NYT reports in detail on sadistic Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners from Gaza

The New York Times has exposed sadistic methods used by Israeli forces, including the rape and torture of defenseless Palestinian prisoners brought from the Gaza Strip.

The report was the result of a three-month investigation, the newspaper said, which revealed that Gaza prisoners held in the Israeli Sde Teiman detention camp had been subjected to cruel mistreatment, torture and abuse.

It is based on interviews conducted since October 7 with former prisoners, Israeli military officers, doctors and soldiers who served in the prison.

The Times painted a harrowing picture of some 4,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom died in custody due to the inhumane conditions in Sde Teiman prison.

The report revealed that Israelis had used cruel methods against Palestinian prisoners, including rape and sexual abuse.

A Palestinian nurse, Muhammad Al-Hamlawi, recounted how a brutal Israeli interrogator ordered two soldiers to lift him into the air and press his rectum against a metal rod attached to the ground. The penetrating rod injured his rectum, which began to bleed and caused the Palestinian prisoner “unbearable pain.”

A leaked draft report from UNRWA, the main UN agency for Palestinian affairs, mentions similar cases of torture, with one detainee saying that interrogators put him “on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire.”

According to a UN report, another prisoner died “after they inserted the electric shock device into his anus.”

A total of 35 Palestinian prisoners have died since October either on the premises of Sde Teiman prison or after being transferred to nearby hospitals, the report said.

The Israeli prison camp Sde Teiman, located on a military base of the same name in the southern occupied territories, has become a makeshift torture center where most Gaza residents detained by the occupation forces are taken for initial integration.

The Palestinian prisoners held there are considered “illegal combatants” under Israeli law and can be held in the prison for up to 75 days without a judge’s authorization and 90 days without access to a lawyer or trial. The whereabouts of these prisoners are not publicly disclosed during this time.

Legal experts, human rights groups and even the International Committee of the Red Cross have sharply criticized the Israeli practice. They say keeping the prisoners’ whereabouts secret is a blatant violation of international law and just one of many crimes committed by the US-backed regime in Tel Aviv.

Former detainees at the site reported numerous abuses inflicted on them during their detention in addition to rape, including beatings in the form of punches and kicks, beatings with batons, rifle butts and a hand-held metal detector, electric shocks, etc.

Some of the detainees said their ribs were broken as a result of beatings during interrogation. One detainee said he was kneed in the chest, while another reported being kicked and hit with a rifle.

Sometimes the prisoners were forced by their interrogators to wear diapers.

Other inhumane conditions to which Palestinian prisoners were subjected included being blindfolded, handcuffed and stripped naked.

They were packed into military trucks and driven to Sde Teiman, where they were held in open hangars. There they were forced to sit on mats in silence and handcuffed for up to 18 hours a day. If the prisoners fell asleep after many hours of waiting, they were called by the staff and beaten as punishment.

The torture also included taking the prisoners to separate “disco” rooms where extremely loud music was played into their ears.

This resulted in one detainee’s ear bleeding. They were interrogated wearing only a diaper and accused of being members of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which had taken part in a special operation against the Israeli regime on October 7. If they denied having any links to Hamas, they were beaten by the interrogators.

Human rights experts say that despite the Israeli regime’s denial of “systematic abuse” of defenseless Palestinian prisoners, the sheer number of consistent testimonies from former prisoners, combined with those of Israeli personnel on the ground, demonstrate a disturbing pattern of ill-treatment and torture at Sde Teiman.