‘More Horrific Than Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo’: The Unsalvageable Depravity of Israel’s Prisons for Palestinians
On June 19, 2024, Khaled Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, became the first lawyer to visit a notorious detention facility for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, located inside the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev Desert, one of several detention facilities established after October 7, 2023 to hold Palestinians seized in Gaza.
Palestinian prisoners photographed at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in December 2023.
Speaking to +972 Magazine a week after his visit, Mahanjeh drew a pertinent comparison with the treatment of Muslim prisoners in the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror”, but concluded that Israel’s behavior was even worse.
“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo”, he said, adding, “I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7. I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”
Mahajneh “was initially approached by Al Araby TV, which was seeking information about Muhammad Arab”, also identified as Mohammed Saber Arab, “a reporter for the network who was arrested in March while covering the Israeli siege of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.”
Muhammad Arab, photographed in Gaza before his capture and his imprisonment in Sde Teiman.
Granted permission to visit, he found Muhammad Arab, 42, “nearly unrecognizable after 100 days in the detention facility; his face, hair, and skin color had changed, and he was covered with dirt and pigeon droppings.”
The journalist told him that the prisoners were “continually blindfolded and tied up with their hands behind their backs, forced to sleep hunched over on the floor without any bedding”, kept on starvation rations, and “prevented from talking to each other, even though more than 100 people are kept to a warehouse, some of them elderly and minors,” as Mahajneh told +972 Magazine. He added, “They are not allowed to pray or even read the Qur’an.”
Muhammad Arab also told Mahajneh that sexual abuse was widespread, stating that the Israeli guards “sexually assaulted six prisoners with a stick in front of the other detainees after they had violated prison orders.” Mahanjeh told +972 Magazine, “When he talked about rapes, I asked him, ‘Muhammad, you’re a journalist, are you sure about this?’ But he said he saw it with his own eyes, and that what he was telling me was only a small part of what was happening there.”
As +972 Magazine also noted, in a video circulating on social media, a Palestinian prisoner recently released from Sde Teiman “said that he had personally witnessed multiple rapes, and cases in which Israeli soldiers made dogs sexually assault prisoners.”
Muhammad Arab also stated that, in the month before the lawyer’s visit, as +972 Magazine described it, “several prisoners were killed during violent interrogations”, while others, “who had been wounded in Gaza”, were “forced to have their limbs amputated or bullets removed from their bodies without anesthesia, and were treated by nursing students.”
Like many dozens of journalists seized in Gaza, Muhammad Arab has not been freed, and his current whereabouts appear to be unknown.
While comparisons with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are relevant, the main similarity is with the CIA “black sites”
Khaled Mahajneh’s comments were not the first time that Guantánamo had been mentioned in connection with Sde Teiman. On March 10, 2024, Haaretz, which had learned of the existence of the facility in December 2023, published an editorial entitled, “No to the Israeli Guantánamo Bay”, after it learned that 27 prisoners from Gaza had “died while in custody in military facilities — at the Sde Teiman base, near Be’er Sheva; at the Anatot base, near Jerusalem; and during interrogation at other facilities.”
The comparisons with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were certainly relevant. After 9/11 in the US, and after October 7 in Israel, both governments, driven by a terrifying all-consuming vengeance, by a determination that everyone they seized was a “terrorist”, and by claims that they were seeking “actionable intelligence” to target everyone responsible, shredded all protections for prisoners, with complete contempt for all international and domestic laws and treaties that were supposed to guarantee fundamental baseline protections from torture, abuse and murder.
On February 7, 2002, George W. Bush issued a notorious memorandum, “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees”, declaring that prisoners seized in the “war on terror” were not protected by the Geneva Conventions, paving the way for them to be regarded as “enemy combatants” without any fundamental rights whatsoever. Bush also explicitly ruled out the applicability of Common Article 3 of the Conventions, even though it prohibits, under all circumstances, “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture.”
Just a month later, on March 4, 2002 — confirming, I believe, that the Bush administration and the Israeli government were in close communication at this time — the Israeli Knesset passed the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which was “intended to regulate the incarceration of unlawful combatants not entitled to prisoner-of-war status, in a manner conforming with the obligations of the State of Israel under the provisions of international humanitarian law.”
