Introduction
Since the Tufan al-Aqsa operation on October 7, 2023, Palestine has been gripped by a genocidal Zionist violence, one that is blatant, hysterical, murderous, and unprecedented. This systematic and organized violence assumed the form of an ongoing war, bloody, genocidal, and wholesale on the Gaza Strip where horrifying massacres have been taking place. This occurred in tandem with turning Israeli prisons into scenes of extermination of all Palestinian prisoners and detainees. This surging violence has turned prisons into a real battlefield where Israel has resorted to instruments of violence, torture and the most abominable measures of repression, making these prisons into veritable killing fields for the prisoners.
This paper deals with the revengeful and sadistic tortures being practiced on prisoners, far exceeding the usual understanding and legal definitions of torture to become genocidal and vindictive. Torture is no longer a means to extract information or confessions from prisoners nor a method of deterrence or punishment. Rather, it has become an instrument of torment to destroy a prisoner’s humanity, and to kill or undermine or maim his/her personhood to the point of reducing him/her into a corpse or into nothing at all, erasing the very humanity of a detainee. Thus, the body and soul of detainees is now a battlefield strewn with severed limbs. It is a veritable Tsunami of torture where all sorts of brutality, bestiality and savagery are practiced, embracing all Palestinian detainees without exception, and where all agencies of the Zionist state are involved. All of these practices are based on theological premises and the rhetoric of extermination found in plenty in the Zionist colonialist ideological lexicon.
This paper is based on statistics gathered regarding the conditions of prisoners issued after October 7 and upon analysis of these reports and comparing them with testimonies by released detainees. The object is to answer the following questions: What is the structure and methods of torture inside prisons based upon after October 7? How do we interpret these testimonies and statistics in the context of colonialist violence?
The paper is divided into four axes of inquiry. The first deals with prisons as part of the systemic genocide being practiced against the Palestinians. The second describes the scenes and routines of torture. The third discusses the ideology of torture. The fourth examines Israeli law as between legalizing torture and legitimizing genocide.
The first axis: Prisons as part of the campaign of genocide
Violent bodily and psychological torture against detainees is nothing new but has been normal and consistent Israeli practice since the Nakba and up to the present day. Torture enjoys immunity, protection, and encouragement of all Zionist governmental agencies and all judiciary and legislative bodies at all levels. The Israeli establishment has legalized every form of injustice, repression and violation of Palestinian human rights and provides impunity to war criminals and other malefactors from any prosecution, accountability, or punishment.[1]
Those who follow closely the testimonies of prisoners released during the current genocidal war on Gaza as well as reports published by local and international human rights groups would conclude that hysterical Zionist torture methods have included violent acts, torture, brutality, summary executions, rape, sexual tortures, starvation, beatings and violent assaults. Prisoners are denied all their basic human rights and subjected to constant humiliation and abuse and are totally secluded from the outside world. These and other crimes that violate international law and international humanitarian law include all forms of visible and invisible extermination techniques such as bodily and psychological genocide, cultural, medical environmental and spiritual extermination, and sexual and social genocide. The prisons have been transformed into morgues and charnel houses where the living are being buried.[2]
Up until early August 2024, the number of Palestinian prisoners has approached 9900[3]. This approximate figure results from the fact that we do not possess accurate figures about the prisoners from Gaza. These are subjected to the crime of disappearance and held in concentration camps some of which are secret and others out of bounds to all legal and human rights groups and organizations. Hence these figures are not stable and are constantly changing to ensure that every Palestinian gets his/her share of bodily torment. This is done by releasing some of those in administrative detention and replacing them by larger groups to the point where prisons are now totally overcrowded with the comings and goings of prisoners.
Since October 7, 2023[4] and until the present writing, 60 prisoners have met martyrdom as a result of torture, grievous bodily harm and summary executions inside these camps, especially at the secret Sde Timan concentration camp which has been the scene of horrific acts of torture, murder, inhuman treatment and rape, directed specially at Gazan prisoners. It is now patently obvious that a deliberate and systematic massacre is taking place which targets the lives of prisoners and their society. This regime of bodily and spiritual torture has no parallel since the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, and down to, and including, the horrors at Guantanamo. No equivalent number of prisoners have died within ten months in any prisons of the world as is taking place in Israeli jail and camps. It is as if those murderous jailers, in their black masks, have turned into death squads like some armed Hitlerite group. It comes as no surprise when the B’Tselem Center for Human Rights titles its report on the condition of prisoners after October 7, 2023, “Welcome to Hell.” The report details how Israeli prisons have become a network of concentration camps of torture where flagrant war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed every day.
The Second axis: Scenes and routines of torture
The torture and terrorization of prisoners is accompanied by a blood lust for murder, sexual depravity, sadistic enjoyment of prisoners’ torments and celebrating all this before an audience. Videos and images of the jailers show how they are enjoying torturing their prisoners and maltreating them in an immoral and depraved fashion.[5]
Torturing a victim during this ongoing confrontation has now become a routine expressed as sadism and pleasure at tormenting a prisoner’s body and spirit. Torture is now a source of pleasure, a legitimate activity and part of the policy of genocide. The human body is violated in the most brutal and sadistic manner. The strange thing is that this policy finds encouragement within Israeli society which has turned into an extreme right wing society dominated by populist leaders with fascist and racist tendencies to the point where Israeli society from top to bottom has become a violent society, riddled with hatred and loud calls for genocide, killing, and revenge.
The third axis: ideology of torture
What we are witnessing today is a new definition of torture that far exceeds the commonly accepted international definition of the term during armed conflicts, international or otherwise, as confirmed in the Lieber Code. “Mistreatment of civilians” and prisoners of war is regarded as a war crime[6] in the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. This includes cruelty, torture, and assaults on human dignity, especially against civilians and others incapable of fighting. However, what is taking place inside Israeli jails exceeds that definition and is tantamount to genocide, bodily and spiritual. Torture and inflicting pain are employed to exterminate or debilitate the body whether directly through starvation, sleep deprivation, rape and deadly beatings or indirectly through deliberate denial of medical care. This type of intense torture derives from colonialist, bio-political ideologies aimed at total domination over the body and its life, as also from necro-political policies that control the bodies of prisoners even after their death.
Thus, the violence and torture of prisoners in Israeli jails does not occur in a vacuum but is squarely based on biblical and religious foundations which regard the extermination of the Palestinians as a holy and divine duty, justifying their merciless slaughter as beings of a lower order of humanity, indeed as non-humans. In the pronouncements of Zionist officials made during the Tufan al-Aqsa operation one finds clear-cut calls that urge genocide and torture of Palestinians as well as all types of human extermination. These officials are of the opinion that the laws of war enshrined by the UN do not apply to the war on the Palestinians.[7]
In his book entitled “The King’s Law” or The King’s Torah” or “The King’s Doctrine” [in Arabic] and in Torat Hamelech [in Hebrew] Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira cites tens of quotes from the Torah, Talmud and Ancient Rabbinical texts that allow the killing of “gentiles.” Shapira writes: “You are to kill all who constitute a danger to Israel, whether man, child or woman.” He argues that Jewish soldiers may kill “gentiles” even without orders from their superiors. Shapira not only permits the killing of non-Jews but calls also for persecuting Jews who criticize violence against “gentiles” and writes the following in his book: “We must also go after and pursue all whose words weaken our kingdom.”[8]
Present day Palestinians are compared to the Amalekites who lived in Palestine when Joshua son of Nun entered Jericho, supposedly in 1190 BC. In February, 1980, Rabbi Yisrael Hess, from Bar-Ilan University, wrote an article in the student paper Bat Kol published by the university entitled “The order to commit genocide in the Torah” where he stated: “The day shall not be far off when we are called upon to wage a holy war and to obey the order [from Yahweh] to exterminate the Amalekites.” Hess then quoted from the Bible texts where Yahweh orders the extermination of the Amalekites and added: “God is not content with merely exterminating the Amalekites and their memory. Rather, he is himself ready to do so since, as shown above, he has a private interest in doing so, this being the principal objective.”[9]
In this genocide of prisoners, the instruments of repression and the various ideologies have joined together, as shown in pronouncements by Israeli politicians who justify the persecution of prisoners such as the following statement made after the assassination of Isma`il Haniyya: “We have cleansed the earth from him.” Most the words used are directly derived from a mindset of torture and genocide which considers what is happening in prisons to be a mere extension of what is happening throughout Palestine. The Palestinian is an “unclean” and “soiled” creature and not merely of less value but is a “gentile” who must be cleansed from the earth, indicating that the ongoing torture and genocide is part of the struggle for existence: the “unclean” Palestinian versus the “pure and cleansed” Israeli.
