“Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!”
—Bob Avakian, November 10, 2023
This powerful quote from the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian from November 2023 can be seen brought to full gruesome life in the notorious Sde Teiman prison in southern Israel where Israel's cruel and sick treatment of Palestinian prisoners calls to mind the torture of the Jews in the Holocaust by the Nazis.
Stripped, blindfolded, and bound Palestinians taken prisoner by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza, December 2023 Photo: Social media post by Israeli soldier.
A video, originally revealed in August 2024, shows at least five soldiers beating a Palestinian detainee, dragging him across the floor, stomping on his body, and tasering him. At least one soldier was also accused of stabbing the prisoner in his rectum with a knife, raping and injuring him. The detainee also had his ribs broken and a lung punctured.
Palestinian prisoners are systematically raped in Israeli prisons. And Israel’s fascists have explicitly defended this, declaring that if someone is a suspected "terrorist," then “everything is legitimate to do! Everything!” “Hands and feet in shackles. Eyes blindfolded. No moving. No talking. And, sometimes, violent beatings. Days upon days, weeks upon weeks pass like this at the Sde Teiman facility,” Israeli soldiers testified. Detainees were “being starved, beaten and tortured.” At the prison hospital, “detainee-patients were fed through a straw, forced to relieve themselves in a diaper and handcuffed so tightly, for 24 hours a day, that there were a number of cases of amputation of limbs.”
Sde Tieman has been where the bodies of Palestinians killed elsewhere are collected, and while their voices have been silenced, their remains speak volumes about Israeli practices and immorality. The remains of at least 135 Palestinians returned to Gaza were mutilated and dismembered, some with their hands tied behind their backs. Others showed signs of being strangled, run over by a tank, or hung. The director of the Al-Awda Hospital in Jabaliya, who was released after the ceasefire, described being confined in a kennel, where soldiers abused him with vicious dogs.
The Israeli columnist Gideon Levy draws a stark contrast between how prisoners—no matter who they are—are supposed to be treated under international law, and how Israel treats them today: “No one physically abused [Adolf Eichmann, a notorious Nazi] before he was executed by court order” in Israel in 1962. “Today, the government prides itself on sadism, abuse and torture. It does so because it knows the souls of its citizens. The majority of Israelis are vengeful and approve of the abuse.”
See also: Israel’s Palestinian Hostages and Its Nazi-Like Prison System, revcom.us, October 20, 2025