Under the Israeli law, as was explained in a UN thematic report, “Detention in the context of the escalation of hostilities in Gaza (October 2023-June 2024)”, published on July 31, 2024, the Chief of the General Staff of the IDF is empowered to “order administrative detention of any person he considers an unlawful combatant for as ‘long as the hostile acts… against the State of Israel have not yet ceased’”, which, “in the context of an occupation and armed hostilities that has already continued for decades, can readily amount in effect to indefinite administrative detention.”
Crucially, while the original law allowed imprisonment without an incarceration order for four days, without judicial review for 14 days, and without the right to see a lawyer for 21 days, an amendment to the law in December 2023 increased the allowed amount of time prisoners could be held without an incarceration order to 45 days, increased the judicial review threshold to 75 days, and increased the time allowed without the right to see a lawyer to 180 days, later reduced to 90.
What this meant in reality was that a system of enforced disappearance was enshrined in Israeli law, in conjunction with a regime of arbitrary detention, both of which are flagrantly illegal under international humanitarian law.
On this basis, the actions of the Israeli state in “disappearing” Palestinians into incommunicado detention are most closely analogous to the US government’s program of CIA “black site” torture prisons, where those held, for up to four and a half years, from March 2002 until September 2006, were imprisoned as though they had vanished off the face of the earth.
This conclusion is also reinforced by the decision, taken in response to the October 7 attacks by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister, who is in charge of all prison facilities, to prevent representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from visiting any prisoners anywhere in Israel’s entire sprawling prison system for Palestinians.
To understand quite how glaringly troubling this is, it is important to note that, after 9/11, the Bush administration allowed access to the ICRC to all of its prison facilities except the “black sites.”
Although torture and abuse was widespread at Guantánamo, at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in Iraq after the illegal US-led invasion in March 2003, and at facilities in Afghanistan, including Bagram, where the majority of the men and boys who ended up at Guantánamo were “processed” under vile conditions most closely resembling those at Sde Teiman, ICRC representatives were allowed access to almost all the prisoners, except for a handful who were hidden off the books, delivering hundreds of thousands of messages from prisoners to their families, even if their efforts to improve conditions in the prisons appeared to be negligible.
In other words, since October 7, Ben-Gvir has transformed Israel’s entire prison system for Palestinians into the equivalent of the CIA “black sites”, where, with no scrutiny whatsoever, and under a regime obsessed with vengeance, coercive interrogations, and the collective and presumptive “guilt” of everyone detained, the “black site” program, which officially involved 119 individuals, has expanded, in Israel’s hands, to become the most monstrous system of murderous torture and abuse ever supported by the west in defence of a supposed ally.
How the brutality of the Sde Teiman facility was exposed in the west
Stories of the horrors of Sde Teiman first emerged in the western media in May 2024, following a report by Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) in April. In detailed coverage based on testimony by whistleblowers, CNN painted a gruesome picture of a monstrously sadistic facility where prisoners were permanently blindfolded and prevented from speaking to one another, and where any perceived infringement was punished with extreme violence. In the prison’s hospital, as Muhammad Arab later confirmed, prisoners’ hands and feet were often amputated after they became infected through constant handcuffing, often with zip-ties, while others were “strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws”, and sometimes operated on, without anaesthesia, by unqualified medics.
One of the whistleblowers, who worked as a medic in the hospital, said that the beatings “were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” as “punishment for what they [the Palestinians] did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”
CNN also spoke to released prisoners, including Dr. Mohammed al-Ran, a Palestinian with Bosnian citizenship, who was the head of the surgical unit at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza. Seized in December 2023, outside the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, where he had just started working after fleeing the north, he, like so many of the hundreds of men held at Sde Teiman, had been randomly abducted, “stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck, where, he said, the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled” to Sde Teiman.
A group of Palestinians, randomly seized by Israeli forces in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, stripped to their underwear on December 7, 2023, prior to being moved to prisons and detention centres, including Sde Teiman.
Amongst the abuse endured by al-Ran was what he called “the nightly torture”, when “the guards would unleash large dogs on sleeping detainees, lobbing a sound grenade at the enclosure as troops barged in” and beat them.
In early June 2024, just before Khaled Mahajneh’s visit to Muhammad Arab, the New York Times reported that “roughly 4,000 Gazan detainees had spent up to three months in limbo at Sde Teiman”, with around 70 percent subsequently “sent to purpose-built prisons for further investigation and prosecution.” While this sounds innocuous enough, conditions in these “purpose-built prisons” are even more disturbing, as can be seen in a harrowing video posted by Israel’s Channel 13 in February 2024.
