The recent reports of rapes of Palestinian prisoners at the Israeli detention camp, Sde Teiman, and elsewhere have caused widespread outrage, revealing the fault lines in Israel’s political and military establishment amid the ongoing war on Gaza.
Knesset members Limor Son Har-Melech (right) and Yitzhak Kroizer (in white) from the far right-wing Otzma Yehudití party stand with armed and masked reservists from Force 100. Israeli right-wing activists demonstrated with masked IDF reservists and broke into Beit Lid military police base following the detention of 9 military reservists from the unit today, who were suspected of sexual abuse of a detainee at the Sde Teiman compound. Matan Golan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
These events are playing out as MERIP has been hard at work on our Fall Issue, ‘Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams.’ Given MERIP’s long history of documenting grave abuses in the Israeli prison system and the work we’re currently engaged in, we felt it appropriate to share a preview from the issue that addresses the Sde Teiman events head-on. The following is excerpted from an in-depth report by Lisa Hajjar and Basil Farraj on Israel’s war on Palestinian prisoners that will be released in full as part of our Fall Issue. We’re sharing this now to continue our mission of shining a light on these crimes against humanity in the region and highlighting defiance and dissent in the face of such crimes. This work is a powerful reminder that, as the authors put it, “in this exceptionally violent present… defiance is above all a will to survive.”
Yesterday, in the latest episode of unrest over sexual violence in Israel’s prisons, a video of nine soldiers raping a Palestinian detainee was broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12. Later in the day, a right-wing mob converged on Israel’s Supreme Court and disrupted a hearing about Sde Teiman.
Sde Teiman is an Israeli military camp in the Negev desert that was partially converted into a detention center after the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October. It has been characterized as a black site because it is inaccessible to independent monitors and officials regard the identities and treatment of Palestinians held there a state secret.
But the veil of secrecy shrouding Sde Teiman was lifted in April when Ha’aretz reported on a letter sent to Israeli cabinet members by a doctor working at the facility. “Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event,’ the physician said in the letter.” He added, “I am writing 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.”[1]
One month later, CNN published an explosive exposé about Sde Teiman based on accounts by three whistleblowing soldiers and 12 Gazans who were recently released. According to the whistleblowers, one section of the detention facility contains a large barbed-wire pen where blindfolded Palestinians are shackled in stress positions for up to 16 hours a day with no shelter from the desert heat. Detainees who talk, fall asleep or even move can be cuffed to the fence in a standing position with hands above their heads. At night, dogs have been released into prisoners’ cells while sound grenades are fired. The other section of the detention facility contains a field hospital where wounded Palestinians are shackled to beds, blindfolded, stripped of their clothes, and forced to defecate in diapers. CNN reported that “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.”[2]
The decision by Israeli doctors to perform medical procedures on detainees without anesthesia is not due to shortages, as is the case for doctors in Gaza; it is a choice that comports with the retaliatory and illegal nature of the broader war. One informant told CNN: “I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise.”[3]
Khaled Mahajneh was the first lawyer the military permitted to visit Sde Teiman. He went to the facility on June 19 to meet with Mohammad Arab, an Al Araby TV journalist who was taken into custody in March while covering the Israeli attack on al-Shifa Hospital. In an interview with +972, Mahajneh said, “The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”[4]
A Right to Rape?
Amid plentiful accounts and abundant material evidence ofsystematicrape, torture and murder of Palestinian prisoners, in July, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the military advocate general, moved forward on an investigation of a gang rape by nine soldiers at Sde Teiman. A Palestinian from Gaza, who is accused of being a member of Hamas’s Nukhba unit, was so badly brutalized in the course of being sodomized that he suffered a ruptured bowel, severe damage to his anus, broken ribs and lung damage. He was transferred in critical condition to a nearby hospital where he required surgery. Dr. Yoel Donchin, who treated him at Sde Teiman, told Ha’aretz that he was shocked an Israeli guard could do such a thing. “I was certain this was revenge by Nukhba against Nukhba.”[5] He added, “If the state and Knesset members think there’s no limit to how much you can abuse prisoners, they should kill them themselves, like the Nazis did, or close the hospitals…If they maintain a hospital only for the sake of defending ourselves at the Hague, that’s no good.”[6]
On July 29, military police were dispatched to Sde Teiman to take into custody the nine reservists accused of the gang rape; one of them is a major who commands Force 100, the unit that operates Sde Teiman (and other military detention facilities). Another reservist also wanted for multiple acts of aggravated abuse of prisoners was not on the base at the time. Soldiers from Force 100 resisted the military police in an attempt to prevent the arrests. Following shouting and clashes, they barricaded themselves along with the wanted suspects in a show of solidarity. During this standoff, a mob of about 200 Israelis, including some members of the Knesset, stormed the base to support the soldiers. Police stationed nearby waited over an hour to enter the base and expel the rioters.
