By Rabia Ali
ISTANBUL (AA) — Visibly emaciated and shaken, the images of released Palestinian detainees have long raised concern about their treatment in Israeli prisons.
However, disturbing accounts and footage of sexual abuse perpetrated by Israeli guards in the notorious Sde Teiman Prison last month sparked massive outcry after a detainee was taken to the hospital with severe injuries to his internal organs.
Rights groups have condemned Israeli authorities for what they describe as widespread and systemic abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
But despite the increased scrutiny, the cases that have come to light so far represent a tiny fraction of the broader pattern of mistreatment, according to rights advocate Tal Steiner.
“The military attorney general said this week in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) that they are looking into 74 different cases of abuse towards Palestinians in the context of the war,” Steiner told Anadolu.
“So, it’s only a drop in the ocean.”
- New phenomena of abuse
Steiner, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), highlighted an emerging pattern of abuse within the Israel Prison Service after Oct. 7.
She explained that they first started to use the term “systemic abuse” and torture to refer to the phenomenon of abuse now prevalent in the Israel Prison Service (IPS) towards Palestinians from the occupied West Bank.
“At first, we didn’t have that much information about Palestinians from Gaza at the time. That was four months into the war,” she said.
But as the picture became clearer, Steiner said they found that detainees were routinely subject to “physical abuse, to beatings, to verbal humiliation, to extreme living conditions such as shortages of food, of hygiene, of electricity, of medical treatment.”
Many Palestinians detained in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7 have been held at designated military detention camps, such as Sde Teiman.
At these sites, Steiner said, reports indicate that prisoners have been held in extreme living conditions, often blindfolded, handcuffed, and forced to kneel for 24 hours a day, all while suffering physical beatings, humiliation, punishment, and very little food.
“You could see from the pictures of people coming out of the military camps, how malnourished famished they looked, with the wounds that got infected and complicated due to those living conditions,” she explained.
- Systemic and not ‘secluded’
According to Steiner, the type of incidents that her organization worked on before Israel’s Gaza offensive were of “secluded” incidents related to security interrogations by the country’s Shabak security agency.
“We didn’t have that much issue with the IPS … and with the conduct of prison guards.”
While prison conditions were harsh and “below international standards,” in terms of living space and connection to the outside world, Steiner said they did not encounter incidents of unprovoked beatings of detainees “as a phenomenon.”
“We had secluded cases. It was never as widespread as we’ve seen.”
However, in the over the course of four months, 19 different cases of torture from seven facilities have been recorded by the PCATI and other organizations.
“This figure is what led us to claim that this was indeed systemic and not just secluded because it was across different facilities in high numbers.”
- Huge accountability gap
Steiner said 1,450 cases of torture by security agents had been filed with Israel’s Justice Ministry over the past several years usually in the context of arrest and interrogation.
However, these resulted in “zero indictments and only three criminal cases in over almost 1,500 complaints of torture in the past 20 years,” she added.
The country has had a massive “accountability gap,” even before Oct. 7, Steiner said, stressing the need to indict “every duty bearer that abuses their power and infringes on the absolute prohibition of torture.”
While these cases usually did not involve soldiers in the military, indictment figures here for suspected abuse of Palestinians were no better, she said.
On recent arrest warrant requests filed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) for an arrest warrant for leaders of Israel and Palestinian group Hamas, she said the application “mentioned starvation and other policies towards Gaza in the context of the war.”
“But, they haven’t mentioned Palestinian prisoners, which we think is unfortunate because everything shows that this is a big human rights violation in gravity and in scale and something that definitely renders the court’s attention.”
The rights advocate also raised questions about an investigation that was launched into the recent case of torture at Sde Teiman Prison.
“Whether this investigation would actually lead to a significant indictment, a conviction, of course, depending on the evidence that the prosecution is able to show, all of that still remains in a very big question mark.”
In that case, the arrest of several soldiers accused of being involved in the sexual abuse of the Palestinian detainee had sparked right-wing protests.
Joined by politicians, the protesters broke into two military bases in southern and central Israel to protest the detention of the soldiers.
Steiner expressed concern about the challenges faced by the military judiciary under the immense political pressure.
She asked: “How much can they insist on conducting a full and fair criminal procedure when they are faced with so much animosity from Israeli public leaders?”