What democracy would accept a member of parliament agreeing that it was permissible and acceptable for its soldiers to sexually abuse political prisoners by “putting a stick up their rectum” and reinforcing this torture and war crimes by saying, “Yes, with these people everything is acceptable. Everything”. That so called “democracy” is Israel. It has for years boasted about it’s military being the “most moral army in the world” when in fact it is now the most immoral army in the world run by a fascist, brutal, extremist, rogue government dominated by messianic settlers.
July 3rd was Palestinian Prisoners Day and hundreds of thousands of people across the world remembered the plight of Palestinian prisoners under Israel’s brutal and illegal incarceration regime. Highlighting these latest abuses and war crimes is the UN, among many reports, detailing the abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israel. The report was released on July 29 2024, by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), (Thematic Report: Detention in the context of the escalation of hostilities in Gaza). This report has detailed the horrific conditions that Palestinian prisoners are being subjected to, both at the SdeTeiman detention facility in the Negev for prisoners from Gaza, and in the prisons in Israel that are illegally detaining thousands of Palestinian prisoners, men, women and children. The detention centres include ad hoc facilities inside military barracks in Israel, such as SdeTeiman, Zikim and others including Ketziot in the Negev desert under the military, while others include the Ofer and Damon prisons in Israel under the control of the extremist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The UN report detailed that thousands of Palestinian prisoners from Gaza have been subjected to brutal and sadistic forms of torture or other ill-treatment. These include “severe beatings, electrocution, being forced to remain in stress positions for lengthy periods, prolonged blindfolding and to being shackled for long periods”. The report detailed that prisoners are held in “cage-like” military centres, shackled and forced to wear nothing but diapers and refused access to toilets. They have been held in the cold in humiliating situations, and tortured using waterboarding, sleep deprivation, the release of dogs on them in some cases resulting in attacks and bites, deprivation of food, sleep and water, lack of medical attention and being burnt with cigarettes, being suspended from the ceiling, being forced to kneel on gravel, deliberate humiliation, blackmailing, and given hallucinogenic pills. There have been extensive reports by both men and women of sexual and gender-based violence and OHCHR received consistent reports of ISF personnel inserting objects into detainees’ anuses. The torture and ill treatment has been so extreme that fifty-three detainees have died in custody.
These are extreme war crimes and this is a so called democratic government that the Australian government still calls a “friend”.
There are also reports that the ISF committed acts of sexual and gender-based violence against detained men and women in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, descriptions of which included the forced nudity of both men and women; beatings while naked, including on the genitals; electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced to undergo repeated humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and threats of rape; and the inappropriate touching of women by both male and female soldiers. There are testimonies of victims as well as video material, that some almost naked, blindfolded and tightly handcuffed male detainees were filmed and photographed in deliberately humiliating positions.
All of this detailed horrific and barbaric torture is considered a war crime and a crime against humanity and our government remains silent.
Male Palestinians interviewed by OHCHR believed they lost between 25kg to 55kg of body weight while in custody, in part as a result of denial of access to adequate food.
The OHCHR reports that Dr. Adnan Ahmad Ateya Al Bursh, a 50-year-old Head of the Orthopedic Department at Al Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, reportedly died on 19 April in Ofer Prison, an Israeli detention facility run by IPS and located in the West Bank. The OHCHR report details that “the ISF detained him on 18 December 2023 at Al Awda Hospital, North Gaza, along with several other doctors and personnel of the hospital. According to a witness detained with Dr. Al Bursh interviewed by OHCHR, Dr. Al Bursh was in good health before being detained, despite a minor injury sustained a few days before, and was performing his normal duties at the hospital. The testimony of Palestinians detained with him raise serious concerns that he died following torture or mistreatment at the hand of Israeli authorities.”
The OHCHR report also details that “Israeli medical personnel and whistleblowers have reported that injured detainees from Gaza were held at a field hospital established in the Sde Teiman compound, where they were blindfolded at all times, their arms and legs shackled to their beds, and they were fed through a straw. In early April 2024, an Israeli doctor reported that two Palestinian detainees from Gaza had had their legs amputated there in what he called “a routine event”, due to injuries caused by harsh shackling by the IDF”. Supporting the OHCHR report, Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) reported that it’s doctors observed the autopsies of five Palestinian men who had died in IPS detention as of 20 March 2024. In two of the five cases, PHRI reported visible signs of physical violence including fractured ribs, and in a third case assessed that the specific cause of death was medical neglect.
Why are Australian media bodies silent over these atrocious violations and war crimes against medical personnel In Gaza?
In the Occupied West Bank, as at the end of June 2024, Israel’s prison service held more than 9,400 so called “security detainees” and some have been held in secret without access to lawyers or respect for their legal rights. Most of these are men although adolescent boys were also detained. Among them were 295 women and 630 children including a woman over 80 years of age with Alzheimer’s disease, and girls without any apparent link to armed groups. Amnesty International reports on five Palestinian women who were held incommunicado for over 50 days. Initially they were held in a “women-only detention camp at Anatot military detention centre, in an illegal Israeli settlement near Jerusalem, then in Damon prison for women in northern Israel under the control of the Israeli Prison Service.” According to the OHCHR monitoring, “there have been regular, at times daily, raids of prison cells, removal of personal items, and limited access to personal hygiene items, including menstrual hygiene”. Israel’s Minister of National Security has stated that Palestinian “terrorists” were to be deliberately subjected to harsh treatment.
Since 7 October, Israel has suspended the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)’s access to all Palestinian detainees.
Why are our governments, state and federal, and all other western governments silent about this horrific torture and ongoing multiple war crimes against Palestinians prisoners? Why are they still supporting this fascist, brutal, extremist, messianic government by setting up Friends of Israel support groups as happened in Victoria recently with a former state premier and member of the current federal government proudly joining in? Is this group not aware of Israel’s present war crimes so clearly identified by the ICJ and now also by the OHCHR, the world’s peak human rights organization?