dpa
Tel Aviv
The Israeli human rights organization Betselem has accused Israel of systematically torturing Palestinian prisoners in its prisons.
A report released on Tuesday entitled "Welcome to Hell” contains testimonies from 55 ex-Palestinian prisoners the group interviewed. Some describe severe abuse and violence.
More than 9,600 Palestinians were recently held in Israeli prisons, around half of them without official charges, the report said.
The Israeli military said it is currently investigating allegations of serious sexual abuse of a Palestinian militant by soldiers in the Sde Teiman military camp in southern Israel.
The UN Human Rights Office recently announced that at least 53 people had died in Israeli custody.
"The testimonies presented in this report provide an account of how Israeli prison facilities have been turned into a network of torture camps,” the report said.
The report said "such spaces, in which every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering, operate as de-facto torture camps. "The abuse consistently described in the testimonies of dozens of individuals held in different facilities was so systematic, that there is no room to doubt an organized declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities,” Betselem wrote.
This policy was implemented under the orders of far-right Police Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and with the full support of the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the authors said.
The unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Hamas group and others on Israel on October 7 had deeply traumatized Israeli society and are "evoking deep-seated fears and an instinct for revenge among many,” Betselem wrote.
The right-wing religious government has used this to "press harder with applying their racist ideology, using the oppressive mechanisms at their disposal.”
Betselem is a donation-funded Israeli human rights group that campaigns against the occupation of the Palestinian territories and for equal rights for Jews and Palestinians.
An Israeli army spokesman said the allegations were being investigated. A spokeswoman for the Israeli Prison Authority said all prisoners were being held in accordance with the law and their basic rights were being upheld. The allegations made by Betselem had not been officially communicated to the authority "and to our knowledge they have no basis whatsoever.”
However she said since the beginning of the Gaza war 10 months ago, the conditions of detention of so-called security prisoners had been tightened on the instructions of Ben-Gvir.