The rest of those held at Sde Teiman, at least 1,200 people in total, “had been found to be civilians and returned to Gaza, without charge, apology or compensation”, according to the Times, which also reported that 35 prisoners had died at the facility.
Noticeably, however, while these statistics would seem to indicate that Israel had some reason for continuing to hold two-thirds of these prisoners, classified Israeli military intelligence made public in September this year indicated that, in fact, “Only one in four detainees from Gaza are identified as fighters”, as the Guardian reported, “with civilians making up the vast majority of Palestinians held without charge or trial.”
As the Guardian also explained, “Those jailed for long periods without charge or trial include medical workers, teachers, civil servants, media workers, writers, sick and disabled people and children. Among the most egregious cases are those of an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s jailed for six weeks and of a single mother separated from her young children. When the mother was released after 53 days she found the children begging on the streets.”
A serving soldier said that, Sde Teiman “at one point held so many sick, disabled and elderly Palestinians that they had their own hangar, dubbed ‘the geriatric pen.’”
Moreover, as the Guardian also noted, “Both rights groups and Israeli soldiers have described an even smaller ratio of fighters to civilians. When photos of Palestinians stripped and shackled [including, and as described by Dr. Mohammed al-Ran] caused international outrage in late 2023, senior officers told Haaretz newspaper that ’85 to 90 per cent’ were not Hamas members.”
The Sde Teiman rape scandal
While some of the reports mentioned above indicated that rape and other forms of sexual assault had taken place at Sde Teiman, it was not until the end of July 2024 that a truly sickening story emerged — when nine IDF soldiers, all reservists, were arrested “on suspicion of sodomizing [a] prisoner”, as Haaretz explained at the time.
A video of the brutal gang rape, of a male Palestinian prisoner, was leaked on August 8, 2024, and, although it didn’t explicitly show what the soldiers did to the prisoner, as it only showed them clustered around him, hiding their actions with their shields, Haaretz had already established that he “suffered from a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs”, and “was taken to a hospital for an operation.”
A screenshot from the leaked Sde Teiman rape video.
A doctor at Sde Teiman, Prof. Yoel Donchin, told Haaretz that, until he saw the man’s injuries, he “couldn’t believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a thing”, and he added, “If the state and Knesset members think there’s no limit to how much you can abuse prisoners, they should kill them themselves, like the Nazis did, or close the hospitals.” As he also explained, “If they maintain a hospital only for the sake of defending ourselves at [the International Criminal Court at] the Hague, that’s no good.”
The impact of the leaked Sde Teiman video — and the accompanying story — ought to have had the same seismic impact as the leaked photos of the abuse of prisoners by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in April 2004, when the world reeled in shock at the first photographic evidence of brutality of the US’s “war on terror.”
Unforgivably, however, although there was some global outrage over the Sde Teiman rape scandal, the world soon moved on. There was no massive backlash against Israel, and no calls for an end to its ongoing genocide, in which the widespread torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners was — and still is — such an integral part.
The lessons of Abu Ghraib were largely forgotten — that, when you dehumanize an entire population, and dispense with notions that evidence is necessary, everyone becomes guilty, and, when there are no restraints of the activities of those working in these prisons, torture, abuse and even murder have a tendency to spread.
The depraved response to the rape scandal within Israel
The silence of the west was even more inexcusable given the response to the scandal within Israel itself. Even before the video surfaced, when news of the soldiers’ arrest was announced, far-right politicians and their supporters stormed the prison in support of the soldiers, and, later, the Beit Lid military base was also broken into by far-right activists after the nine soldiers had been moved there.
Netanyahu’s two far-right ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, praised the soldiers as “heroic warriors” and “our best heroes”, while, in the Knesset, Likud member Hanoch Milwidsky argued that it was legitimate to rape Palestinian prisoners accused of being members of Hamas’ “Nukhba” force — the special forces unit within the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing. “Everything is legitimate to do”, he said, “Everything.”
What makes all of the above even more shocking is that the man in question was a civilian. Never charged with a crime, he was one of the 1,718 Palestinian hostages freed as part of the ceasefire deal agreed on October 10, although his injuries were much worse than reported.
