Standing Ovation for Our Shared Values!

Two weeks ago we had a very special guest grace our hallowed Congress with a speech about the deep relationship between America and Israel. And how this was a clash between barbarism and civilization. And this esteemed speaker was given a standing ovation 58 times by our elected leaders!

However, since then we had a very detailed 118 page report from B'Tselem - the Israeli non-profit organization - released which documents the abuses taking place in Israeli prisons. The title of the report: "Welcome to Hell": The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps.

This comes on the heel of Israeli mobs breaking into military bases to free soldiers who were under investigation for raping Palestinian prisoners. The debate in Israeli society went as far as whether rape was permissible under certain conditions. And keep in mind that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been ignoring any calls to restrict arms sales to any Israeli military units that are linked to killings or rape. And it is not just B'Tselem but NY Times also reported after a three-month investigation of horrific crimes. Reminds me of Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib so perhaps we do have a lot of shared values.

Given people are busy and who really has time to read through 118 pages, I have taken the liberty of including some of the highlights below. If you have the time, please do read the whole thing but here are some of the worst parts:

• ...overall number of Palestinians incarcerated by Israel and classified as "security prisoners" was 5,192, with about 1,319 held without trial as "administrative detainees." In early July 2024, there were 9,623 Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, 4,781 of whom were detained without trial, without being presented with the allegations against them, and without access to the right to defend themselves."
• Some were jailed simply for expressing sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians.
• ...Ben Gvir has openly steered a policy of humiliating Palestinian prisoners and trampling their basic rights underfoot from the moment he took office, long before the war...Some of the changes he instated clearly have no other purpose but to torment Palestinian prisoners.
• ...as far as we are concerned, they are all terrorists. We’ve reduced the conditions to a minimum.
• This practice, of enforced disappearance, has been employed in the past, but has become prevalent in recent months.
• ...sealing off prisons to external oversight by denying meetings with legal counsel and family visits, and refusing access to monitoring and oversight bodies.
• Members of those units took us out of the cells and beat us. They took away all our belongings, including letters from my late mother and documents and articles I was using to study for a master’s degree in prison.
• crammed 11 of us in a cell meant for four
• Every roll call was an opportunity to abuse us.
• Once they told us Ben Gvir was there himself. Those humiliating visits lasted at least 40 minutes each, and the whole time we had to kneel. Sometimes the visitors took an active part in humiliating, swearing and shouting at us.
• On the days we couldn’t shower, I bathed in the toilet bowl with cold water, using the pitcher for hand washing before prayers.
• These practices no longer serve their original purpose, and have become an opportunity for prison guards to unleash severe violence and another tool for humiliating and degrading prisoners.?
• Under this law, thousands of Palestinians were automatically tagged as "enemy combatants" with no factual basis to support this. Defining them as such allowed Israel to hold them for extremely long periods of time with no external review whatsoever
• During the hearing, I also spoke about how we were brutally attacked and abused by the guards during transfers, but the judge didn’t pay attention to that. After the hearing, on the way to the cell, the IPS people took revenge on me for complaining about their behavior. They hit and kicked me brutally the whole way.?
• He threatened that if I complained to the judge, I would pay.
• "Have you been exposed to violence in prison?" I didn’t dare answer, because I was afraid the guards would retaliate and beat me even more brutally. […] Every time they took me to the room where we attended our court hearings on Zoom, I endured the same path of torture, beating and humiliation.?
• Family visits were canceled altogether and meetings with legal counsel were denied for increasingly long durations, reaching as much as 180 days, on the pretext of "dynamic needs on the ground.
• ...in line with the new official policy, most of the Palestinians arrested after 7 October received no legal counsel or representation.
• Calling for prayers was forbidden. Of course, they confiscated the Qurans. Even group prayer in the cells was forbidden. If the guards heard the Quran being read out in a cell, they would punish all the inmates in it.?
• We would do the prayer ablutions without water, because we just didn’t have any.
• Running water was only available 15 minutes a day — not at a fixed time, but when the guard on duty felt like it.
• It was during evening prayers, and the guards heard someone calling out for prayers. They threw a stun grenade in the cell they put us in, and quickly went to cell 1. They attacked everyone in the cell and we heard the inmates screaming. They beat them relentlessly for half an hour.
• The IRF people dragged me, threw me on the floor and kicked me in the head. I tried to shield my head with my hands, but the guards pushed them away and kept beating me. I screamed in pain after about ten minutes of being beaten. I couldn’t move. Then one of them told me that if I prayed again, he’d kill me.
• Testimonies attest to physical, sexual, psychological and verbal violence, directed at all Palestinian prisoners and perpetrated in an arbitrary, menacing fashion, usually under a shroud of anonymity.?
• They forcibly undressed me, took off my pants and underwear, and tied my shirt over my head like a mask. Then they hit my testicles with force. After that, the guards picked me up and sat me on the metal frame of a sink. They brought two more prisoners and told them to watch while they beat me. I was still naked, and I saw them through the thin shirt that was covering my head. The guards pulled their hair to lift their heads and forced them to open their eyes to watch me.
• At admission, we were strip-searched again, fully naked. The most humiliating thing was that it was three female soldiers who did the search.
• During the torture in the interrogation, they would ask me: "Where's Sinwar?" I would answer that I didn't know. The soldier said: "Confess, so you can go home." The female soldier standing behind me put an electric device on my neck and I got an electric shock that pushed me two meters away.
• The guards came into the cell, hit us on the head from behind and sprayed large amounts of pepper spray in the cell. We all started suffocating. They handcuffed us with metal handcuffs, which they opened by hitting them on our hands. The pepper spray burned our faces and stung our eyes.
• Testimonies reveal that setting dogs on inmates has become part of the new prison routine.?
• One of the dogs bit a prisoner in the arm until he bled. Another dog bit me while I was being beaten.
• The only expressions we saw on the faces of the guards and the special forces were anger and vengefulness.
• They would look at the prisoners, pick one as a victim, and then torture and humiliate him to break the spirit of the other prisoners.
• They ordered us to sing and repeat the phrase "Am Yisrael Chai" (the People of Israel live). They ordered us to sing and repeat the phrase "Am Yisrael Chai"
• (the People of Israel live).?
• They didn’t let us sleep, either, only three hours a night. In the last three days, they didn’t let me sleep at all, in the day or in the night.?
• Later, on the wing, I met two of the prisoners who were knocked down. There wasn’t a single part of their body that wasn’t bleeding. They were literally bleeding everywhere.?
• ...we were taken out of the vehicle and then attacked in a spot that was not visible to the security cameras.
• People were crying and shouting, and the guards were yelling at them and cursing them and their mothers. They forced us to curse our mothers, as well as Hamas and Sinwar. They also forced us to kiss the Israeli flag and sing the Israeli national anthem.
• Two of them stripped me like the other prisoners, and then threw me on top of the other prisoners. One of them brought a carrot and tried to shove it in my anus. While he was trying to shove the carrot in, some of the others filmed me on their cell phones. I screamed in pain and terror. It went on like that for about three minutes.
• They forced us to spread our legs and then sit half crouching. Then they started hitting us on our private parts with the detector. They rained blows down on us. Then they ordered us to salute an Israeli flag that was hanging on the wall.?
• All medical treatments we used to get in prison also stopped. They even tried to extort information about plans to protest the punishment policy from prisoners, in exchange for medical treatment.
• I would bring sick prisoners to the door of the cell, some of them unconscious, so they could be treated. [The guards] would say to me, "He’s still breathing," and I would take the prisoner back inside without treatment.
• When the doctor saw my yellowish face, exhaustion and severe weight loss, he called the officer responsible for the prison in front of me and said that if I stayed in that condition, my life would be in danger. But the prison administration didn't care. After the visit to the clinic, they beat me again.