As events at Sde Teiman were unfolding, there were debates in the Knesset over the military advocate general’s move to investigate soldiers for gang rape. Likud member Yuli Edelstein, who chairs the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said, “A situation where masked military police officers conduct a raid on an IDF base is not acceptable to me and I will not allow it to happen again. Our soldiers are not criminals and this disgraceful persecution of our soldiers is unacceptable to me.”[7] Ahmad Tibi, a member from Hadash Ta’al who was outraged by comments of other members, asked: “Is inserting an explosive into the rectum of a person legitimate?” Likud member Hanoch Milvetsky retorted, “If he is a Nukhba, everything is legitimate.”[8] Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir chimed in that “the sight of military policemen arriving to arrest our best heroes in Sde Teiman is nothing short of shameful. I advise the Minister of Defense, the Chief of Staff and the army authorities to support the soldiers and to benefit from the Prison Service. The summer camp and tolerance for terrorists are over. Our soldiers must receive full support.”[9]
When the nine suspects finally were extricated from Sde Teiman, they were transferred to the base at Beit Lid for questioning. There, an even larger mob—including members of Force 100—stormed the base and rampaged to protest the arrest of soldiers accused of rape and aggravated abuse. On July 31, two of the suspects were released without charges, three more were released earlier this week. The other five remain under investigation. On August 1, it was reported that the gang-raped detainee was returned to Sde Teiman.
The War on Prisoners
Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is an evolving story, but one never free of dehumanization and discrimination. Endemic torture and abuse of prisoners is only one dimension of the violent and degrading practices present in all spheres of Israeli control that affect Palestinians. Israel’s carceral project has been designed and developed to eliminate Palestinians’ national-collective existence, to re-engineer the population through fragmentation and repression and to deter people from engaging in resistance or even aspiring to liberation. Indeed, as Walid Daqqa—a long-serving prisoner who died in Israeli custody in April—explained, there are the “small prisons,” where at least 800,000 Palestinians have been incarcerated over the decades, and the “large prison” of Palestinian society which, despite geographic and political fragmentation, remains unified by experiences of occupation and apartheid.[10]
In the current moment—as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed tens of thousands and military assaults and state-supported settler pogroms are rampant across the West Bank—the level and scope of violence and dehumanization perpetrated against Palestinian prisoners by Israeli soldiers, security agents and prison staff has extended the hot war into the prisons. What the Israeli government consistently fails to appreciate, however, is the resilience of Palestinian defiance against erasure. In this exceptionally violent present, this defiance is above all a will to survive.
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[Lisa Hajjar is chair of the sociology department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Basil Farraj is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural studies, Birzeit University.]
Endnotes
[1] Hagar Shezaf and Michael Hauser Tov, “Doctor at Israeli Field Hospital for Detained Gazans: ‘We Are All Complicit in Breaking the Law’,” Haaretz, April 4, 2024.
[2] “Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center,” CNN, May 11, 2024.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Baker Zoubi, “‘More horrific than Abu Ghraib’: Lawyer recounts visit to Israeli detention center,” +972 Magazine, June 27, 2024.
[5] Hagar Shezaf, Bar Peleg and Ran Shimoni, “Sde Teiman Doctor Who Saw Abused Gazan Detainee: ‘I Couldn’t Believe an Israeli Prison Guard Could Do Such a Thing’,” Haaretz, July 30, 2024
[6] Ibid.
[7] Eliav Breuer, Ministers, “MKs criticize arrests of soldiers suspected of terrorist prisoner abuse,” The Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2024.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Basil Farraj and Hashem Abushama, “‘Parallel Time’: Cultural Productions from the Small Prison to the Large Prison,” Jadaliyya, March 24, 2022.