As the political analyst Muhammad Shehada noted in a post on X on November 3, his injuries were so severe that he “underwent 20 surgical operations, including colostomy and urostomy, and is still suffering medical complications.” Shehada added that Israel “likely released him so he wouldn’t be able to testify at court against his rapists who are still at large”, adding that he “is now fearful for his life; he could be killed in any Israeli strike to cover up this atrocity.”
Although Israel screams “Nukhba” about everyone if detains and abuses, its hysteria cannot disguise the fact that, more often than not, it has no evidence to justify its claims, which, instead, only reveal the sordid depths of its racist and exterminatory hatred of all Palestinians. Israel more than doubled its prison population after October 7, 2023, from around 5,000 to over 11,000, but the majority of those held are not suspected “Nukhba” at all, just civilians rounded up, mostly arbitrarily, in Gaza or the West Bank, as discussed above.
Even with the recent releases, including 250 prisoners serving long prison sentences, Addameer, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, estimates that there are still over 9,100 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, including around 50 women and 400 children, and with around 3,500 of these prisoners held without charge or trial under “administrative detention.”
Based on secret evidence that neither they nor their lawyers can challenge, and which can be indefinitely renewed every six months, “administrative detention” is not only the bedrock of Israeli detention policy; it also influenced the US, which has operated a form of “administrative detention” at Guantánamo from 2004 until the present day, with most prisoners only ever freed through a series of administrative review processes.
No one knows how many “Unlawful Combatants” are still detained, although Addameer believes it is at least 1,200.
After the rape scandal broke, Israel sank to new levels of depravity as the soldiers, released on bail, grotesquely became media celebrities, even as further evidence of rapes in the facility emerged, via Ibrahim Salem, seen in one of the photos furtively snapped by one of the whistleblowers who spoke to CNN. Released after nearly eight months of imprisonment without charge or trial, Salem told Middle East Eye, “Most of the prisoners will come out with rectum injuries [caused by the sexual assault],” sometimes, he said, undertaken by female soldiers.
His testimony emerged as B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, released a devastating report, “Welcome to Hell”, detailing the transformation, since October 7, 2023, of the entire Israeli prison system for Palestinians into “a network of torture camps.”
As B’Tselem stated in their report, which featured the testimonies of 55 released prisoners from a number of detention facilities, “The prisoners’ testimonies lay bare the outcomes of a rushed process in which more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, both military and civilian, were converted into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates. Such spaces, in which every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering, operate as de facto torture camps.”
In October 2024, as I reported at the time in an article entitled, UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel also weighed in, issuing a hugely significant report not only about Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, but also about its war on Gaza’s hospitals.
As the Commission stated, it had “documented more than 20 cases of sexual and gender-based violence against male and female detainees in more than 10 military and Israel Prison Service facilities, in particular in Negev prison and Sde Teiman camp for male detainees and in Damon and Hasharon prisons for female detainees.”
Israel’s ever-worsening depravity
Fast-forward to now, as Israel is seeking to redeem its reputation after a US-brokered ceasefire took effect on October 10 — even though it continues to kill Palestinians and to starve them, while occupying 58% of the Gaza Strip and continuing to demolish homes to make Gaza unliveable — all of which ought to establish that it has no reputation to redeem.
Shamefully, as the ceasefire began, biased western reporters sought to avoid seeing the emaciated and brutalized Palestinian prisoners and hostages released in exchange for the last surviving Israeli hostages. Reports from a Palestinian perspective were rare, although +972 Magazine and WSWS both managed to pierce the wilful media silence with harrowing reports from released prisoners.
Western media also largely averted their eyes as the bodies of dead Palestinians were returned in exchange for the bodies of dead Israeli hostages.
Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, Israel was obliged to return 15 Palestinian corpses in exchange for each dead Israeli hostage. On October 20, the Guardian reported that “At least 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned by Israel to Gaza” had been held in Sde Teiman. The Guardian added that some of the photos of seen by its reporters “cannot be published due to their graphic nature”, as they “show several of the victims blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs”, with one showing “a rope fastened around a man’s neck.”
Doctors at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis said that official examinations and field observations “clearly indicate that Israel carried out acts of murder, summary executions and systematic torture against many of the Palestinians”, with health officials noting that the documented findings included “clear signs of direct gunfire at point-blank range and bodies crushed beneath Israeli tank tracks”.
On November 11, Dr. Muneer Alboursh, the Director General of the Gaza Health Ministry provided an update, stating in a post on X, “We have received 315 bodies so far, and only 89 of them have been identified through clothing or a wedding ring or simple markings. Yesterday, we received a pure body that had been mauled by trained predatory dogs, and the marks of the attack were clearly visible. Some bodies arrived without heads, some were crushed under military bulldozers, and some were found with their hands tied and eyes blindfolded, with close-range gunshot wounds to the head and chest. There is also clear evidence of organ theft through precise surgical incisions, with the heart, liver, kidneys, and corneas removed.”
He added, “We buried 182 bodies in a mass grave after taking samples as much as our limited resources allowed. We requested cooling facilities from the Red Cross, and they brought us refrigerators used for fish, which we were forced to use temporarily to preserve the dignity of the bodies and allow families time to identify them. International investigation committees must be activated to hold the occupation accountable, identify the unknown, and document these crimes in a legally recognized manner.”
While Dr. Alboursh is undoubtedly correct, Israel itself is unconcerned, digging itself further into uncharted depths of depravity through renewed public celebrations of the rapists, after revelations that it was the IDF’s own Advocate General, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who leaked the rape video.
Hounded from her post and subsequently arrested, Tomer-Yerushalmi said in her resignation letter that she had leaked the video “to defuse attacks on military investigators and prosecutors working on the case to enable it to go ahead”, as WSWS reported, adding that, “In no small part, this was an attempt to protect Israeli soldiers from international prosecution and leave punishment to Israel’s sympathetic judiciary.”
However, she is now a reviled figure, even though, throughout two years of genocide, she dutifully refused to investigate any other cases of alleged war crimes by the Israeli military. Nevertheless, she now faces charges of “fraud and breach of trust, abuse of office, obstruction of justice, and disclosure of official information by a public servant”, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that “The incident in Sde Teiman caused immense damage to the image of the state of Israel and the IDF”, and calling it “perhaps the most severe public relations attack that the state of Israel has experienced since its establishment”, while the more unhinged defence minister Israel Katz said, “Anyone who falsely spreads blood libels against IDF soldiers and prefers the welfare of the Nukhba terrorists over theirs is not worthy of wearing the IDF uniform and belongs in prison.”
Ben-Gvir’s bill for the execution of Palestinian prisoners
As Israel’s moral collapse continues, with widespread calls for the trial of the celebrated rapists to be dropped, the last cause for profound concern about the country’s increasing derangement is a bill approving the execution of Palestinian prisoners, which recently passed its first reading in the Knesset.
The bill — a long-cherished dream of Itamar Ben-Gvir, who, before the vote, posted a video of himself with bound, prone Palestinian prisoners, gloating that “there is still something we have to do; the death penalty for terrorists” — stipulates that “any person who intentionally or recklessly causes the death of an Israeli citizen or a person residing in Israel, when motivated by racism, hatred, or intent to harm Israel or the Israeli people, shall be subject to the death penalty”, and, as the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor explained, “further stipulates that the sentence of any person who receives a final death verdict may not be commuted.”
As the Geneva-based NGO added, “The most dangerous aspect of the bill lies in its application within a judicial system that lacks any guarantees of a fair trial for Palestinians. Confessions are extracted under duress, effective legal representation is unavailable, the presumption of innocence is disregarded, and there is no right to appeal or to access documents essential for the defence.”
The conviction rate in Israel’s military courts for Palestinians is a staggeringly unbelievable 99.74%, and, to renew the analogy with the “war on terror”, it is difficult to imagine the grotesque miscarriages of justice that would have occurred in the US if former Vice President Dick Cheney had prevailed in his attempts to swiftly try and execute alleged terrorists, using evidence explicitly derived through the use of torture, in the military commissions that he established at Guantánamo in November 2001.
In the US, the Supreme Court, in 2006, eventually ruled that, essentially, torture was incompatible with justice, forcefully reminding the Bush administration that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all prisoners, without any exceptions allowed, and striking down the military commissions as illegal and unconstitutional. They were subsequently revived, but have, ever since, been mired in the unresolvable effort to successfully prosecute anyone who has been subjected to the use of torture.
Will the west ever recognize how unforgivably one-sided it is with regard to Israel and the Palestinians?
As further evidence of Israeli depravity continues to emerge, western media and western political leaders still continue, for the most part, to be silent.