All genocidal texts in the Torah have been cited in the war on the Palestinian people. Israel’s Defense Minister Galant described Palestinians as “human animals,” “murderers,” and “Nazis”. Israeli premier Netanyahu described the war as one between the “sons of darkness” and the “sons of light” and as a war between civilization and barbarism, between good and evil, and between life and death. Such pronouncement go a long way towards explaining the brutality of the Israeli army in the current war on Gaza and the treatment of prisoners. All internationally forbidden weapons are being used as also all methods of murder, destruction, torture and degradation of human dignity, not to speak of calls to execute prisoners and to further degrade their inhuman imprisonment as expressed especially by Israeli minister Ben-Gvir.[10]
The fourth axis: Israeli law: between legalizing torture and legitimizing genocide
In the early days following the outbreak of war, Israeli law now allowed Israelis to achieve their revenge by employing unmonitored and unlimited torture, and this under legal and political cover. The Knesset passed several amendments to the 2002 Law of “unlawful combatants” allowing the Israeli army to deal directly with civilian and combatant Gazan prisoners whereas prisoners from the West Bank, Jerusalem and the ’48 territories are subject to Emergency laws but within the jurisdiction of the Israeli Prisons Authority.[11] In both cases, prison conditions are designed to bring about death, especially under cover of the “minimum” policy led by minister Ben-Gvir, where the life of prisoners is repressed and tormented through denial of basic human survival needs. These include the ability to survive at the lowest possible levels whether in food or drink, breathing or relaxation, or in total seclusion.[12] This latter involves the total and utter isolation of Palestinian prisoners from their immediate social environment by forbidding all contacts internal or external such as with families, lawyers and even the Red Cross. Any prisoner who dares to receive visitors or to contact the outside world pays an extremely heavy price.
A report issued by the UN[13] points to investigations conducted regarding allegations of torture and maltreatment inside Israeli concentration camps. The report documents cases of arbitrary detention where a prisoner is forbidden to contact a lawyer or appeal to any judiciary body. The report speaks of a systematic policy of disappearance of prisoners, whether or not connected with the resistance, and cites testimonies of prisoners that reveal savage treatment, torture and violations of all mandatory legal measures on both the local and international levels. The very large number of examples of torture include waterboarding, setting attack dogs on detainees, confinement in cages, stripping naked, forcing detainees to wear diapers, electric shocks, cigarette burns and similar practices of grisly torture.
Despite the legal safeguards which protect Palestinian detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails, Israel utterly refuses to acknowledge these safeguards or abide by them. As mentioned above, international reports that cite cases of torture and prisoner testimonies and which begin with the following conventional phrase “the names of those involved have been withheld to protect them from persecution” reveal the extent of Israel’s violations and their pursuit of anyone whose voice is louder than its own in order to achieve genocide even in the realm of language.
