Torture in Israel’s Prisons

In early August the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a report called “Welcome to Hell.” It presents the testimonies of fifty-five Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself who were held by Israeli authorities after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, in what the report calls “a network of torture camps.” Some of these detainees were already in prison when the attack took place; others were arrested thereafter. All were subsequently released, mostly without charges.

Summarizing the testimonies, B’Tselem says they indicate “a systemic institutional policy” of

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.

After Hamas’s onslaught and the ensuing Israeli assault on Gaza, the thousands of Palestinians who were already incarcerated in Israeli prisons on October 7 likewise suffered, the report says, from a “massive increase in hostility from prison authorities.”

B’Tselem states that guards have hit prisoners in the testicles and abused them with “pepper spray, stun grenades, sticks, wooden clubs and metal batons, gun butts and barrels, brass knuckles and tasers.” One prisoner testified:

I had broken ribs and was injured in my right shoulder, my right thumb, and a finger on my left hand. I couldn’t move or breathe for half an hour. Everyone around me was screaming in pain, and some inmates were crying. Most were bleeding. It was a nightmare beyond words.

Having spent several decades trying to uphold human rights in virtually all parts of the world, including as the director of Human Rights Watch and the president of the Open Society Foundations, I am accustomed to reading detailed, sickening reports of torture. I have also helped compile such reports after taking testimony from detainees in Central America during the wars of the 1980s, from prisoners in Chile during the Pinochet years and in Cuba during Fidel Castro’s reign, from former inmates of prison camps in Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s, and from prisoners in South Africa under apartheid. The testimonies gathered in “Welcome to Hell” include elements that one finds in those reports, including beatings, sleep deprivation, and sexual abuse. In certain respects, however, the accounts collected by B’Tselem seem to me unusual.

Most of the time, in my experience, detainees are tortured in police facilities before being transferred to regular jails and prisons, apparently to elicit information that will incriminate the detainee or others. That purpose can usually be achieved in a limited period. At some point most detainees provide information, true or false, to stop the torture. There are, of course, variations to this pattern: when a colleague and I went to India in 1990 to investigate detentions, we found that torture there likewise took place in police lockups rather than regular prisons, but mainly for the purpose of extorting the detainees’ families.

The testimonies in “Welcome to Hell,” in contrast, describe guards torturing detainees in regular prisons over an extended period with no such motive. One detainee says that he was asked, “Where’s Sinwar?” But that’s about it. Nor does this abuse seem intended to punish disrespect to the guards or infractions of the rules. Such abuse tends to be sporadic, whereas these accounts describe prisoners suffering sustained torture over weeks and months. HaMoked, another Israeli human rights group, has reported that at certain military prisons detainees are kept handcuffed at all times except when they take a five-minute shower once a week; some have to defecate into diapers. Some prisoners have had amputations due to the prolonged use of handcuffs.

Another characteristic of torture in other countries is that it usually takes place when the detainee is isolated. Many detainees may be subjected to such practices as sleep deprivation or the denial of food at the same time, but physical violence, such as forcing a carrot into a detainee’s anus (as reported in one of the testimonies cited by B’Tselem), is usually kept out of the sight of other detainees. The only witnesses are the torturer and his or her fellow torturers.

And yet almost all the violence in Israel’s torture camps, according to the testimonies, takes place in full view of other detainees. Sometimes others are made to witness it. “They brought two more prisoners and told them to watch while they beat me,” said a survivor who had been held in Ketziot, a large Israel Prison Service (IPS) facility in the country’s south. “I was still naked, and I saw them through the thin shirt that was covering my head. The guards pulled their hair to lift their heads and forced them to open their eyes to watch me.”

One implication is that the guards engaged in torture at these facilities have no reason to hide what they are doing. Indeed, they seem to have called attention to it. B’Tselem relates that in some cases “the IPS held organized publicity tours to showcase the downgrading of prison conditions and flaunt the dehumanizing treatment of Palestinian prisoners.” A thirty-four-year-old man held in the Etzion detention facility and the Ofer and Nafha prisons recalled:

From time to time, they brought Israeli visitors and Israeli journalists and show them our situation and how we were being mistreated. Sometimes, they’d bring some of the visitors into the cells and tell us to kneel on the floor and bend over, in a very difficult and humiliating position, until the end of the visit. Sometimes they jeered and laughed at us.

