The Horrors of Israel’s Sde Teiman: Abuse and Torture of Palestinian Prisoners
Humiliation, debasement, beatings, torture, medical malpractice, and sexual abuse: these are the claims made by Israeli whistleblowers and former detainees about the treatment of Palestinians at Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base located in the Negev desert near the border of the Gaza Strip.
After the Oct 7th attacks on Israel by the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas, where 1200 people were killed and 251 were captured, Israel’s Defense Force, or the IDF, has arrested many Palestinians for their supposed connections to Hamas. The military base Sde Teiman is one of the places where the IDF is holding arrested Gazans. However, recent claims made by Israeli whistleblowers and released detainees align to paint an extremely troubling picture of abuse and dehumanization.
Ibrahim Salem was captured on December 8 at Kamal Adwan Hospital while his son was in the Intensive Care Unit being treated for injuries sustained during Israeli airstrikes. Salem and other men were reportedly stripped down to their underwear, blindfolded, handcuffed, and thrown into a truck “like animals.”
The IDF believed that the hospital was a command center for Hamas; however, the militant group denied using the hospital in the war. Salem was confused throughout this ordeal, telling reporters, “I have nothing to do with resistance groups … There were no accusations against me. I am a barber.”
Salem spent one and a half months at Sde Teiman before being transferred to the Israeli prison system for the remainder of this eight-month sentence. His time at the Israeli military base was filled with beatings and verbal and psychological abuse as the soldiers interrogated him on his knowledge of Hamas. Salem shares that soldiers would ask him questions like “Where are the hostages?” and “Where are Hamas’ weapons?” However, the former detainee claims that the worst part of this torture was the sexual abuse.
For a majority of the time, prisoners are kept in their underwear, but they are stripped naked for interrogations. Salem’s interrogations began with soldiers running a metal detector over his body and using the device to hit him in his private parts. He would then keel over in pain and feel the soldiers violate him from behind. He recounts, “With the pain, I would lean forward. Then suddenly, they would push [a baton] into my butt.”
In addition to sexual abuse and humiliation, Salem shared stories of psychological torture as well. The soldiers showed him photos of six exhumed bodies, which he believes to be the bodies of family members killed in Israeli airstrikes. In Islam, the ritual and placement of a person after passing is sacred. In tears, he asked the soldier why they would desecrate his family’s gravesites. The soldier responded that these could be the bodies of hostages, to which Salem replied, “My nephews, are they hostages? Five years old?”
Other sources have verified claims of sexual abuse against prisoners. A leaked CCTV video showed an Israeli soldier taking a Palestinian from a lineup of a dozen detainees lying on the floor and sodomizing him. The victim was later taken to hospital for injuries he sustained to his rectum, according to Physicians for Human Rights Israel, an Israeli medical non-profit. Shortly after the video was leaked, ten soldiers were arrested for involvement; however, since then, five have been released, and five were placed under house arrest.
Unfortunately, Salem and other former prisoners’ accounts were widely ignored by the IDF and Israeli government until 3 Israeli whistleblowers stepped forward to share what they witnessed at Sde Teiman. The three whistleblowers’ stories align with many prisoners’ accounts, further legitimizing their claims. However, something that particularly stood out about their report involved medical recklessness and mispractice.
Sde Teiman is split into the prisoner wing and the medical wing. In the medical wing, injured prisoners are held in physical restraints, forced to wear diapers, and fed through a straw with neglected wounds. One whistleblower who worked as a medic stated, “They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings.”
The whistleblower shared stories of underqualified medics amputating prisoners’ limbs after injuries they sustained from constant handcuffing. The lack of procedure earned the place the reputation of being “a paradise for interns.” The medical worker whistleblower reported that he was ordered to perform medical procedures he was not qualified to perform. These procedures were often done without anesthesia while patients cried out in pain.
These whistleblowers also shed light onto the soldiers' mindsets at Sde Teiman, commenting that the acts of abuse “were not done to gather intelligence” but “out of revenge,” claiming that the soldiers felt a sense of justice by punishing men who were potentially involved with the October 7th attacks.
The prisoners at Sde Teiman were detained under the Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows a person to be arrested for 45 days without a warrant, after which they must be moved to an Israeli prison system (IPS). Currently, over 9,000 Palestinians are being held in the IPS, where Human Rights Watch claims conditions have deteriorated exponentially since the October 7th attacks.
The organization has also reported that the Unlawful Combatants Law “strips away meaningful judicial review and due process rights.” This is supported by the fact that out of the over 9,000 Palestinians in the IPS, an estimated 3,500 are held without charge.
One whistleblower, having witnessed the abuse at Sde Teiman, wrote a letter to Israel’s attorney general addressing the many ways in which the military base has failed to comply with not only Israeli law but international law as well. The IDF responded by saying that they would investigate cases of abuse, adding, however, that Israel’s Unlawful Combatants facilities follow international law.
Several protests have called for the closure of Sde Teiman; however, Muhammad Salem’s layer Saja Mishreqi says, “Our problem is not just with Sde Teiman… but with the systematic policies taking place there, the violations and torture that take place at the facility without any external supervision.” Mishreqi stated that shutting down Sde Teiman won't stop the problem “if its policies are transferred to other prisons.”
留言