Home / History

Genocide and racism in the holy land

Palestinians Face Torture, Starvation and
Sexual Violence in Israeli Prisons
Prisoners' families are kept in the dark
about their loved ones as prison authorities
engage in unbridled abuse.

Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians since last October has extended beyond the daily mass death, displacement, and starvation of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip. Behind the bars of Israeli prisons, Israel has been waging war against Palestinian prisoners, creating conditions that make the continuation of human life impossible. The effects of this brutal campaign have reverberated among prisoners’ families outside of jail, who are watching their loved ones being systematically starved, beaten, tortured, and degraded.

Shortly after October 7, Israel imposed a new set of rules in its cell blocks. In some detention centers like Ofer near Ramallah, the Israeli army was reportedly handed over control of the prison, while the Israel Prison Services guards were given a free hand in dealing with Palestinian inmates inside the jail sections. This shift was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of Palestinian detainees who were arrested after October 7, doubling the prisoner population as early on as mid-October. This included prisoners from Gaza, for whom the hardest part of the treatment was reserved.

In mid-May, CNN released an exposé based on the testimonies of Israeli whistleblowers about the horrific treatment of Palestinians from Gaza at the Israeli military base of Sde Teiman, now containing a detention center. The whistleblower testimonies detail a number of medieval practices to which Palestinian prisoners have been subjected, including being strapped down to beds while blindfolded and made to wear diapers, having unqualified medical trainees conduct procedures on them without anesthesia, having dogs set on them by prison guards, being regularly beaten or put into stress positions for offenses as minor as peeking beneath their blindfolds, having zip-tie wounds fester to the point of requiring amputation, and a host of other horrific measures.

On June 6, the New York Times published another story about Sde Teiman based on interviews with former detainees and Israeli military officers, doctors, and soldiers who worked at the prison, bringing new horrors to light about the treatment of Gazan prisoners. Detainee testimonies repeated many of these same accounts but also included additional disturbing accounts of sexual violence, including testimonies of rape and forcing detainees to sit on metal sticks that caused anal bleeding and “unbearable pain.”

Related Story
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on an executive order limiting asylum in the East Room of the White House on June 4, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
Op-Ed | War & Peace
Biden Wants to Enable Genocide. We Must Make It Impossible for Him to Continue.
Palestinian genocide comes at a devastating human cost. What will supporting it cost Biden politically?
By Khury Petersen-Smith , TruthoutJune 8, 2024
The picture that emerges is one in which Israeli authorities are putting Palestinians in animal-like conditions calculated to torture, humiliate, and in many cases, to bring about their death. In March, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that some 27 Palestinian detainees had died in detention in two facilities, including Sde Teiman.

Meanwhile, the families of Palestinian detainees, both from Gaza and the West Bank, have been left to wonder about the fate of their loved ones for months on end as horror stories continue to trickle out of Israeli prisons from those who are released, further feeding the anxieties of the families.

Death by Beating
According to Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups, Israel has arrested no less than 8,800 Palestinians since October from Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. Many have been released, including as part of a prisoners’ exchange between Israel and Hamas in November. Currently, some 9,300 Palestinians continue to be held behind bars, including 78 women, 250 children, and more than 3,400 detainees without charge or trial under the military legal system of administrative detention.

Thaer Taha, a Palestinian in his forties, was one of them until last April when he was released after two years of administrative detention. Taha was arrested in May 2022 and was given a detention order of six months. By October 7, he had spent almost a year and a half in Israeli jails.

“The day his detention order expired, we prepared ourselves to welcome my father at home,” Guevara Taha, his 22-year-old daughter, told Mondoweiss. “My mother made his favorite meal, my siblings and I dressed up, and friends and family members prepared to receive him at the checkpoint,” says Guevara. “That day, the lawyer called us and said that the occupation had renewed my father’s detention order for another six months,” she recalls.

On October 7, Thaer Taha was a month away from ending his second detention period. Since his arrest, he had been receiving family visits once a month.

Then, everything changed. Israel suspended all family visits for Palestinian inmates and began a series of unprecedented repressive measures against them. “Even those who had experienced the occupation jails in the 1970s and the 1980s said that they had seen nothing like the past eight months in the occupation’s prisons,” Thaer Taha says, referring to past periods that had hitherto been regarded as the highest point in Israel’s repression of Palestinian prisoners.