“So systemic” are the abuses, B’Tselem concludes, “that there is no room to doubt” that they belong to “an organized, declared policy.” The report quotes the commander of Ketziot: “As far as we are concerned, they [the detainees] are all terrorists. We’ve reduced the conditions to a minimum.” This seems to reflect the widespread view among Israeli officials and much of the Israeli public that Palestinians in Gaza are collectively guilty of the crimes that Hamas committed on October 7. While it does not directly address the question of collective guilt, a Pew Research Center survey released on May 30 found that Israel’s Jews broadly approve of the country’s punitive military campaign in Gaza. The survey was conducted in March and early April, when the toll of those killed and wounded in Gaza was already very high and reports had made it clear that there was a humanitarian crisis resulting from the obstruction of deliveries of food, water, and other necessities. The Pew survey found that 39 percent of Israelis thought the military response to Hamas was about right, 34 percent said it had not gone far enough, and only 19 percent thought it had gone too far. Most of those who thought it had gone too far were Palestinian Israelis. Only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis thought it had gone too far.

The authors of “Welcome to Hell” point out that the IPS is overseen by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the extreme right-wing minister of national security and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir, they write, “has openly steered a policy of humiliating Palestinian prisoners and trampling their basic rights underfoot from the moment he took office.” Months before October 7 the prisons were already limiting family visits, reducing the time allotted for showers, and forbidding prisoners from preparing their own food.

And yet whatever responsibility Ben-Gvir may have for the torture to which detainees have been subjected in the past year, such abuses have also taken place at detention facilities administered not by the IPS but by the Israel Defense Forces, one of which has become notorious. B’Tselem knows of sixty Palestinians who have died in detention since October 7; most of these deaths reportedly took place at an IDF facility in the desert south of Gaza called Sde Teiman, where many of those taken into custody in the Strip have been confined.

In recent months several media outlets, such as Haaretz, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, and the Israeli magazine +972, have published exposés of the conditions at Sde Teiman with extensive testimony from Israeli whistleblowers. One physician reported that amputations due to the use of handcuffs had become “routine.” On June 6 the Times reported that some four thousand Gazans had been detained at Sde Teiman since October, of whom about 1,200 had been returned to Gaza and thirty-five had died: “An Israeli soldier who served at the site said that fellow soldiers had regularly boasted of beating detainees and saw signs that several people had been subjected to such treatment.” The article included interviews with several of the former detainees, among them a law student, an ambulance driver, and a senior nurse from the al-Shifa Hospital who said that soldiers had subjected him to sexual torture.

The torture of health care workers from Gaza was the focus of a report released in late August by Human Rights Watch. It included testimonies that the organization obtained from doctors, nurses, and paramedics who had been arrested in Gaza, taken to detention facilities in Israel, and subsequently released. Like those whose testimonies were collected by B’Tselem and HaMoked, they described humiliation, beatings, prolonged handcuffing, blindfolding, denial of medical care, and sexual abuse by Israeli forces that affected them and the general detainee population. One of the cases cited is that of a thirty-six-year-old paramedic, Walid Khalili, who, according to the report, said that

when soldiers removed his blindfold at the Sde Teiman facility, he saw he was in a large building “like a warehouse,” with chains hanging from the ceiling. Dozens of detainees in diapers were suspended from the ceiling, with the chains attached to their square metal handcuffs. He said that personnel at the facility then suspended him from a chain, so his feet were not touching the ground, dressed him in a garment and a headband that were attached to wires, and shocked him with electricity.

