Rights group releases harrowing report on torture of Palestinian detainees by Israeli forces

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has released testimonies from newly-released Palestinian detainees revealing their being subject to severe torture, strip searches, dog attacks, beatings, denial of food and bathroom access among other cruel practices.

The most concerning testimonies that Euro-Med Monitor received concern female detainees who were sexually harassed.

The rights group confirmed that the soldiers forced the female detainees and their families into providing information about others by threatening to indecently assault and even rape them.

A 70-year-old man who requested anonymity said Israeli soldiers took him from his house in the neighborhood of Al-Amal in Khan Yunis. He said he and a group of other detainees were stripped naked before being led to a detention facility that was an iron cage meant for severe torture.

The group was confined to the cage for ten days and subjected to daily insults, beatings and deprivation from food, water and sleep.

Other accounts by male detainees include forced evacuation or detention at checkpoints, taken to destroyed houses or remote places, stripped to underwear and severe beatings. The soldiers also threatened men with rape their family members and called for information on Hamas tunnels.

A woman, identified as G, said she was arrested at the checkpoint, blindfolded, taken to a detention center and forced to take off clothes as male soldiers made rude comments and harsh insults and threatened to rape her.

In response to recent revelations from freed detainees, the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas, has called on human rights and international institutions to follow up on the horrifying testimonies given by Palestinian detainees from Gaza who were recently released of the physical and psychological torture and violations they suffered in Israeli prisons of the occupation, which deliberately conceals their places of detention, their numbers and the conditions of their detention.”

These testimonies, the movement added, “are new evidence that Israeli forces committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, which requires legal prosecution before international courts.”

Euro-Med Monitor has called on Israeli regime “to promptly reveal the names, whereabouts, and fate of all forcibly disappeared detainees, and to immediately stop its policy of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees”.

It stressed that “Israel’s ruthless assaults on Palestinian detainees, which violate their dignity and purposefully cause them great pain and suffering, are tantamount to crimes against humanity and/or torture, which fall under the purview of war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”

According to the Rome Statute, enforced disappearance is considered a crime against humanity, Euro-Med said.

The group also called on the International Committee of the Red Cross “to bear its responsibilities and verify the detention conditions of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.”