An exception is a recent Guardian report about Rakefet, an underground wing of the Ramla Prison in Israel, where numerous Palestinians from Gaza are “isolated in an underground jail where they never see daylight, are deprived of adequate food and barred from receiving news of their families or the outside world.” Despite claims by Ben-Gvir that Rakefet “was being rehabilitated to hold ‘Nukhba’ fighters who led massacres inside Israel, and Hezbollah special forces fighters captured in Lebanon”, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel has revealed that it represents two prisoners who are clearly not any kind of combatant at all — a 34-year-old [male] nurse detained while at work in a hospital in December 2023 and a teenager seized in October 2024 as he passed through an Israeli checkpoint.”
On other reports, however, silence still prevails. Just days ago, Physicians for Human Rights Israel published another compelling report, “Deaths of Palestinians in Custody: Enforced Disappearances, Systematic Killings and Cover-Ups”, with testimonies here, confirming that at least 94 Palestinian prisoners have been killed in Israeli prison facilities since October 7, 2023, although, given the number of extrajudicial disappearances, PHRI also expressed “grave concerns that the actual number of Palestinians who have died in Israeli custody is significantly higher, particularly among those detained from Gaza.”
And on November 10, the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) published four harrowing accounts of the rape of Palestinians — one woman and three men — in Israeli prisons, who were arbitrarily seized in Gaza and just as arbitrarily released after being held for up to two years without charge or trial. Their accounts only add to the growing mountain of evidence confirming what PCHR described as “an organized and systematic practice of sexual torture, including rape, forced stripping, forced filming, sexual assault using objects and dogs, in addition to deliberate psychological humiliation aimed at crushing human dignity and erasing individual identity entirely.”
Yet again, however, the entire western mainstream media has turned a blind eye, and politicians are mute, which, in conclusion, I can only read as an indictment of the deeply embedded racism in western countries regarding the Palestinians.
To understand the silence, we need to recognize that, across newsrooms in the west, editors, if they noticed this story at all, would presumably defend their refusal to report on it by claiming that they were unable to independently verify the accounts.
What they fail to understand, however, is the deep racism that permeates their decisions, based on a fundamentally biased assumption, which, in many cases, they may not even recognize — that Israeli sources are implicitly trustworthy, while Palestinians are not.
In the case of claims of rape and sexual violence, the contrast between the scepticism of the west with regard to Palestinian accounts, and the unquestioning embrace of Israeli claims could not be more marked.
On October 7, 2023, most western media leapt unquestioningly on false claims of 40 beheaded babies and mass rapes propagated by Israeli sources, plastering the lies on their front pages, and amplifying them in lurid news reports. The reports were clearly designed by Israeli propagandists to stir up hysteria to justify its coming genocide, and the west walked right into the trap.
Shamefully, not a single western media outlet has retracted its amplification of Israel’s vile claims, even though they were all patently untrue, and have all been thoroughly discredited.
As was confirmed by Israel in December 2023, through an analysis of social security figures, only 36 children in total (those under the age of 18) were killed across southern Israel on October 7, and only two were infants. At the Kfar Aza kibbutz, where the 40 beheaded babies story originated, the youngest victim was 14 years old.
As for claims of mass rapes, those too have not been substantiated with any evidence. In January this year, Israeli media reported that Moran Gez, the Israeli prosecutor responsible for cases arising from the October 7 attacks, had “not identified a single victim in which a prosecution can be brought against an alleged perpetrator of a sexual attack”, as The Electronic Intifada described it.
Gez told Ynet, “In the end, we have no complainants,” confirming the conclusion reached by Amit Schwartz, an Israeli filmmaker and former air force intelligence official, who, despite her lack of experience, was commissioned by the New York Times as the lead writer of a shameful and discredited article, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”, published in December 2023.
Although the Times’ team “extensively canvassed Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, sexual assault hotlines and other specialized facilities”, they “could not find a single victim of a 7 October sexual attack”, as The Electronic Intifada explained, adding that, as Schwarz herself explained in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, “No one had met a victim of sexual assault.”
The west’s bias is unforgivable, and, as Israel continues its genocide, more stealthily than before its relentless bombing came to an end, it is unpardonable that its continuing depravity towards Palestinians in its network of grotesque torture prisons continues to be largely ignored.
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list. Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.