On July 29 military police went to Sde Teiman to arrest nine IDF reservists who were accused of the sexual torture of a Palestinian detainee that caused severe injuries and left him unable to walk. The soldiers resisted arrest. A crowd of right-wing protesters—among them the heritage minister and two right-wing members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament—gathered at the military base in support of the detained soldiers. Waving flags, they forced their way onto the grounds of the facility and broke into a base that houses Israel’s military courts. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich issued a statement: “I’m calling on the chief military prosecutor, get your hands off the reservists.” Ben-Gvir, Justice Minister Yariv Levin, and the transportation and economy ministers all issued statements in support of the accused torturers; Hanoch Milwidsky, a Knesset member from the Likud Party, insisted that it was permissible to sexually abuse Hamas militants: “Everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

In the end the commander of the IDF, General Herzi Halevi, upheld the military police’s efforts to arrest the accused torturers. As of this writing, however, none of the protesters who broke into the two bases has been arrested.

Many of those detained since October 7 are held under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, enacted in 2002. During the current conflict Israel amended the law to permit holding detainees for forty-five days without a detention order and for ninety days before they can consult a lawyer. The law allows the IDF to imprison a person based on “reasonable cause” to believe that “he is an unlawful combatant and that his release will harm national security.” An unlawful combatant is defined as a person “who has participated either directly or indirectly in hostile acts against the State of Israel or is a member of a force perpetrating hostile acts against the State of Israel.” According to a 2017 Human Rights Watch report, the law requires civilian courts to “presumptively accept the Defense Ministry’s finding that the organization in question is a ‘hostile’ force, and that membership makes the detainee ‘a person whose release would harm state security.’” There is thus little room for an independent judgment by a court.

The term “unlawful combatant” is not known in international law. After September 11, 2001, officials in the George W. Bush administration used it to justify the treatment of detainees in Guantánamo and at secret locations outside the United States. Some of these detainees were tortured using methods like waterboarding and body slams. Calling them unlawful combatants, as I wrote in these pages, was also a way to justify bypassing federal courts and trying detainees before military commissions.¹

It hardly needs saying that Israel’s treatment of detainees, like the US’s after September 11, violates many norms and provisions of international law that the country has signed and ratified or that are so accepted worldwide that they have the status of customary international law and bind all governments. These include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which forbids torture; the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which deals with the obligations of an occupying power in making arrests and imprisoning civilians; the 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions, which protects detainees in armed conflicts from corporal punishment, torture, outrages upon personal dignity, and humiliating and degrading treatment; and the Convention Against Torture, which provides that an official who participates in torture can be arrested and tried in any country that is a party to the agreement.² Israel’s treatment of detainees also violates the UN’s Standard Minimum Rules on the treatment of prisoners, now known as the Mandela Rules.

It bears mentioning, too, that Israel has ended access to detainees by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which keeps its findings rigorously confidential and only discusses them with officials of the detaining power in its effort to end abuses and improve conditions of confinement. The ICRC also provides detainees with humanitarian assistance, including medical care and in some circumstances even goods like mattresses. In many other countries where international or domestic armed conflicts have taken place, from El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s to present-day Ukraine and Russia (where the ICRC has not been able to see all the prisoners), ICRC access has been the best protection against mistreatment. Some Israeli officials bristle at comparisons between their country and apartheid-era South Africa, but in this respect Israel’s practice falls short of that country’s treatment of detainees. In his autobiography Nelson Mandela writes that ICRC visits humanized his many years of incarceration.

Reports on the events at Sde Teiman join an ever-growing body of evidence contradicting Netanyahu’s frequent claim that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.” What we know about the IDF’s actions in Gaza is limited because the international press only has access during carefully controlled visits and because Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights groups are excluded from the territory. We do know, however, that large numbers of civilians have been killed in its aerial attacks, that it holds a substantial share of the responsibility for obstructing humanitarian assistance, that it has destroyed much of the infrastructure that helped provide Gaza’s inhabitants with food and water, and that videos posted online by the troops themselves show them vandalizing and looting Palestinian institutions and homes. We also know that since October 7 more than six hundred Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by both IDF soldiers and settlers, some of whom donned their old IDF uniforms while participating in the killings. An American activist, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was shot and killed by an IDF sniper on September 6.

In other countries where regular armed forces have committed atrocities, many citizens have found it hard to accept that their own family members, friends, and neighbors could behave in such a manner. The crimes committed by US forces in Vietnam, for example, were widely reported. Yet most Americans still stop short of recognizing the deep immorality of US conduct in that war as a national disgrace.

