, which has condemned the gang rape of the Palestinian detainee, stated, “Since the beginning of the war, we claimed that the Sde Teiman was operating as an ‘ex-territory’, and the soldiers stationed there were acting outside any law — first in their treatment of detainees, and now towards military law enforcement agents.” The group added, “Instead of absolute condemnation, some Israeli far-right leaders have rallied to support the suspects of abuse, which is emblematic of the root causes that enable such abuse to happen in the first place.”

The reported barbarities are unlawful by the lights of Israel’s own courts. In July, Israel’s High Court issued a conditional order seeking to close Sde Teiman, citing reports of widespread abuses and torture, asking, “Why is the Sde Teiman detention facility not operated in accordance with the conditions set forth in the law governing internment of unlawful combatants?”

Israeli officials have made no secrets of these cruelties. Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister who oversees the prison system, has boasted that he “dramatically reduced” shower time and introduced a “minimal menu” for Palestinian prisoners. Ben-Gvir recently confirmed that conditions inside Israeli prisons “have indeed worsened,” adding, “I am proud of that.”

Cheered by the mainstream media, the Biden administration has allowed Israel to act with unmatched brutality toward thousands of Palestinian prisoners, depriving them of human rights and stripping them of their basic humanity and dignity. This inhumanity reflects a growing culture of impunity in Israel marked by unhinged violence and desire for revenge.

These barbarities bear witness to the brutality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and the brutal reality of its apartheid system in the West Bank. The dehumanization of Palestinians has been normalized in Israel.