Released Palestinians describe abuses in Israeli prisons

Frequent beatings, overcrowding, withholding of basic rations. Released Palestinians have described worsening abuses in Israeli prisons crammed with thousands detained since the war in Gaza began 10 months ago.

Israeli officials have acknowledged that they have made conditions harsher for Palestinians in prisons, with hard-line National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir boasting that prisons will no longer be “summer camps” under his watch.

Four released Palestinians said that treatment had dramatically worsened in prisons run by the ministry since the Oct. 7 attacks that triggered the latest war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Some emerged from months of captivity emaciated and emotionally scarred.

A fifth prisoner, Muazzaz Abayat, was too weakened to detail his experience soon after his release in July following six months at southern Israel’s Naqab prison. Frail-looking and unable to focus, he could only muster the strength to speak for several minutes, saying he was regularly beaten.

Now at home outside Bethlehem, the 37-year-old can hardly leave his armchair.

“At night, he hallucinates and stands in the middle of the house, in shock or remembering the torment and pain he went through,” said his cousin, Aya Abayat. Like many of the detained, he was put under administrative detention, a procedure that allows Israel to detain people indefinitely without charge.

Their accounts match reports from human rights groups that have documented alleged abuse in Israeli detention facilities.

Alarm among rights groups over abuses of Palestinian prisoners has mainly focused on military facilities, particularly Sde Teiman, a desert base where Israeli military police have arrested 10 soldiers on suspicion of sodomizing a Palestinian detainee. The detention facility at the base has held most of the Palestinians seized in raids in the Gaza Strip since the war began.

The soldiers, five of whom have since been released, deny the sodomy allegation. Their defense lawyer has said that they used force to defend themselves against a detainee who attacked them during a search, but did not sexually abuse him.

The Israeli army says 36 Palestinian prisoners have died in military-run detention centers since October. It said some of them had “previous illnesses or injuries caused to them as a result of the ongoing hostilities,” without elaborating further.

According to autopsy reports for five of the detainees, two bore signs of physical trauma such as broken ribs, while the death of a third “could have been avoided if there had been greater care for his medical needs.” The reports were provided by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, an Israeli rights organization whose doctors observed the autopsies.

Facing calls to shut down the Sde Teiman facility, the military has been transferring hundreds of Palestinians from the base to the prisons run by Ben Gvir’s ministry.

But according to Abayat and the others, conditions in those facilities are traumatic as well.

Munthir Amira, a West Bank political activist who was held in Ofer Prison, said guards regularly beat detainees for punishment or often for no reason at all.

He said he and 12 others shared a cell with only six beds and a few thin blankets, freezing during the winter months. When prisoners had to go to the bathroom, they were handcuffed and bent over, and they were let outside for only 15 minutes twice a week, he said. Amira was held in administrative detention, apparently over his Facebook posts critical of Israel.