Released Palestinians describe worsening abuses in Israeli prisons

Palestinian boxer Muazzaz Abayat, 37, holds his 2-month-old son Mohammed and daughter Mira, 5, at home in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, days after his release from Israeli prison, frail, disoriented and with no initial memory of his family. (Breaking The Silence via AP)

OUTSIDE OFER PRISON, West Bank — Frequent beatings, overcrowding, withholding of basic rations. Released Palestinians have described to The Associated Press worsening abuses in Israeli prisons crammed with thousands detained since the war in Gaza began 10 months ago.

Israeli officials have acknowledged that they have made conditions harsher for Palestinians in prisons, with hard-line National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir boasting that prisons will no longer be “summer camps” under his watch.

Four released Palestinians told the AP that treatment had dramatically worsened in prisons run by the ministry since the Oct. 7 attacks that triggered the latest war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Some emerged from months of captivity emaciated and emotionally scarred.

A fifth prisoner, Muazzaz Abayat, was too weakened to detail his experience soon after his release in July following six months at southern Israel’s Naqab prison. Frail-looking and unable to focus, he could only muster the strength to speak for several minutes, saying he was regularly beaten.

Now at home outside Bethlehem, the 37-year-old can hardly leave his armchair.

“At night, he hallucinates and stands in the middle of the house, in shock or remembering the torment and pain he went through,” said his cousin, Aya Abayat. Like many of the detained, he was put under administrative detention, a procedure that allows Israel to detain people indefinitely without charge.

The AP cannot independently verify the accounts of the prisoners. But they described similar conditions, even though they were held separately. While Abayat was only able to speak briefly, the other four spoke to the AP at length, and one requested anonymity for fear of being rearrested. Their accounts match reports from human rights groups that have documented alleged abuse in Israeli detention facilities.

Alarm among rights groups over abuses of Palestinian prisoners has mainly focused on military facilities, particularly Sde Teiman, a desert base where Israeli military police have arrested 10 soldiers on suspicion of sodomizing a Palestinian detainee. The detention facility at the base has held most of the Palestinians seized in raids in the Gaza Strip since the war began.

The soldiers, five of whom have since been released, deny the sodomy allegation. Their defense lawyer has said that they used force to defend themselves against a detainee who attacked them during a search, but did not sexually abuse him.

The Israeli army says 36 Palestinian prisoners have died in military-run detention centers since October. It said some of them had “previous illnesses or injuries caused to them as a result of the ongoing hostilities,” without elaborating further.

According to autopsy reports for five of the detainees, two bore signs of physical trauma such as broken ribs, while the death of a third “could have been avoided if there had been greater care for his medical needs.” The reports were provided to the AP by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, an Israeli rights organization whose doctors observed the autopsies.

Facing calls to shut down the Sde Teiman facility, the military has been transferring hundreds of Palestinians from the base to the prisons run by Ben Gvir’s ministry.

But according to Abayat and the others who spoke to the AP, conditions in those facilities are traumatic as well.

Munthir Amira, a West Bank political activist who was held in Ofer Prison, said guards regularly beat detainees for punishment or often for no reason at all.

He said he and 12 others shared a cell with only six beds and a few thin blankets, freezing during the winter months. When prisoners had to go to the bathroom, they were handcuffed and bent over, and they were let outside for only 15 minutes twice a week, he said. Amira was held in administrative detention, apparently over his Facebook posts critical of Israel.

He said he lost 33 kilograms (72 pounds) during his three months in detention because of minimal food.

The treatment drove some to the edge: Amira recounted a day when he and his cellmates watched through their cell window as another inmate tried to kill himself by jumping off a high fence. He said they banged on their door to get help. Instead, he said, soldiers with two large dogs entered their cell, bound their hands, lined them up in the corridor and beat them, including on their genitals.

He said that when he was first arrested in December, guards ordered him to strip naked and spread his legs, then beat him into submission when he refused. During the ensuing examination, one guard prodded his genitalia with a metal detector, he said.

The National Security Ministry said in a statement to the AP that it was not aware of the claims of abuse from the five released men. It said it follows “all basic rights required” for prisoners, and that detainees can file complaints that will be “fully examined.”

But it said it has intentionally “reduced conditions” for Palestinian detainees “to the minimum required by law” since Oct. 7. The purpose, it said, “is to deter ... terror activities.”

Since the war began, the Palestinian prison population has nearly doubled to almost 10,000, including detainees from Gaza and several thousand people seized from the West Bank and east Jerusalem, according to HaMoked, an Israeli rights group that gathers figures from prison authorities.

Those detained include alleged militants seized in raids in the West Bank and Palestinians suspected in attacks on soldiers or settlers. But others also have apparently been detained for social media posts critical of Israel or past activism, according to a report from the United Nations human rights office

All four former detainees who spoke at length said hunger was perhaps their greatest challenge.

Breakfast was 250 grams (9 ounces) of yogurt and a single tomato or pepper shared among five people, said Omar Assaf, a Ramallah-based retired Arabic language professor, also held at Ofer. He, too, said he was interrogated over his social media posts.

For lunch and dinner, he said, each person received two-thirds of a cup of rice and a bowl of soup shared with others.

“You didn’t see the color of fruit ... not a piece of meat,” he said.

Harsher conditions were imposed immediately after Oct. 7, according to Mohamed al-Salhi, who at the time was serving a 23-year sentence in a Jerusalem prison for forming an armed group.

Days after the attack, he said, guards stripped his cell of everything, including radios, televisions and clothing. Eventually, the number of inmates in the cell grew from a half-dozen to 14, and curtains in the communal showers were removed, leaving them to wash exposed, he said. Al-Salhi was released in June after completing his sentence.

A half-dozen Palestinian families gathered outside Ofer one day earlier this month to await their relatives’ release. As the gate slid open, several emaciated-looking men, with unkempt hair and rough beards, walked out before dropping to the ground to pray.

Mutasim Swalim embraced his father. He said he spent a year in prison over a Facebook post.

“The taste of freedom is very nice,” he said.

Others declined to speak.

“I just spent two months in prison,” one said as he staggered by. “I don’t want to go back.”

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Associated Press journalists Maya Alleruzzo in Bethlehem and Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.