“The organized daily life inside cells, which so many [prisoners] had struggled for over the years, suddenly disappeared. Books and other personal belongings were confiscated and we were no longer allowed to have any kind of activity or representation,” explains Taha. “Guards began to violently raid our cells on a daily basis, food quality immediately decreased, and covers were taken away. We were intentionally put into insecurity, hunger, and cold. At the same time, the cells became crowded. We were 12 people in a 9 by 4 meter cell.”

The worsening of detention conditions for Palestinian inmates had already begun before October 7. In February 2023, Israel’s security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir began to reduce water access for Palestinian prisoners, beginning by limiting shower time to four minutes per day. The step caused outrage among human rights groups at the time. After October 7, it went to a whole new level.

“In mid-December, our water supply inside each cell was reduced to one hour per day. We used this hour to store as much water as we could, and since we only had one bottle in the cell, we filled empty cans,” Thaer says. “This situation continued for three months, until the beginning of the month of Ramadan, in mid-March.”

In November, Hamas and Israel struck a prisoner exchange deal. Around 150 Palestinian women and children were released from Israeli jails in exchange for 50 Israeli captives. The released Palestinians gave testimonies of severe beating and sexual abuse by Israeli prison guards. In April, the Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups said that 16 identified Palestinians had died in Israeli jails as a result of mistreatment since October 7. More had died but weren’t identified.

In November, 38-year-old Palestinian Thaer Abu Asab was announced dead in the Negev prison, after being beaten by Israeli guards. A month later, Israel admitted that Abu Asab’s death was a result of being beaten by 19 prison guards at the same time.

“I was in the Negev prison when Thaer Abu Asab was killed, but in a different section,” remembered Thaer Taha. “It was November 18, just after the morning head count, when we began to hear a lot of screaming. Then some prisoners were moved to the section I was in and they told us what had happened.”

“The guards were very aggressive during the morning count and every day they beat someone. That morning, Thaer Abu Asab dared to ask one of the guards about the news, if the truce in Gaza had begun or not,” Taha continued. “The guard told his commander, who told Abu Asab that he would show him the truce in Gaza, and he ordered him beaten. They beat him so brutally that one of the guards struck him with a thick wooden hoe handle on the head, and he immediately lost consciousness and bled to death.”

The suspected guards were reportedly put under “strict restrictions” following a probe into the incident but were set free all the same. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that the guards were dealing with “the scum of humanity,” and should not be smeared before an investigation.

Cut Off From the World
While this news was being made public, prisoners’ families had no contact with their loved ones in Israeli jails and had no idea about their conditions. Guevara Taha described it as “a constant anguish, thinking all the time about what could be happening to my father, what conditions he is in, preventing us from sleeping.”

“We the families of prisoners have Whatsapp groups where we exchange information, so whenever a lawyer manages to know anything about one prisoner in a given jail, or if a prisoner manages to access a phone and make contact, they would give information about those who are held with them, and we share that news on WhatsApp,” said Guevara. “We spent all the time on WhatsApp expecting any news, and the news was never encouraging. It was either that they had no access to water, food or electricity, and the anguish continued.”

“My father spent 13 years in jail, eight of them as an administrative detainee, so I grew up knowing his news from prison more than having him at home, to the point that I didn’t get used to calling him ‘dad,’ I just called him by his name,” she continued. “But this time it was different, I was seriously fearing for his life, thinking of whether he has eaten or if he can even sleep at night.”

In February, a report by UN experts concluded that some Palestinian prisoners had been subject to sexual abuse and that at least two female prisoners had been raped in Israeli jails. The next day, Palestinian prisoners’ families and rights groups held a public press conference in Ramallah, where they announced that they had halted all coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross, accusing it of inaction.

“The Red Cross had stopped giving us updates on the prisoners’ conditions since October 7, and even though they told us that it was because the occupation authorities had banned them from visiting the prisoners, they didn’t do anything else about it, and they didn’t speak up,” exclaimed Guevara.

Her father adds, “Our lawyers have been and continue to be banned from visiting prisoners, intimidated, and prevented from doing their work, but they speak out, they denounce it, and the prisoners were very offended by this silence.”

In November, the ICRC said publicly that it “hasn’t been able to visit Palestinian detainees since October 7.” In January, ICRC’s Middle East director told media outlets that Israel and Hamas were banning it from visiting captives on both sides. The ICRC never called publicly to end the suspension of visits, and has maintained that it is “actively engaging with the relevant authorities on this critical matter in our usual bilateral and confidential dialogue.”