In 1995 the Hamburg Institute for Social Research shocked the German public by mounting an exhibit demonstrating that the Wehrmacht—the German armed forces—had participated in genocide. By then Germans had widely accepted their country’s guilt for the Holocaust. But many believed that only groups such as the SS—which had been declared a “criminal organization” at Nuremberg—and the Gestapo had carried out the crimes of World War II. They maintained the illusion that the regular armed forces conducted themselves with honor. The Israel-born Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, who served in the IDF as a young man and has been a strong critic of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, has written:

The exhibition touched a raw nerve, for here one could no longer speak of excesses by individuals or a few generals, nor about SS atrocities or crimes committed “behind the back of the fighting troops,” since evidence was there for all to see: photographs taken by the soldiers themselves of massacres, hangings and torture, documents directing military units to murder Jewish communities, clear indications of the close collaboration between the SS and the regular army.³

The high regard that Israelis have for the IDF is reflected in the findings of the Israel Democracy Institute, which published its annual Democracy Index in March. According to Tamar Hermann, the IDI’s director of policy research, surveys conducted after October 7 found that Jewish Israelis were “not satisfied (to say the least) with the functioning of the Israeli political system.” According to the index, only 19 percent expressed trust in the Knesset and only 15 percent in the country’s political parties. On the other hand, IDI president Yohanan Plesner said the report showed that “the public places great trust in the IDF and its commanders, who set a personal example, take responsibility, and act with courage and conviction in every aspect of the war.” It reported that the IDF had its highest rating for trust, 86.5 percent. Apparently many Israelis have either blinded themselves to the extreme misery in Gaza or convinced themselves that Hamas is mainly to blame. Indeed, Hamas contributes to the suffering because its combatants mingle with the civilian population in the territory, thereby providing a rationale for the IDF’s aerial attacks. In late August Hamas demonstrated anew its ruthlessness by executing six of the hostages it had seized on October 7. This makes it very difficult to persuade many Israelis to accept denunciations of the grave human rights abuses committed by their armed forces.

And yet the very existence of reports like “Welcome to Hell” is a reminder that Israel still has human rights advocates willing and able to denounce the indiscriminate killings in Gaza, the obstruction of humanitarian assistance, the violence by religious Zionist settlers aided and abetted by the police and the IDF in the West Bank, and the abuses against detainees. Israel remains home to a well-organized human rights movement that includes, in addition to B’Tselem and HaMoked, such outstanding groups as the long-established Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and Yesh Din. It is hard to think of any country in the world, and certainly of one Israel’s size, that has a comparable array of highly qualified human rights advocates.

These advocates operate in a very difficult environment and have lost most of their recent struggles, but their cause is not yet hopeless. They deserve support from those outside the country and particularly from Americans concerned about human rights. Israel is prosperous and militarily powerful, but many Israelis recognize that their security, their prosperity, and their international standing are closely linked to the United States.

In the 1980s and the early 1990s, major changes took place in countries that were geopolitically aligned with the US and that practiced grave abuses of human rights, such as Argentina, Chile, the Philippines, South Korea, and South Africa. The reporting by domestic human rights organizations in each of them was crucial in bringing about those changes. Though they seemingly faced overwhelming odds and in some cases severe persecution, they prevailed because their findings attracted international attention, especially in the US.

International organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also played important parts in documenting abuses, mounting campaigns to secure changes in American policies toward repressive regimes, and creating a global constituency for the promotion of human rights. Some political leaders in Western countries, including Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, strenuously resisted those efforts. Yet the Reagan administration was ultimately obliged to shift its stance and became involved in the termination of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Today the State Department should remind Israel that the “Leahy Law” prohibits US security assistance to government forces committing gross violations of human rights, including torture, unless the secretary of state reports to Congress that the government in question is taking effective steps to bring members of the unit responsible to justice.

Altering the US’s stance on the human rights abuses of the government of Israel is far from an easy task. It will take sustained effort by politically active Americans who insist on compliance with American laws on human rights and who are determined to denounce grave human rights abuses, whether the abuses are committed by Hamas, Israel, or any other friend or foe of the United States.