As early as the first month of Israel’s war on Gaza, Sde Teiman, a secretive Israeli military prison in the Negev desert, had been raising alarm bells for Israeli human rights attorney Roni Pelli and other rights advocates.
Pelli and her colleagues started to hear reports from whistleblowers about poor conditions for Palestinians imprisoned inside Sde Teiman. They heard of instances of violence committed by soldiers against detained Palestinians, and, in one case, a Palestinian who died there.
Since then, media reports about the prison have mounted, quoting formerly detained Palestinians and Israeli whistleblowers, who spoke in more detail of the harrowing conditions inside the prison. A CNN investigation in May revealed that Palestinian detainees were restrained and blindfolded, forced to sit and sometimes stand throughout the night beneath flood lights; wounded Palestinians were strapped down onto beds, forced to wear diapers, and fed through straws; soldiers beat detainees motivated by revenge for the October 7 attacks; and prisoners’ limbs were amputated due to untreated […]
Where is the outrage? What the US did in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison was less than this and received, as it should have, strong condemnation from all quarters. But this long-term ongoing outrage by the “most moral country in the world” not so much. This whole Gaza experience has brought into focus the horrors that Israel has been perpetrating for years times a thousand. How day after day they bomb and destroy anything and everyone in Gaza, yet no one stops them is beyond my understanding. Latest polls show that most Israelis support their government, and a large minority think the IDF has been too gentle, not aggressive enough. What more needs to be said of this the only democracy in the Middle East, for Jews?