Front Burner - Israel accused of turning prisons into ‘torture camps’

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Israeli prisons have been making headlines in recent weeks, after far-right protesters stormed the gates of the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility to protest the arrest of nine soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian prisoner. The incident reportedly left the man in life-threatening condition, and it has led to a furious debate within Israeli society, with some defending the use of torture against Palestinian detainees.But the case is far from isolated, according to investigations by several media outlets, who in recent months have documented numerous incidents of abuse, medical neglect and deaths in Israeli prisons.Now, a new report by the Jerusalem-based human rights group B’Tselem goes further, accusing the Israeli government of turning its prisons into a “network of torture camps” in the wake of October 7th. B’Tselem interviewed 55 former detainees, the vast majority of whom had not been charged with a crime.Today, B’Tselem’s executive director, Yuli Novak, speaks to us about their findings.You can read the report, Welcome to Hell, here.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem, brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. A note before we start, this episode contains some graphic and distressing details about abuse and torture, including sexual abuse, so please take care while listening. You may have seen a couple of weeks ago videos of far-right Israeli protesters and lawmakers storming a notorious detention facility, State Eman, which houses Palestinian prisoners. which houses Palestinian prisoners.

They were protesting against the arrest of nine soldiers who were accused of taking part in the sexual assault of a Palestinian detainee. Video has since emerged appearing to show the incident. In CCTV footage obtained by Israel's Channel 12 News, masked Israeli soldiers select one of more than two dozen Palestinian detainees lying on the ground and take him away. Behind a wall of shields obstructing the view of security cameras, the soldiers allegedly sodomized the detainee. Their victim was taken to a hospital in life-threatening condition with injuries to his rectum and upper body, according to Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

The Israeli Defense Forces says five soldiers remain in detention for allegations of serious abuse and that their investigation is ongoing. The incident has provoked heated debate in Israel and internationally. But according to reporting from CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, Israel's Haaretz newspaper and others, what happened is far from isolated. Their investigations have exposed allegations of widespread abuse of Palestinians in Israel's prisons since October 7. One young Israeli army reservist agreed to speak about scores of detainees at Sedi Taman. He says are kept in cages or pens, constantly shackled and blindfolded, many for weeks on end. It's not dying in the face, so you don't see blood.

The detainees lie belly down, being hit and kicked, people screaming and dogs barking at them. It's terrifying. Some detainees are taken away and beaten really hard, so bones and teeth are broken. I was zip-tied and blindfolded, says this former detainee, and tortured in a way I never imagined. One source telling us the restraints were so tight they had to amputate a man's hand.

The view that I've heard expressed... Now, a new report from the prominent Israeli-Palestinian human rights organization, B'Tselem, goes further, accusing Israel's prison service and military of implementing a, quote, systemic institutional policy of abuse in the prison since October 7th, and saying the prisons now amount to a network of torture camps. Butselem interviewed 55 former detainees, the majority who were imprisoned without charges. The Guardian newspaper also separately interviewed eight of the detainees in B'Tselem's report and said they described patterns of abuse that matched B'Tselem's findings. Israeli officials have rejected the findings and asserted that they oversee prisons in accordance with Israeli and international law.

Today, I'm going to speak with Yuli Novak, Executive Director of B'Tselem, about that report. Hi, Yuli. Thank you very much for coming on to FrontBurner. Hi, Jamie. Thank you for having me. So one of the former detainees who your organization interviewed is a 41-year-old man named Sami Khalili from Nablus in the West Bank. He had been serving a prison sentence since 2003. And he was one of several former prisoners you spoke to who described an abrupt and drastic change in prison conditions after October 7. What kind of changes did he and others describe? And so maybe firstly, I should say that, you know, the Israeli prison was

since ever, as we see it as a tool for oppression against Palestinians. But having said that, there was a drastic change since October 7, a very fast and horrifying one. What we heard from Sami and others are that practically overnight, the policies in the system changed dramatically. We're talking about an arbitrary, ongoing physical and mental abuse of basically all the Palestinian prisoners all the time. After October 7th, all hell broke loose.