Although Israel began to allow some family visits in recent months, most Palestinian prisoners remain banned from any contact with their families.

“Between October 7 and my release in late April, I was not allowed a single family visit, and my lawyer was allowed to visit me only twice,” indicates Thaer Taha. “During my time in prison, shortly after October 7, my son who is 17 was wounded by an Israeli bullet in the leg while taking part in a protest. I didn’t learn about it until my release in April. That is how cut off prisoners have been from the rest of the world.”

By Qassam Muaddi , Mondoweiss June 8, 2024

Ukraine

Sexual Violence by Russian Troops in Ukraine “Chronically Underreported”
UN and Amnesty International representatives are calling on the international community to hold all parties accountable.
By Amy Goodman & Nermeen Shaikh , DemocracyNow! June 9, 2022

Gaza

French Nun Assaulted

Line from song "War Crimes"

WAR CRIMES JUST LIKE IN GAZA
IN HOSPITALS AND SCHOOLS, OUT ON THE PLAZA
A GENOCIDAL CAMPAIGN
WITH SURVELIENCE AND DRONES
RACIST SETTLERS ALLOWED TO ROAM
MURDERING CIVILIANS AND DESTROYING THIER HOMES
WITH THE NERVE TO THINK THAT GOD CONDONES
WAR CRIMES

Follow up on Epic Fury War Crimes

On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.”

By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door.

The teachers had started phoning families the instant the attacks began, begging them to come collect their children. There wasn’t enough time. Some parents reached the school only in time to claw through the rubble looking for their daughters, and according to first responders and a Reuters stringer the building was hit a second time, a so-called “double tap” (which is a war crime), with the survivors and the rescuers caught in that second blast and blown to pieces.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both opened investigations. Reporters at TIME and elsewhere traced the weapon to an American Tomahawk cruise missile, the kind fired only by US forces in that war, and a preliminary military inquiry concluded our forces were almost certainly responsible for both the initial killing of the children and the double-tap that killed the firefighters, rescuers, and their parents.

When a reporter asked Trump about it at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains last week, he waved the dead children away as if they were nothing. “Nobody did that on purpose,” he said. “Mistakes are made, war is nasty.” Then he handed the question off to Pete Hegseth and moved on.

His shrug doesn’t survive contact with the evidence. An Al Jazeera investigation that traced satellite imagery back more than a decade found the school had been a clearly marked civilian building, walled off from the neighboring military base with its own separate gates since 2016.

A medical clinic that opened on the same complex barely a year before the strike was left untouched, while the school full of children was hit.

Either our targeting was precise enough to spare a brand-new clinic but careless enough to level a decade-old school, or the school was struck on purpose. The children, after all, were the kids of members of Iran’s military. Both answers are damning, along with the double-tap evidence, and there’s exactly one document that would tell us which is true.

That document exists. The Pentagon finished its investigation last month, and members of Congress still haven’t been allowed to see it. So a bipartisan group of senators has resorted to the only leverage they have left, moving to freeze 75 percent of Hegseth’s travel budget through the defense authorization bill until he hands over the unredacted civilian-harm investigations, Minab among them.

The same provision demands the unedited video of the boat strikes off Venezuela that have killed more than 200 people, which Trump and Whiskey Pete are also refusing to release. You don’t bury a report that clears you.

We’ve seen this reflex before, from the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad in 1991, where American smart bombs killed more than 400 civilians the Pentagon insisted were a military target, to the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in 2015, where the official story changed three times before a US commander finally admitted the decision had been entirely American. Not to mention My Lai in Vietnam. Deny, deflect, and bury, every single time.

There’s a reason, however, that this particular cover-up may be more frantic than the ones that came before it, and it carries a name we’ve all heard way too many times: the machine helping choose our targets in Iran was Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot.

We know this because the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, Cameron Stanley, said so under oath, swearing in a court filing that Musk’s “Grok Gov Model” let American forces “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours” during the operation. That’s one target every three minutes.

Musk’s company signed its deal with the Defense Department on February 23rd. The war began February 28th. And we only learned any of this because the disclosure slipped out in a lawsuit the NAACP brought over a Musk data center accused of poisoning a Black neighborhood near Memphis with gas-turbine fumes.

This is the same Grok that spent the summer of 2025 praising Adolf Hitler, calling itself “MechaHitler,” telling users that people with Jewish surnames were the problem and that the Holocaust was the solution, and injecting white-supremacist “white genocide” talking points into conversations that had nothing to do with them.

