Starvation and Torture

The Horrifying Reality of Palestinians Detainees in Israeli Prisons

The Israeli army has released at least six more Palestinian detainees, including two women, all displaying signs of ill-treatment. Photo credit: PRCS

The number of people in the Gaza Strip suffering from acute hunger continues to grow: the United Nations reported a staggering 300% increase in child malnutrition rates between May and July this year. Also bearing the brunt of this crisis are the thousands of Palestinian prisoners detained by Israeli forces since October last year.

Living conditions in Israeli prisons and camps have always been dire, but they have become even worse recently. Those released from Israeli imprisonment, including Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of Al-Shifa Hospital, revealed that prisoners received extremely little food, mostly amounting to a loaf of bread per day, and polluted water, leading to a catastrophic situation in terms of nutritional and immunological status.

Some of the released prisoners, visibly emaciated, have lost over 40 kilograms as they endured physical and emotional torture. They describe horrendous treatment in places like Sde Teiman, an Israeli concentration camp in the Negev desert, where they are exposed to sexual abuse, tied up, blindfolded, and forced to wear diapers.

Even some Israeli doctors working in the camp have admitted these conditions amount to torture. Speaking to El País, one doctor described a prisoner he was treating as “unable to move, unable to see, unable to speak, unable to understand what is happening, and with a diaper.”

“They call it a hospital, but it is not a hospital. It’s worse than the prisons,” Iyad Adwad, who was taken to Sde Teiman in May this year, told Resistance News Network (RNN).

Prisoners’ committees have linked the pervasive use of shackling among prisoners to increasing rates of limb amputations. According to some testimonies, amputations are also used to avoid providing care for chronic health conditions like diabetes.

Treatment for non-communicable diseases such as diabetes is virtually non-existent in all Israeli prisons. Like cancer patients in Gaza who have been blocked from traveling to receive treatment, prisoners with cancer have no access to proper care. Some of the chronic patients have been imprisoned for years, during which they developed secondary conditions that need specific support which is, again, not provided by medical personnel in the prisons. Among them is Mutassim Raddad, imprisoned since 2006 and serving a 20-year sentence, who is grappling with around two dozen health issues that emerged after occupation forces neglected to treat his primary intestinal condition.

Many physicians in the prisons remain complicit in the torture and deliberately avoid providing care, according to those released, and their medical knowledge is often abused by occupation forces to increase suffering. In May this year, there was a severe outbreak of scabies among prisoners, exacerbated by Israeli authorities moving prisoners among sections, deliberately encouraging the spread.

Those released from Sde Teiman and other prisons across occupied Palestine face a healthcare system that has been decimated, unable to provide the support needed to recover from the torture experienced while imprisoned.