In the first week of the war, they started abusing the prisoners. They entered cell after cell and beat us up. They took out prisoner after prisoner with their head down and led us through a sea of guards, beating us the whole way. They started kicking me in the neck and ear. Unfortunately, I got a very hard blow to my ear. I've completely lost my hearing on that side. The day or two after October 7th, all their personal belongings and communal belongings,

including food and tools to prepare their own food, was taken away. So they now completely need to trust on the food that the prison system delivered them. And that's not enough, not even close. They brought us food by sliding a plate under the door. All we got was a plate of cooked white rice. Five people shared every plate, and we had to eat with our hands. I lost eight kilos in my ten days in prison. We're talking basically about starvation in the prisons, deprivation of sleep, inhumane sanitary conditions,

denial of medical treatment, sexual assault that we hear again and again. So this is the new routine in Israeli prisons. We talked to 55 people who were held in 16 different detention centers. So it's not one facility. And you said about Sdet Eman and what we heard about Sdet Eman in the previous weeks. And our conclusion is that, unfortunate conclusion, is that Sneddheiman is only the tip of the iceberg in that sense. I want to get into the details of some of those testimonies a little more with you here. get into the details of some of those testimonies a little more with you here.

So one of the more distressing ones is of a man whose leg had to be amputated. And can you just very briefly explain what he says led to his leg needing to be amputated in the first place and then how he was treated in prison after the amputation? Yeah, so we're talking about a man that was, the circumstances of his arrest, he got arrested in Gaza, in what we call the mass arrests that the Israeli army is conducting there. It's basically to arrest any male in what's considered to be a fighting age, which usually is between 16 and 60 or even more. So he got arrested then. He was completely healthy. He suffered abuse and torture like we heard from others, right?

So days in and out that he got beaten up. He also got some injury of his leg. It wasn't treated. And this is also something that happened again and again and basically became a policy. No medical treatment and denial of medical treatment. So a month after he got arrested, he was put into surgery. His leg was cut off and about a month later, he was released. So it was a combination, as we understand, it was a combination of both, you know, physical abuse that caused this health situation combined with the lack of medical treatment that brought him into that situation. Everyone can go into our website and read the full testimony,

but he's talking about the treatment that he got from the gods and all the people, basically, who treated him along the way, which was full of humiliation, but also abuse, which is quite hard to read and to acknowledge. Yeah. There was one part that really stood out to me. He said that actually after he was released, it was around 2 a.m. and the soldiers put him in an ambulance, and sometime later, he found himself at the Karim Shalom crossing. And in several testimonies, both women and men described being stripped naked and humiliated. Male prisoners also described various incidents of sexual assault. And what kind of stories of sexual assault and abuse did witnesses describe? So, yeah, sexual assault is one of the things that, you know, the hardest to hear. Strip search, including beating up intimate parts.

That's something that we heard again and again in different facilities. Almost as a routine. We heard about the humiliation of people using this kind of, you know, asking women to get undressed while there are men in the room or close by. Some of them are religious, so it's even harder. But again, this variety of incidents at the end of it, you know, the extreme cases of it are rape. And that's also something that we heard of more than once.

So again, if we go back to Slete Iman, you know, it's a very harsh story what came out there, but we're quite sure that that's not the only story far from it. The Israel Defense Forces wrote to us that it, quote, categorically rejects allegations of systematic abuse, including sexual abuse, in its detention facilities and that, quote, any abuse of detainees, whether during arrest or interrogation, is illegal and against IDF guidelines and is strictly prohibited. They also wrote that detainees are provided with three meals a day, have access to showers and clean clothes and get adequate medical care.

In addition, the Israel Prison Service, which also oversees prisons, told us in a statement that as far as they know, the claims in the report are baseless. They also said that every prisoner and detainee has the right to submit a complaint through the appropriate channels. And I wonder, how would you respond

to those statements? As an Israeli, I'm ashamed. I'm really ashamed. And as I hear it in my Israeli ears, is saying, we basically don't care. We don't care about what's going on, about what you're saying. We don't care about the condition. It's a part of this reaction is a complete lies. They are just lying. When we came to the conclusion that this is the policy, it's not the policy that came bottom up. It's very clear that it's a policy that came from the top down. And, you know, even more than that,

what I think and what I see is that the Israeli government is taking advantage, you know, of the state that Israelis are in, in our collective trauma from the atrocities of October 7th, that we're still all holding inside us. of this situation in order to make a fundamental change in the state apparatus in a way that according to their values that are nothing to do with democracy with human rights with justice so to say that you know it's almost a joke to say that prisoners can file complaints when where to who i mean that that is what happened all the time in all the prison facilities, in all detention facilities in Israel. So yeah, I'm not very impressed of this reaction. I'm going to go. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