Demonization of Palestinians in Israeli school curricula and in Zionist literature, art, the press and academia, in all of which the soldiers of occupation have been nurtured, combine to divest the individual Palestinian from his/her humanity and to deny his/her very existence. This demonizing process breeds a violent militarism in Israeli society, and fans the flames of chauvinism and racial hatred of every Palestinian. According to this mindset, the Zionist narrative, fortified by religious and political justifications, is the one Israelis grow up to adopt and in accord with which they find it legitimate to torture and murder Palestinians, a matter that this mindset and nurture find normal and acceptable.[14] Israel, in the words of Noam Chomsky, has become a “Spartan” state and a militarized entity, a state of bloody militias with no soul, as in the words of Israeli writer Haim Levinson.[15]
Conclusion
Colonialist violence, now bloated to extremes against the Palestinians in Israeli jails, is built on the premise of recovering and reimposing the power stripped away from it. This is essential if one wishes to understand the current wave of deterrence which assumes the shape and instruments of revenge. This is accompanied by the Prisons Authority, the SHABAK and the entire Israeli establishment of repression acting together to deprive Palestinians of their humanity, weaken their morale, destroy their self-confidence, sever all contacts with their society, causing them to abjure all resistance and all attempts to gain control over their lives.
It is imperative that the perpetrators of this genocide in all its forms inside Israel’s prisons should be prosecuted and all state agencies complicit in this crime should be accountable to international laws.
This paper therefore recommends the following:
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The need to redefine torture in international law.
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Preparing legal files based on testimonies of Palestinian prisoners regarding torture in camps and detention centers, and passing these on to states that support the cause of Palestine and making them available internationally in order to reveal the crimes being committed against the Palestinian people.
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Preparing a legal grievance file which reveals the extent of violations of international and humanitarian laws which Palestinian prisoners are being subjected to and presenting this file to the International Criminal Court as evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity and as a flagrant violation of human rights and the rights of prisoners under international treaties and conventions.
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Activating popular courts (Courts of Conscience) to expose Zionist crimes before the entire international community.
[1] فردوس العيسى، "أساليب التحقيق في مراكز الاعتقال الإسرائيلي: بين استخدام نظريات علم النفس والأخلاقية المهنية"، هيئة شؤون الأسرى والمحررين، 2017، ص 24-32.
[2] لمزيد من التفاصيل، انظر: تقرير جمعية نادي الأسير، "واقع الأسرى الفلسطينيين بعد تاريخ السابع من أكتوبر"، 9/8/2024.
[3] لمزيد من التفاصيل، انظر: "نادي الأسير يكشف عدد الأسرى في سجون الاحتلال"، "دنيا الوطن"، 4/8/2024.
[4] لمزيد من التفاصيل، انظر: تقرير أعدته بتسيلم بعنوان: "أهلا بكم في جهنم" (آب/ أغسطس 2024)، ص 7.
[5] "نادي الأسير يكشف..."، مصدر سبق ذكره.
[6] لمزيد من التفاصيل، انظر:
[7] انظر: "نصف عام على حرب غزة"، المركز الفلسطيني للدراسات الاسرائيلية – مدار، "مجلة قضايا إسرائيلية"، العدد 93 (ربيع 2024).
[8] أحمد الدبش، "سفك الدماء: تراث الصهيونية للبشرية"، "الكرمل"، 1/11/2023.
[9] المصدر نفسه.
[10] المصدر نفسه.
[11] أشرف بدر، "سياسات بن غفير ضد الأسرى والتحوّل بعد 7 أكتوبر"، ورقة سياسات، مؤسسة الدراسات الفلسطينية.
[12] المصدر نفسه.
[13] لمزيد من التفاصيل، انظر: "تقرير للأمم المتحدة، المعتقلون الفلسطينيون محتجزون بشكل تعسفي وسري ويتعرضون للتعذيب وسوء المعاملة"، 31/7/2024.
[14] لمزيد من التفاصيل، انظر: ياهف دان، "ما أروع هذه الحرب"، 2024.
[15] المصدر نفسه.