Israeli forces have taken pictures of Palestinian children they have abducted into their torture camps and posted them online with humiliating captions, a report finds as Israel holds thousands of Palestinians in detention without charges.
A Human Rights Watch review of 37 posts on social media published Tuesday finds that Israeli soldiers regularly post pictures of Palestinians abducted from Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Most of the pictures are of men and boys, with many showing them stripped to their underwear or totally naked. The people pictured are often handcuffed, blindfolded and injured, the report says.
One post, published by an Israeli soldier in Gaza on December 8, depicts nearly two dozen detained people, including two who appear to be children. The people are all stripped to their underwear, and some of them are blindfolded.
The caption on the post implies that soldiers took even more explicit photos that they have not posted online: “As part of our mission we kept Hamas terrorists under arrest. We’ll settle for this picture, there are pictures not for publication …”
The sheer number of posts similar to this suggests that Israeli officials are at least aware of the posts and have done little to stop them; Israeli officials fired one soldier caught doing this after it was reported on by the BBC, but have also defended the practice of stripping Palestinians supposedly in order to ensure they don’t have weapons. The UN has separately found that Israeli forces either order or condone the stripping of Palestinian men and children in their detention.
Stripping detainees and posting pictures of them online is a form of sexual violence and a violation of international law, Human Rights Watch noted.
“Israeli authorities have for months turned a blind eye as members of their military published dehumanizing fully or seminude images and videos of Palestinians in their custody,” Balkees Jarrah, acting Middle East director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Senior officials and military commanders can be held criminally responsible for ordering these crimes, or for failing to prevent or punish them, including at the International Criminal Court.”
Other posts reviewed by Human Rights Watch depict similar scenes. One now-deleted post on Instagram by an Israeli soldier who reportedly holds U.S. citizenship shows him standing in front of six Palestinian men who are stripped to their underwear, kneeling on the ground and handcuffed and blindfolded. The caption read, “Mom I think I freed palestine.”
Israeli forces have detained nearly 10,000 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank just since October, sending them to torture camps where released prisoners say they experience humiliation, beatings and abuse at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Several prisoners who have been released are visibly traumatized due to their time in Israeli custody.
Many of the detainees are children. The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society recently reported that Israeli forces have arrested at least 640 Palestinian children from the occupied West Bank alone since October, with at least 240 of them still in Israeli custody.
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