Beatings, deaths and starvation: Israel turns prisons into centres of systematic abuse

Less than 24 hours had passed since Hamas’ massive attack on Israel when Ashraf Al Muhtaseb was arrested in the early hours of the morning at his home in Hebron, one of the most tense cities in the West Bank. It was October 8, 2023, and he weighed 96 kilos. He says that, six months later, he was released from prison weighing 56 kilos and with one ear damaged by the beatings of his jailers. They left him lying at an intersection. “I crawled 100 meters, I couldn’t walk. It was Ramadan, so there was hardly anyone on the street. Someone saw me and took me home. When my son saw me, he said: Where is daddy!?”

It was not his first time behind bars. He has spent six of his 53 years there, for his ties to Hamas. “But,” he adds, “I had never experienced anything like this. So many beatings, so many humiliations…” The Prison Service depends on the Ministry of National Security, which has been in the hands of the far-right Itamar Ben Gvir since 2023, who last month advocated giving the “minimum that the law allows” to imprisoned “terrorists” until Parliament approves his proposal to “kill them with a shot to the head.”

Al Muhtaseb tells the story while smoking cigarettes on the sofa in his living room in Hebron, in the south of the West Bank, more sad than angry at what he experienced and saw: the beatings, the overcrowding, guards urinating on a prisoner, the lack of food, the screams of fellow prisoners being tortured, or the one who emerged lifeless from solitary confinement. At least 60 prisoners have died in these 10 months, according to prisoner and human rights organizations.

His story is consistent with others that have come to light. In the Negev prison, the guards threw him to the ground and beat him “all over my body.” “They ordered me to get up, but I couldn’t, so they grabbed me by the legs and arms, while one of them emptied a bottle of shampoo at the entrance to the cell. They threw me down so I would slip. I hit my shoulder on the leg of the bunk bed. You don’t know how they laughed,” he recalls.

He says that one day in November the guards came “to look for a radio that didn’t exist.” The beating was so bad that everyone ended up on the ground, “bleeding and some crying.” Another saw a group of soldiers playing loud music while they attacked five handcuffed and blindfolded twenty-somethings they had brought from the Bethlehem area. “They kicked them and hit them with rifle butts. One of them was bleeding so much from his face and mouth that I thought he was going to die right there,” he adds.

In one cell he spent four days without mattresses or blankets. In another, there were 11 of them: six slept in beds and five on the floor, with no pillows or glass in the windows. “Sometimes we placed the mattresses diagonally, so that everyone could fit in. Mobile phones, radio and television were forbidden, as was taking a shower every day. I understand Hebrew, but I was afraid to ask for medicine, to say anything,” he says.

What sets her story apart from many others is that she dares to tell it publicly. The prestigious Israeli human rights NGO B’tselem published a report this week in which it concludes, based on 55 testimonies, that Israel has been applying since October 2023 an “institutional and systematic policy focused on the abuse and torture of all prisoners”, with the blind eye of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s Office. UN agencies and NGOs such as Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights had already warned about this.

The report speaks of “deliberate torture and abuse, degrading and humiliating treatment, sexual assault and arbitrary violence.” It also mentions reprisals for praying, poor hygiene conditions and confiscation of property. The prison service and the army strongly deny this and say that individual cases will be investigated appropriately. In July there were more than 9,600 prisoners in Israeli jails, half of them in “administrative detention,” meaning they are not tried and neither do they or their lawyers know what they are accused of.

The Israeli Guantanamo

In this context, one centre has captured the attention: Sde Teiman, a kind of Guantanamo established at the beginning of the war 30 kilometres from Gaza and which concentrates two thirds of the prisoners’ dead. Israeli society, divided around Netanyahu, but fairly homogeneous in its support – more or less expressed – to avenge the traumatic attack of October 7, has ignored the complaints and journalistic reports that have been coming out. Until it has become too much.

Last month, the military courts entered Sde Teiman to arrest nine suspects of seriously abusing prisoners, and even filming it. Dozens of right-wing extremists, including ministers and deputies, stormed Sde Teiman and the centre to which the “heroes,” as the finance minister, the right-wing Bezalel Smotrich, called them, were taken.

Only one of those arrested has been charged, suspected of having raped a prisoner in the rectum with a baton and a rifle. Yoel Donchin, the doctor at the public hospital who treated him when he was admitted on the verge of death, found “a ruptured intestine, a serious injury to the anus, lung damage and broken ribs.” Channel 12 of national television has just broadcast the video from the security cameras. Several officers can be seen placing their shields so that what their colleagues are doing to a prisoner behind him is not recorded.

Ahmad Khalifa, 42, was not there, but in other prisons, but his story has common elements. He is an Israeli citizen. He is from the Palestinian minority, the descendants of those who stayed behind during the first Arab-Israeli war (1948-1949) and did not end up as refugees.

In the first month of the war, he was one of the very few who dared to take part in a demonstration in support of Gaza in Um El Fahem, the city where he is a councillor. His arrest, amid “beatings and kicks”, was the beginning of the first prison term of his life, which ended in February and has clearly affected his spirit. He is under house arrest, for “inciting terrorism” and “identifying with a terrorist group”. An electronic ankle bracelet is visible from the bottom of his trousers.

Since he cannot be in Um El Fahem, he rents a house in the northern city of Haifa, from which he cannot leave “even a meter.” His wife is one of the guarantors of compliance, so they spend most of the day inside the apartment with their two daughters. If she takes them to the park or does the shopping, another guarantor has to take her place. “If we are missing something, we end up sending the girls to the store,” he says while the little girls try to cope with boredom.

“What do you think you are? That you are in a hotel?”

Khalifa left prison with the feeling that his Israeli passport did not guarantee him better treatment than other Palestinians. Almost the opposite: he was seen as a “traitor.” The worst thing came after he complained at the court hearing in January that he had been mistreated, although it allowed him to see a doctor for the first time. “Before, when I asked, they responded with laughter: ‘What do you think? That you are in a hotel?’ When I went, it was not so necessary. The doctor asked me why I had not gone before. I laughed and he understood everything,” he says. He does find it helpful that many of the jailers are Druze from his area, aware that he is a lawyer and human rights activist.

He was not exempt, however, from physical violence. “They beat you from the moment you set foot in the prison, no matter where you come from,” he recalls. In one of the prisons where he spent the most time, the guards took advantage of the blind spots of the security cameras to attack the inmates, he says. “Sometimes, with effort, you could see it. But above all you heard the beatings and the torture, and people begging them to stop out of mercy. They insulted their mothers. Or asked them to kiss their boots, or the Israeli flag. Some ended up doing it, of course. They also had fun forcing them to sing a children’s song.” Khalifa hums it. It is the same one that some soldiers force Palestinian prisoners to sing while blindfolded in videos that they then share on TikTok.

He says that for 12 consecutive days, guards inspected his cell at mealtimes, in retaliation for someone throwing a glass of water into the hallway. “They would come in, leave the mattresses stained with food, beat us and leave,” he says.

But what Khalifa particularly hated was the fact that the cell was brightly lit at night: “I had a hard time sleeping like that.” He cared less about it than having to make do with a third of a towel, which the prison administration tore up so there was enough for everyone, or hunger. “You only eat enough to keep from dying, but you are always hungry. They give you just enough to keep you alive,” he says. More than weight, he adds, he lost muscle mass, due to the lack of protein, with “two or three spoonfuls of rice to eat” or a slice of bread to share with cheese and cucumber, for breakfast.

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