Dozens of Palestinian prisoners are being held indefinitely in an underground Israeli detention facility, disadvantaged of daylight and subjected to excessive violence, Palestinian legal professionals say, as extra experiences of abuse emerge from the devastation of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Attorneys for Palestinians held at Rakevet, an underground wing of the Ramla (Nitzan) jail complicated in central Israel, mentioned their purchasers have been assaulted, starved, and denied medical care regardless of critical accidents.
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“When the prisoners arrive for the interview [with their lawyer], their faces present what they’ve endured,” lawyer Nadia Daqqa advised Al Jazeera. “Significantly on this jail, prisoners are afraid to speak. The [interview] room is one sq. metre and the guards refuse to depart.”
Regardless of that, Daqqa and different legal professionals have collected testimonials from prisoners held at Rakevet.
One detainee, referred to by the initials YH, had a damaged jaw, shoulder and ribs, but had acquired no medical therapy. One other, often known as KHD, mentioned Israeli jail guards punish the prisoners “by breaking their thumbs”.
The experiences are the most recent to element wide-scale abuse in Israel’s jail system, because the nation has ramped up its arrests of Palestinians amid its two-year genocidal warfare on the Gaza Strip.
Greater than 9,200 Palestinians are at present detained in Israeli prisons, in accordance with the latest figures from Palestinian prisoner rights group Addameer. The bulk are in what’s often known as administrative detention, held with out cost or trial.
Scores of detainees from Gaza have additionally been held in a infamous Israeli navy detention camp often known as Sde Teiman, the place experiences of killings, torture and sexual violence, together with rape, have been rife because the Gaza warfare started in October 2023.
Whereas the Israeli authorities have denied allegations of abuse, Palestinian prisoners who have been just lately launched from the services as a part of final month’s Gaza ceasefire deal described harrowing abuses.
The our bodies of slain Palestinian detainees returned to the coastal Palestinian enclave beneath the ceasefire settlement additionally confirmed indicators of torture, mutilation and execution, with some returned with ropes still tied round their necks.
A number of human rights teams in Israel have described the nation’s prisons and detention services as a form of torture and merciless and weird punishment.
“Human rights organizations documented widespread abuses, together with bodily beatings, sexual violence, harassment, and threats – pointing to systemic and deliberate mistreatment,” the Public Committee In opposition to Torture in Israel (PCATI) said in June.
The wave of abuse additionally comes amid a push from inside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right authorities to harden its insurance policies in direction of Palestinian detainees.
Earlier this week, the Israeli parliament advanced a bill that may impose the demise penalty for so-called “terrorism” offences based mostly on “racist” motives towards Israelis.
The transfer, which rights teams have condemned and mentioned would solely goal Palestinians, has been championed by Israel’s far-right Nationwide Safety Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Assaults by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians, which have been burgeoning in the occupied West Bank and are carried out with impunity and sometimes backed by the Israeli navy, wouldn’t apply.
“The enactment of a brand new legislation imposing the demise penalty solely towards Palestinians marks a brand new episode within the ongoing sequence of oppression and constitutes a grave escalation in Israel’s widespread violations towards Palestinians, together with a whole bunch of extrajudicial executions,” Addameer said on November 9.
Basil Farraj, a professor at Birzeit College within the occupied West Financial institution, mentioned the underground Rakevet facility is only one a part of this wider system of abuse.
“This secret centre is in actual fact a symptom of the broader phenomenon of Israeli carcerality, the place Palestinians proceed to be handled in a violent and, in actual fact, a particularly brutal means that denies and negates all of their rights,” Farraj advised Al Jazeera.
He defined that many Palestinians have been arrested beneath Israel’s so-called “illegal combatants” legislation, which permits the authorities to detain them indefinitely on safety grounds with out having to show any allegations.
“The truth that you’re held with out trial provides one other layer of psychological abuse and psychological torture,” Farraj mentioned. “Not realizing why you’re being arrested … provides to those layers of violence and torture that Israel has entrenched over the previous two years.”
