On May 11th, 2024, CNN released two photos of Gazans who are held captives in one of the most drastic prisons of Israeli occupation.
At the military base of Sde Teiman in Israel’s Negev desert, rows of men in gray tracksuits were seen sitting on paper-thin mattresses, ringfenced by barbed wire. All appear blindfolded, their heads hanging heavy under the glare of floodlights. Another leaked photo showed a blindfolded man stands with his arms above his head.
The two photos were snapped by an Israeli worker at the Sde Tieman who said the scenes didn’t stop to haunt him. His testimonies predominantly match with other three Israeli whistleblower who were also met by CNN.
One of the Israeli whistleblower recounted his experience at Sde Teiman elucidating that a putrid stench filled the air and the room hummed with the men’s murmurs; they are forbidden from speaking to each other, and when they mumbled to themselves, Guards were instructed “to scream uskot” – shut up in Arabic – and told to “pick people out that were problematic and punish them.”
The whistleblower were told that the detainees were not allowed to move, nor were they allowed to talk or even to peek under their blindfold.
Another source who worked as a medic at the facility’s field hospital said the detainees were stripped down of anything that resembles human beings, and exposed to long-term beatings, which were not done to gather intelligence, but out of revenge. “It was punishment for what the Palestinians did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp,” the source added.
A former testimony by an Israeli doctor also revealed a picture of the facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.
Reports of abuse at Sde Teiman have already surfaced in Israeli and Arab media after an outcry from Israeli and Palestinian rights groups over conditions there and cast more doubt on the Israeli government’s repeated assertions that it acts in accordance with accepted international practices and law.
Affirming the same testimony on Israel’s savagery with Palestinian detainees, specially those from Gaza, Dr. Mohammed al-Ran, who headed the surgical unit at northern Gaza’s Indonesian hospital, recalled his detainment at a military facility where he said he endured desert temperatures, swinging from the heat of the day to the chill of night.
Al-Ran was arrested on December 18th, 2023, and released after spending 45 days, where he was stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where, he said, the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.
“Part of my torture was being able to see how people were being tortured,” he said. “At first you couldn’t see. You couldn’t see the torture, the vengeance, the oppression.”
“When they removed my blindfold, I could see the extent of the humiliation and abasement … I could see the extent to which they saw us not as human beings but as animals,” Al-Ran added.
Sde Tieman is some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier. It is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws
Shortlink for this post: https://daysofpalestine.ps/?p=53812