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To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I want to come back to where and with whom you're laying some of this blame. But first, you know, you mentioned allegations of psychological abuse, things like sleep deprivation and various kinds of humiliation. One man, a 53-year-old wedding band manager from the West Bank, Ashraf Amutasib, said that the sleep deprivation was so severe that now that he's home, he can't sleep without medication. Now I can't sleep without pills. They forced insomnia

on us for a very long time, six months without sleep. They bother you every second with huge loudspeakers, noise all the time, and loud music. People also frequently describe being made to do things like kiss the Israeli flag. And something else that comes up a lot in these stories is that many witnesses describe soldiers and guards laughing during these incidents. Just to give one example, the man who lost his leg said that soldiers laughed when the doctor told him his leg would have to be amputated. Witnesses also say guards and soldiers live streamed what they were doing to prisoners. And what does that say to you? It says to me that we got to a very, very bad place as a society. There were a few PR pieces in the Israeli media, Israeli mainstream media,

that IPS, the Israeli prison system and the government pushed forward. So it was a PR for the IPS. And one of the things they showed there, you see Minister Ben-Gur, who is responsible over the prisons, walking there, very pleased, hearing that it is being played, the anthem, the Israeli anthem, day and night in order for them not be able to sleep. So when you see that on primetime with a minister, and then you think about the IDF and the IPS reaction that you just got, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable that they are trying to deny it, but it is even more unbelievable that this is the place where we got to. That torture and abuse is something that almost consider positive when it has to do with Palestinians.

You mentioned Itamar Ben-Gavir. So just quickly for our listeners, Ben-Gavir is the leader of the far-right Jewish Power Party, and he is a key member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government. Obviously, these are very weighty claims the report is making. So tell me more about how B'Tselem arrived at the conclusions that this was a systemic policy of abuse in the prison since October 7th and why you think those orders are coming from the top, you know, as high up as Minister Ben-Gavir. Yeah, so, you know, we didn't start with that assumption. When we started doing the research and collect testimonies, we were sure we're going to hear about, you know, cases of abuse happening here and there. And we were also surprised about the systematic nature of what we heard.

Because when you talk to dozens of people who doesn't know each other, some of them from the West Bank, some of them from the Gaza Strip, some of them Israeli citizens, they were imprisoned in completely different circumstances. Most of them, the vast majority of them, as you said, got released without any charges. But again and again, they are repeating the same stories is just it cannot be a chance that people in 16 different facilities throughout months going through the same policies that they the same conditions and the same treatment and that you know i can i can ask you as a journalist if you get this kind of evidence after you cross-checked it and verified it, I think the conclusion is quite clear that this is not random actions, but a policy, a systematic policy. That's first.

And the second thing is about bank bills. So is the minister responsible, got the responsibility over the police and the prison system? prison system. So these are two systems that have the potential to be the most cruel and violent, I think, maybe from all state apparatus. And they were given to a person who said far right, you cannot go farther right than Benfield. This man is racist, is violent, he talks in a sadistic way. You say he's a 12-year-old. I say he's a 12-year-old terrorist. A 12-year-old who endangered one of our officers. We must win and not go to conferences in Doha or Cairo.

Rather, defeat them. Force them to kneel. That's the message. We can defeat Hamas. Bring them to their knees. We have proven once again who are the owners of Jerusalem, and all the threats by Hamas will not help. We are the owners of Jerusalem and the entire land of Israel.

And since he got into office, way before October 7th, he declared that he's going to make a revolution in the prisons in regard to Palestinians held in prisons. He called it, we're going to finish with the summer camp. And some of the policies that we see, he declared them himself. I mean, very openly and he personally gave regarding to the low amount of food, the overcrowded sale, the confiscation of personal belonging. The rest of the policies, you know, Ben-Gur didn't give the order himself, of course, and we don't mean that. But, you know, in Hebrew, we have a saying, Ruach HaMefaked, the spirit of the commander. It comes from the army. And the spirit of the commander is when you are

a commander in the army, you sometimes don't need to give the orders, but your spirit is something that affects your unit and your soldiers. And what we see here is exactly that. The spirit of Ben-Gavir took over the Israeli prison system. I'll just note here that we did request comment from Itamar Ben-Gavir. A spokesperson from his office told us, quote, there is no official response from Minister Ben-Gavir. Something that's clear in reading the testimonies is the diversity of people who were detained, men and women, children, grandparents, lawyers, doctors, students, many from the West Bank, as you mentioned, others from Gaza. A few are Palestinian citizens of Israel. I know that you mentioned before that many of them weren't charged with crimes, but were some of them charged with crimes? of them weren't charged with crimes, but were some of them charged with crimes? I wonder if you could elaborate for me on what we know about why at least some of these people were in jail.

