Freed Palestinian prisoners recount how Israeli jailers ‘treated them like animals’ and ‘brutally tortured’ some to death
By Maha Hussaini, Reposted from Middle East Eye
Israeli jailers would wrap Palestinian prisoners in shrouds and bury them alive.
As they began to suffocate, just before death took hold, a small amount of air was allowed in to keep them alive, only for the process to be repeated moments later.
This is one of many accounts of torture inflicted on Palestinian detainees by Israeli authorities.
Following the recent Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange, hundreds of detainees have been released, and similar harrowing testimonies have emerged.
Middle East Eye spoke to some of the recently freed prisoners in Gaza, who described how Palestinians were “tortured to death” in Israeli prisons.
‘Treated us like animals’
Mahmoud Ismail Abukhater, 41, was at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza when an Israeli military quadcopter hovered overhead, broadcasting a voice ordering “people of the neighborhood to surrender,” on 20 October 2024.
“They fired bullets at houses and balconies and bombed homes nearby as they broadcast those messages to terrorize us. That’s when they detained us,” he recalled.
Abukhater said the torture began the moment they were detained and continued until the very last moment before their release.
“They treated us like animals, not humans,” he said.
Before being transferred to prison, the prisoners were taken to a place that resembled a cattle farm in Gaza, he explained.
There, they were forced to endure the freezing night, wearing only boxers and the thin white clothes they were given.
“Our hands and feet were shackled, and they struck us with frozen water bottles and bottles filled with olives,” he added.
“There, the soldiers urinated in a container and then poured it over our faces and bodies.”
Abukhater was then taken to the notorious Sde Teiman military detention camp, where he was kept handcuffed for nearly two months.
“It’s a torture camp for men,” he said.
“They forced us to sit from dawn until midnight without moving, and we were only allowed to go to the toilet with permission and with our hands shackled. Sometimes the officer allowed it, other times he didn’t, and many detainees ended up urinating on themselves,” he continued.
Despite being denied access to toilets and having their hygiene restricted, soldiers forced prisoners to shower every other day in freezing water during December and January, in spite of the bitter cold.
If they discovered someone hadn’t bathed, they would punish and torture them immediately.
However, according to him, one of the most harrowing torture methods at Sde Teiman involved deceiving prisoners into believing they were being drowned or suffocated to death.
“They would place a detainee in a shroud connected to a hose with a small camera inside, bury him in a pit, and then monitor him through the camera,” he explained.
As soon as he was on the verge of complete suffocation, believing he was about to die, the guards would allow in a small amount of air to keep him alive.”
Torture to death
Abukhater recalled that one of the most haunting moments in prison was witnessing the torture to death of Musaab Haniyeh, the nephew of Ismail Haniyeh, the former political leader of Hamas.
Musaab died in Ofer Prison in January after enduring “brutal torture” that left him frail and wounded in his legs, he said.
“The officers didn’t provide him with any medical assistance and eventually worms began emerging from his wounds, and he lost control of his bladder,” Abukhater explained.
“One day, other detainees overheard a soldier saying he had died and saw through the bars as they wrapped his body in a shroud and carried him away.
“When he entered the prison, he weighed about 120 kilograms, but by his final days, he was down to just 50 kilograms.”
Before his release as part of the sixth batch of Palestinian prisoners freed in the prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas, Abukhater was transferred to Negev Prison.
He and his fellow prisoners did not know they were about to be released, but for the entire week leading up to their release, they were given “real food” for the first time since their detention.
“They started giving us cooked food and cheese, acting like they were treating us well. But we didn’t know we would be released until a Red Cross delegation visited us at 2 AM on the day of our release,” he said.
“On the morning of our release, [Israeli officers] handed us shirts with the statement ‘We will never forget, and we will never forgive,’ along with the Star of David and the Israeli army emblem printed on them. They forced us to wear them.
“At first, we refused, but they told us that anyone who refused wouldn’t be released. So we wore them, and once we arrived in Gaza, we took them off and burned them.”
Ibrahim Abdulrazzaq al-Majdalawi, 63, says Israeli officers showed “no mercy, whether you’re 16 or 60.”
Majdalawi was also tortured, humiliated, and relentlessly scolded by young Israeli soldiers despite his old age.
“When we arrived at Sde Teiman, they stripped us of all our clothes, even our underwear, despite the cold weather and heavy rain. Then, they gave us thin garments,” he told MEE.
“The soldiers would scold and beat us whenever we did anything or uttered a word. Some of the punishments for speaking or moving without permission included standing on one foot for hours,” he added.
Medical negligence
Because al-Majdalawi speaks Hebrew, the officers ordered him to move from place to place inside the prison to translate.
“They would sometimes bring me in to translate their scolding for sick prisoners. When a prisoner fell ill and couldn’t stand, they would beat him and threaten to send him to solitary confinement if he didn’t get up,” he said.
“I saw this with my own eyes, there was a diabetic prisoner in critical condition. He was vomiting and too weak to move, yet they neglected him for a very long time. Only later did they transfer him and check his blood sugar, but even then, they kept threatening and abusing him.”
Another 62-year-old resident of the northern Gaza Strip who was detained for three months at Sde Teiman asked to remain anonymous as Israeli forces threatened him with persecution if he spoke to the media.
“They told us that they would watch us wherever we went and that they would see everything we did. The officer said, ‘If you do anything, it will only take us one drone bomb.’”
The retired teacher said he was detained in November after Israeli forces bombed his home, wounding both him and his daughter.
“We decided to leave the house, but they took me from a checkpoint. From the first moment, they started beating and humiliating me for no reason other than staying in my home and not evacuating,” he said.
A patient with diabetes, prostate issues, and cartilage disease, the elderly man fainted about 15 times over three months in prison.
“Every time I fainted, they would unshackle my hands and pour cold water on my face. When I woke up, they would give me around 30-60 minutes to fully regain consciousness, then handcuff me again and resume the abuse,” he said.
“They would hurl obscene insults at us and force us to repeat the curses against ourselves. Once, when I didn’t do it, the soldiers violently attacked me and beat me mercilessly.”
The released prisoner said that part of the torture was forcing them to sit in painful positions for 19 hours every day.
“For nearly three months, they forced us to wake up around 5 AM and kept us sitting in an extremely exhausting and painful position until midnight every single day. In the mornings, they would violently strike our cage with metal, forcing us to wake up in terror.”
A relative of the released prisoner shared with MEE that since his release, he has been grappling with profound psychological trauma.
“We have to treat him like a child, terrified of everything and enraged by the slightest thing.”
Maha Hussaini is an award-winning journalist and human rights activist based in Gaza.
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