The Israeli government has pledged to close its worst detention facility, but there is severe abuse throughout its prison system

Caution: This column contains descriptions of violence and bodily injury readers may find disturbing.

By Herbert Rothschild

After Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, I attempted to bring perspectives on the event that were largely absent from commentary in the U.S. The third of my four columns focused on the distinction between vengeance and justice, which Aeschylus dramatized so powerfully in the “Oresteia.” Aeschylus personified the spirit of vengeance in the Furies, and I asserted that “what we are now witnessing in Israel/Palestine is a dance of the Furies.”

In Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Furies are hideous creatures associated with hideous acts. It’s Apollo who points out their savagery as he defends Orestes, his suppliant.

(N)ever touch my halls, you have no right.

Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out,

where justice and bloody slaughter are the same,

castrations, wasted seed, young men’s glories butchered,

extremities maimed, and huge stones at the chest.

And the victim’s wail for pity —

Spikes inching up the chest, torsos stuck on spikes.

In their fury, when Palestinian fighters momentarily broke out of the concentration camp in which the Israelis had pent them for years, they committed “bloody slaughter.” Some of the more gruesome acts the Israelis originally claimed they committed later proved to be mistaken perceptions at the scene or deliberate propaganda, but the reality was gruesome enough.

And so, too, have been the large-scale Israeli military operations in Gaza. When we see video footage of the human casualties, we get a sense of the savagery of modern warfare. Still, that savagery doesn’t seem quite like what Apollo describes, mainly because the soldiers who drop the bombs and fire the rockets aren’t face-to-face with their victims watching the agony they inflict and experiencing the adrenalin of cruelty.

For that kind of savagery on the part of Israelis, one must go to Sde Teiman. It’s a former military barracks in the Negev Desert near the Gaza Strip that, since the current war with Hamas began, has been used as a detention camp for Gazans taken into custody.

In May, prison officials told the New York Times that some 4,000 Gazans have been detained at Sde Teiman since October 2023. All of them are denied access to lawyers for up to 90 days, and their location is withheld from rights groups and the International Red Cross. Many of them had no connection with Hamas. They are among the 1,200 who’ve been released. Of the remainder, 70% had been detained for further investigation and at least 25 had died in custody.

In the U.S. we’ve had a few opportunities to learn about what those 4,000 have experienced at Sde Teiman. On May 10, CNN ran a story called “Israeli whistleblowers detail horror of shadowy detention facility for Palestinians.” And a Washington Post story on July 29 covered abuse of Palestinian detainees throughout the Israeli prison system.

Residents of Israel had more knowledge about what was taking place. The Times of Israel was just one of the country’s news outlets that reported on a petition Israeli human rights groups filed with the High Court of Justice on May 23 to close Sde Teiman based on allegations of torture there. The petitioners included, among others, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights and the Public Committee Against Torture.

Their petition asserted that surgeries are performed without anesthesia. Detainees are handcuffed for days, often leading to amputations. They are held in painful positions and blindfolded for long periods. They are malnourished. The CNN story, based on testimony by three Sde Teiman employees who wished to remain anonymous, said that punishments for infractions like talking to each other and raising their blindfolds include beatings and putting prisoners in a stress position, sometimes zip-tied to a fence, for upwards of an hour.

There have been reports of more gruesome treatment from those who have been released. Many have testified that they and others, including children, were subjected to rape, gang-rape, and other forms of sexual violence by both male and female soldiers and medical staff. There has been some independent corroboration of these assertions. Leaked CCTV footage obtained by CNN showed Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian detainee with a metal rod that injured his anus and lungs. According to a story in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a doctor who served at Sde Teiman said that he had examined a prisoner who had been sexually abused. “I couldn’t believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a thing.” Released detainees have also claimed they were subjected to electric shock.

Sde Teiman is the most notorious of Israeli prisons, but abuse is widespread. Last month, B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, released a report called “Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps.” B’Tselem collected testimonies from 55 Palestinians held after Oct. 7 and later released. Just reading the report is painful.

While there have been the obligatory official denials of detainee abuse, I don’t sense that denial is the prevailing Israeli reaction to these reports. Rather, I think the population is divided between those who think the abuse should stop and those who think it’s what Palestinians deserve. If the doctor who reported on sexual trauma represents the former, the person who submitted this comment on the Haaretz story about it represents the latter: “The prisoners from Gaza (terrorists) deserve to live-out their pathetic lives in captivity, in the worst conditions. WITH NO SYMPATHY WHATSOEVER. JUST GIVE THEM HELL-ON-EARTH! The ONLY reason not to execute them is to keep them ready for any hostage/prisoner swap.”

The Israeli government took into custody the nine reservists implicated in the forced sodomy of the detainee the doctor examined. Tellingly, on July 29, dozens of protesters, including far-right Knesset members, stormed Beit Lid, the army base where the reservists were being held, and others stormed Sde Teiman. Among the protesters were armed and masked soldiers, some of them wearing the Force 100 logo on their uniforms, the unit tasked with guarding detainees at Sde Teiman. At Beit Lid they accused the soldiers guarding the reservists of being “traitors.” The uprising alarmed the Israeli government. It said it would close Sde Teiman.

And perhaps it will curb the worst abuses at its other prisons. But desirable as that reform would be, it won’t go far toward substituting a spirit of justice for a thirst for vengeance. The cycle of revenge can’t be ended until Israel allows law rather than force to govern its general conduct toward the Palestinians. And the U.S. is at fault for continually protecting Israel from any consequences of flouting international law and even our own law governing recipients of U.S. military assistance.   

While Israelis have experienced no overt consequences for rejecting justice through law, there have been real ones. Sde Teiman and the moral deterioration and psychological deformation it manifested were not part of the Zionist intention. Why flee from monsters only to turn into a monster oneself?  

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear on Friday in Ashland.news. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].