So I have to say that because we're, maybe that's the most important thing about it, we're talking about torture. Torture is something that cannot happen in any circumstances by international law, but also, I think, by basic human moral standards. And in that sense, for me as a human rights activist, it doesn't matter what this person did and what were the circumstances that brought them in. They're not deserved to be tortured like that. that brought them in, they're not deserved to be tortured like that. But more than that, you know, we're talking about, we said among the 55 people that we've talked to, 49 got released without being charged, right? And five were held before October 7th, and they were the ones who got released after that, but they spent time and they were charged before.

who got released after that, but they spent time and they were charged before. So in that sense, what people do is not, I think, is not exactly the right question, but what the circumstances that brought them into jail. And then we have a variety of circumstances. I said before about Gaza, the mass arrest in Gaza. So many, many, many of them. The Israeli citizens, most of the Israeli citizens that gave testimonies, got arrested for what's broadly called incitement. So it can be a post on social media, it can be taking part in demonstration, or even showing solidarity with the Palestinian people.

solidarity with the Palestinian people. So we have a really wide variety, as you said, of circumstances. I think that was also the reason why we decided to name it Torture Camps, because Torture Camp is a place where every person who enters it, regardless of what you did or what were the circumstances brought you there, will suffer ongoing abuse. Once you enter the jail system, you are a terrorist. It doesn't matter what you did, if you did. It doesn't matter if tomorrow you're going to release without any accusation at all. Once you're there and while you are there, you are being treated as a terrorist. And that is the mindset, but also the practice. In your report, just to note, you write that of the more than 9,600 Palestinians that were

detained in Israeli prisons as of July, about half are detained without trial. Your report arrived at a moment when this is a very hot-button issue in Israeli society. In the intro, we mentioned the case of the Palestinian prisoner who was allegedly sexually assaulted at State Maron. has unfolded in the wake of that incident is that some Israeli politicians and media figures have defended the use of torture and sexual assault against Palestinians in prisons. There was a very heated debate in the Israeli parliament a couple weeks back. One member of the parliament was saying

that it was okay to put a stick in someone's rectum if they were a Hamas militant, that everything was okay to do to them. and that for those detainees who are Hamas militants and who may have in some cases been involved with October 7th, that this is a justified form of revenge. I want to be really clear that there has been an outcry from many Israelis about these comments. Many people strongly disagree with them. But what's your response to hearing those comments and seeing where this conversation is at in Israel right now? Not easy to hear that. And we hear that all the time. But yeah, when the society got to a point

when the discussion takes place again in primetime media is whether it is right or wrong to rape someone as a deterrence as a punishment without trial whatever really it's hard for me to to grasp that we got there that it's even a discussion so um yeah you know it's a connection between you know the government and its policy they're an unbelievable harsh and and horrendous policies, and a public that is being instilled with fear and anxiety and desperation about the future. And I think that's the result. The report concludes by saying the International Criminal Court and the international community must investigate and promote criminal proceedings against individuals suspected of planning, directing and committing

these crimes. And just before we go, tell me more about that. What do you want to see happen now? So, you know, since all state systems, the Israeli systems, including its legal system, by the way, have been mobilized in support of the creation and the operation of these torture camps. Either by taking an actual part in this or by turning a blind eye, like the legal system. know that the Israel investigation bodies cannot be expected to hold the relevant, high-ranking people who are involved in this accountable. It won't happen. They cannot do it. They won't do it. And that leaves us, Israelis and Palestinians who live here and believe in justice and human rights, to appeal to any international body, including the international tribunals, and ask them to get involved, to do whatever in their power,

and to stop these horrific crimes. Okay. Yuli Novak, I want to thank you very much for coming by today. Thank you. Thank you. All right, that is all for today. I am Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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