• The soldiers even refused to give us water, which really scared me because of my medical condition.
• During those two hours, I asked the soldiers for the inhaler I had in my bag, but they refused. They wouldn’t give me my diabetes medication, either. […] they came and told me they were taking me to the infirmary. Four Israeli Prison Service (IPS) people escorted me, but instead of reaching an infirmary, they suddenly put me in a room, pushed me down to the floor and started beating me and kicking my legs.?
• A medic would come with the guards during roll call and bring one Tylenol for all ten prisoners in the cell. In other words, the treatment for everyone’s ailments was one Tylenol pill.
• ...they hit my injured leg with batons and with their guns and stepped on my legs. I screamed in pain. A soldier asked me: ‘Which of your legs is hurt?’ and started hitting
• me hard on that leg, brutally.
• The reduced amounts of food provided to Palestinian prisoners and limited calorie intake are part of the new policy declared by the Minister of National Security when he first took office.
• There was also a clear policy of starvation. Most of the day we were hungry and thirsty. We were given very little food.
• Witnesses spoke of being forced to live in filth during their incarceration, as a result of the blanket confiscation of bathing, cleaning and washing supplies, the water supply cut off in cells, and the limited access to shower facilities that were not meant for such a large number of prisoners in the first place.
• Toilet tanks had running water for only one hour a day, forcing prisoners to wait and hold off on toilet use for hours and sometimes days.
• They also cut off the water supply to the rooms and only turned it on for one hour a day. We had one water bottle for all seven of us, which we filled up so we could drink when there was no water in the tap.?
• We only had running water in the cell for one hour a day. We had to fill garbage bags with water so we’d have something to drink the rest of the day. Of course, when they found the bags, they made holes in them.?
• ...guards...took the windowpanes out of the cells, letting the cold air in. As warm clothing was confiscated and fewer blankets were provided, prisoners were left without protection from the intense cold inside the cells.
• There were about 20 of us in total, and we’d all been beaten up with kicking, punching and batons. Some were bleeding. They left us there for about seven hours, and the whole time we were groaning in pain.?
• During the attack, they pulled all my clothes off, including my underwear. I heard them say to each other, "This one is sick," but they kept on hitting me anyway. I felt I was going to pass out. Finally, they ordered me to get dressed. I could hardly pull my clothes on, and the whole time they kept kicking me.
• I saw them grab some inmates by the testicles, and the inmates screamed and cried. The officers also pressed their batons against the genitals of some inmates. The stream of insults didn’t stop: "motherfuckers," "sons of bitches," "dogs," "ISIS." Some of the forces filmed us with cell phones and cameras. I heard the officer tell the others in Hebrew: "We’re livestreaming for Ben Gvir."
• One prisoner said in tears that they’d raped him with a stick.
• At least 60 people died in Israeli custody. Forty-eight of them were detainees from Gaza, some of whom died in detention camps set up by the military and others before they even got there, apparently due to extreme violence by soldiers during their transfer from Gaza to Israel.
• After we dragged ‘Arafat on a blanket to the door, the medic asked us to get him on his feet. I asked how he was supposed to stand on his feet when he was unconscious.
• Every time they took us to the court, they beat the other detainees on the bus along the way. They didn’t hit me, perhaps because I’m a lawyer, but the other detainees were constantly beaten in front of me.?
• They put me in an interrogation room, where I found that the reason for my arrest was a Facebook post.?
• One had a broken leg that was bandaged in a plastic bag. His condition required daily care but he was only given a paracetamol pill from time to time.
• They went into the cell and started beating him, I heard the kicks landing on his body. Then I heard one of them asking to call for the doctor and get a first aid kit. The doctor arrived a few minutes later. They stayed in the cell for over an hour. Later, I heard one of them say in Arabic: "As long as you’re all healthy." Everyone laughed and closed the door. I realized he was dead. After about an hour, they returned with a wheeled stretcher. They took the young man out, wrapped in a black bag, and left.?