Israel Faces Mounting Pressure Over Detaining Palestinians In Alleged Torture Camps

Several investigations from human rights groups and news outlets reveal a network of prison camps where Palestinians are subject to inhumane treatment.

Israel is facing mounting pressure from the international community and human rights groups as more evidence surfaces of the military’s severe punishment of Palestinians held in what are being described as torture camps, including a notorious prison in the desert where soldiers have for months been accused of sexual abuse.

The Israeli Supreme Court said Wednesday that it will consider a petition from rights groups to close down Sde Teiman, the main military facility holding Palestinians captured in large-scale raids during the past 10 months of Israel’s offensive in Gaza. Whistleblowers and dozens of Palestinian captives who have since been released told the rights groups and media outlets of the inhumane treatment they faced while incarcerated with no formal charges, no trial and often no legal counsel.

“Given the political function that Israel’s prison system fills in the context of the accelerated dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli discourse, a radically right-wing government, a weak judicial system swept up in public sentiment and a minister in charge of prisons who takes pride in violating human rights ― this system has become an instrument for the widespread, systematic and arbitrary oppression of Palestinians through torture,” Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem said in its report earlier this week on the network of what the group calls torture camps.

Throughout this year, many rights groups and news outlets released their own investigations of Israel’s prison system, including Sde Teiman. The camp sits about 18 miles from Gaza in the Negev desert, and is split into two areas ― one that serves as a kind of pen for dozens of physically restrained Palestinians, and another area that serves as a field hospital where doctors say wounded captives are strapped down to the bed while forced to wear diapers and consume food through straws.

Public criticism of the facilities increased after the Israeli military arrested nine reservists accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman. Many hardline Israeli supporters angrily protested the July arrest, which the accused soldiers initially resisted. The officers also had the backing of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ― whose office oversees the Israel Prison Service ― and Likud party member Hanoch Milwidsky, who came under fire for justifying the rape and abuse of Palestinians.