That is the AI a Nazi-salute-giving apartheid-era South African billionaire wired into our targeting systems five days before we started killing Iranian schoolchildren.

I can’t tell you that Grok chose the school in Minab, and neither can anyone else, because the report that would answer that question is the one they refuse to release. That’s the point.

An AI that has openly admired a genocidal Hitler was helping aim American missiles at brown people at the rate of one target every three minutes, the deadliest day for civilians in the entire war. It happened on the first full day that machine was running, and the people who could tell us what it did are betting we’ll lose interest before they ever have to reveal what really happened.

Louise and I lived in Germany for a stretch in the 1980s, and the thing the older generation there understood in their bones was how ordinary the machinery of atrocity becomes once you hand the moral choices over to a system and tell yourself you were only following its output.

We’re now doing that on purpose, for profit, under the control of the richest man on Earth. In The Hidden History of American Oligarchy I wrote about how the ruling class quietly captures the functions that are supposed to belong to a self-governing people, and I hoped it would never be a private chatbot helping decide who lives and who dies.

On top of that moral trainwreck, the recklessness that week reached well beyond that one school, because it left our nation weaker.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press that the war burned through so many of our irreplaceable Tomahawks and interceptors that we’ve opened a “window of vulnerability” against China over Taiwan, with some stockpiles unlikely to be refilled until 2029.

Senator Mark Kelly, who flew combat missions for the Navy, said it was shocking how deep we’d gone into our magazines, and that Trump started this “without a strategic goal, without a plan, without a timeline.”

We spent more than fifty billion dollars and a generation’s worth of munitions to let a Hitler-praising chatbot run up a body count, and it appears the brown-skinned children of Minab paid first.

When the Iranian national team took the field at the World Cup in Los Angeles, the fans in the stands unfurled a banner for the 168 children. We ought to be at least as willing to remember them as were the strangers in that stadium.

Congress has the power to drag all of this into the daylight, and it needs to use every bit of it. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and your representative two things.

First, hold the line on the provision freezing Hegseth’s travel funds until that Minab report is released in full.

Second, open public hearings on the use of private, for-profit AI in American targeting decisions, with Cameron Stanley and Elon Musk testifying under oath.

We have a right to know whether a machine that admires Hitler helped kill a school full of little brown-skinned girls in our name, and no invocation of national security should be allowed to bury the answer.

If this enrages you as much as it does me, don’t let it sit quietly. Share this piece, send it to the people in your life who still think AI in warfare is science fiction, and forward it to anyone who can pick up a phone and call Congress.

The “Good Tree” school had a name. So did every child beneath its roof. The least we can do is refuse to let them be classified into silence by a couple of corrupt billionaires.

Rachel Corrie

American nonviolence activist and diarist

Rachel Aliene Corrie (April 10, 1979 – March 16, 2003) was an American nonviolence activist and diarist. She was a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and was active throughout the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. In 2003, she was in Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military was demolishing Palestinian houses at the height of the Second Intifada. While protesting the demolitions as they were being carried out, she was killed by an Israeli armored bulldozer that crushed her.

Corrie was born in Olympia, Washington, in 1979. After graduating from Capital High School, she went on to attend Evergreen State College. She took a year off from her studies to work as a volunteer in the Washington State Conservation Corps, where she spent three years making weekly visits to mental patients. While at Evergreen State College, she became a "committed peace activist", arranging peace events through a local group called "Olympians for Peace and Solidarity". She later joined the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) organization in order to protest the policies of the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Corrie went to Gaza as part of her college's senior-year independent-study proposal to connect Olympia and Rafah with each other as sister cities While in Rafah on March 16, 2003, she joined other ISM activists in efforts to nonviolently prevent Israel's demolition of Palestinian property] where she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer that crushed her. Corrie's death sparked controversy and led to international media coverage.

Physicians present and fellow ISM activists stated that Corrie had been wearing a high-visibility vest and was deliberately driven over, while the Israeli army said that it was an accident because the bulldozer operator did not see her.Following the incident, an Israeli military investigation concluded that Corrie's death was the result of an accident and that the bulldozer operator had limited visibility. The ruling attracted criticism from organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), B'Tselem, and Yesh Din.HRW stated that the ruling represented a pattern of impunity for Israeli forces. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro stated that the Israeli investigation was unsatisfactory, lacking thoroughness, credibility and transparency, and that therefore the U.S. government is unsatisfied with the investigation's closure