On August 5, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a report titled “Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps.” It shines a glaring light on the reality of Israel’s systemic torture. It presents visceral testimony of 55 victims. It exposes the way the most vicious, systematic torture is used to crush the bodies and souls of the Palestinian people. 

The B’Tselem report puts this escalated torture in the context of decades of violent genocidal oppression of the Palestinian people. It estimates that “since 1967, Israel has imprisoned over 800,000 Palestinian men and women from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, which accounts for about 20% of the total population and about 40% of all Palestinian men.” (emphasis added)

Israeli Torture: Covered Up and Whitewashed by the USA

In July 2024, there were nearly 10,000 Palestinians locked up in Israeli torture chambers. They are doctors, lawyers, journalists, students, laborers, and others. They are men and women. They are children, including some under 16 years of age. Some were jailed for expressing sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians. Others were taken into custody under the vague definition of "men of fighting age." Some are accused, accurately or not, of being supporters of armed Palestinian organizations. 

They are being deprived of contact with the outside world. They are confined in literal darkness, prevented from access to the outdoors or light. They are starved and deprived of sleep and access to medical care. They are tortured, raped, and murdered in detention.

Since October 7, reports of these depraved crimes against humanity have trickled into mainstream (western ruling class)  media. But when processed for consumption by people in the U.S., horrific torture is reported as “allegations” of “abuse.” Systematic depraved crimes against humanity are presented as excesses in a warped framework of a “war” begun by Hamas on October 7 of last year, out of context of 75 years of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.¹ And claims by Israeli officials, the U.S. State Department and now the spokesman for Kamala Harris that the U.S. cares about this are taken seriously when in fact these U.S. and Israeli officials are covering up and whitewashing these horrors (see Kamala Harris, the U.S. & Israel: “Shared Values” of Depraved Torture, Terror and Genocide).

A Network of Torture Camps

The introduction to the B’Tselem report paints a picture of the torture going on in Israel’s network of more than 12 detention centers as well as other Israeli prisons:

This includes frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation; deliberate starvation; forced unhygienic conditions; sleep deprivation; prohibition on, and punitive measures for, religious worship; confiscation of all communal and personal belongings; and denial of adequate medical treatment. These descriptions appear time and again in the testimonies, in horrifying detail and with chilling similarities. The prisoners’ testimonies lay bare the outcomes of a rushed process in which more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, both military and civilian, were converted into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates. Such spaces, in which every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering, operate in fact as torture camps. 

And through firsthand testimony, some captured in video, the report brings that horror to light.

“It might even be worse than Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib”

In testimony to B’Tselem investigators, A.H., a Palestinian man from the West Bank, described conditions he experienced in Israel’s Ketziot Prison. He was specifically threatened by an operative of Israeli intelligence in prison if he spoke out about what he was subjected to. He defied those threats to provide testimony to B’Tselem. 

[October 7] was the start of a period of severe violence… On Sunday, 15 October 2023, at 10:30 A.M., [prison guards] ordered us one after the other to stand with our backs to the iron door of the cell and stick our hands out through the opening in the door, so they could tie them from behind.

Then they ordered us all to come out of the cell and stand next to the wall with our legs spread and our heads down. The guards kicked our testicles hard from behind. They did that to all the prisoners in my cell. Two masked guards punched me in the waist, and one grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to a cell on the other side, where he kicked me in the back. I fell on the floor and my back hurt a lot, where I’d been injured in a work accident and had broken vertebrae. I had surgery back then.

A.H.’s testimony includes describing how a guard tried to rape him with a carrot while other guards filmed that on their cell phones. And the B’Tselem report documents widespread “sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity, by soldiers or prison guards against Palestinian detainees,” including “cases of gang sexual violence and assault committed by a group of prison guards or soldiers.”

A.H. left detention, where food rations were starving prisoners, weighing half of what he weighed when he went in. He told B’Tselem interviewers:

I still suffer from pain in most parts of my body, especially stomach pain. My blood sugar is unbalanced, and I’m still getting treatment. I’m also mentally very unwell. The prisoners’ screams still echo in my ears. I can’t take any screaming or yelling, and I’m generally terrified of loud noises. I’ve also developed a phobia of dogs. Once, when my wife gave my son a carrot to chew because he’s teething, I got very frightened, and when he put the carrot in his mouth, I took it from his hand right away and threw it out. I can’t eat solid food, only some liquids and soup. I’m terrified of being arrested again. I don’t think I’d survive such torment again. It was truly hell. I’m also very worried about the detainees who stayed in the prison hell after I was released. The torture people are going through in Israeli prisons now is indescribable. It might even be worse than Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

A.H. is referring to other instances of the most depraved and systematic torture carried out by the United States. In January 2002, in the wake of the attacks on the U.S. of September 11, 2001, the U.S. set up the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp on the Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba. Ever since, Guantánamo has functioned as a torture center, where hundreds have been, or are, illegally detained, held indefinitely, and tortured (see American Crime Case #54: The Guantánamo Torture Chamber). In 2003, as part of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, U.S. soldiers and CIA agents were routinely torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Army detention center outside Baghdad with 3,200 inmates. That torture included sexual assault and rape. 

The torture being carried out now by Israel, covered up by the U.S., is in that “tradition.” (To begin to learn about that, see The United States of Atrocity: When It Comes to War Crimes, USA Is “Number One” at revcom.us.) 

“The Israeli regime operating this system as an apartheid regime … must come to an end”

The horrors that A.H. was subjected to are, as you read this, being repeated over and over by Israeli authorities. Over, and over—in over 100 pages and many more appended interviews, detainees describe being systematically attacked with pepper spray, stun grenades, sticks, wooden clubs and metal batons, gun butts and barrels, brass knuckles and tasers, attack dogs, beatings, punches and kicks. These are part of everyday life for Palestinians in Israeli prisons, often leading to severe injuries, loss of consciousness, and broken bones. And that brutality and torture has killed at least sixty prisoners. 

The report concludes with:

This reality is unacceptable and fills us, Israelis and Palestinians who believe in justice, freedom and human rights, with shame, anxiety and rage. 

And:

We appeal to all nations and to all international institutions and bodies to do everything in their power to put an immediate end to the cruelties meted out on Palestinians by Israel’s prison system, and to recognize the Israeli regime operating this system as an apartheid regime that must come to an end. 

Readers of revcom.us should stay tuned for more reporting on the substance and implications of this report, here and on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube.