Knesset Members Joined in Riot to Thwart Questioning of Soldiers Accused of Rape

Unrest continues to brew in Israel after a right-wing mob including members of the Knesset broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility. +972 Magazine’s Oren Ziv, who was at one of the bases reporting on the events, says that the support of Israeli political leaders, including some members of the Knesset who participated in the riots, and the apathy of the military police all indicate that those protesting against the soldiers’ charges are “the face of the state,” expressing what are “mainstream” views in Israeli society. We also speak to Diana Buttu, a Palestinian human rights attorney who has interviewed some of the torture victims and says the extent of their abuse is “appalling.” She calls Sde Teiman a “concentration camp” that the entirety of Israeli society and the international community are “complicit” in.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israel is facing new accusations that it’s been torturing Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. A new report by the United Nations Human Rights Office found at least 53 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli custody since October 7th. The U.N. also found Palestinian prisoners have faced multiple forms of torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, starvation, electric shocks and the release of threatening dogs. The U.N. says most of the Palestinian men, women, children, doctors, journalists and human rights defenders jailed by Israel are being held without charge or trial in deplorable conditions.

The U.N. report was released on Tuesday, a day after a group of far-right Israeli protesters, including members of the Knesset, broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining nine soldiers suspected of torturing Palestinian prisoners. The nine soldiers are reportedly being investigated for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman, a facility where prisoners from Gaza say they’ve been routinely beaten and tortured.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by two guests who have been following this story closely. Diana Buttu is with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Her new piece for Zeteo is headlined “Rioting for the Right to Rape Palestinians,” her previous piece headlined, “I Spoke to Palestinians Tortured by Israel. What They Endured Is Unimaginable.” Also with us, Oren Ziv, reporter and photographer for +972 Magazine. His latest piece, just out, “A riot for impunity shows Israel’s proud embrace of its crimes.”

Diana Buttu, let’s start with you. Explain what you found in these prisons, and the significance of these revelations and this protest that broke out this week trying to protect Israeli soldiers who were being arrested by Israel, involved with the rape of one of the Palestinian prisoners in the jail.

DIANA BUTTU: Thank you, Amy.

Look, I think it’s important for people to understand that Israel has arrested somewhere up to the tune of 21,000 Palestinians. We don’t actually even have the correct number, because that information has been held back. And of these thousands of people who have been imprisoned, they’ve been imprisoned without charge, without trial — in effect, kidnapped. The people who have been released — and I’ve spoken to a number of them — all of them have been reporting the exact same treatment of extreme abuse, of torture, of being shackled 24 hours a day, of being kept in a fetal position, of being forced to eat food that is inhumane, of being deprived water, of being — many of them have talked about being raped, of being electric shocked, of sleep deprivation, you name it. And the people with whom I’ve spoken are young. Some of them are teenagers, and some of them are older. And the stories that are coming out from these prisoners is absolutely appalling.

The fact that Israel can continue to do this with impunity is what is so alarming, because nobody has been holding back. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We have the minister, the Israeli minister who is in charge of the prisons, who has come out and said, very unequivocally, that the way that we can deal with overcrowding in prisons is to institute the death penalty. He himself has been reported as being one of the individuals who carried out torture against Palestinians who have been kidnapped. And so, the situation that we hear of these people who have been coming out of Sde Teiman — by the way, Palestinians call it the “slaughterhouse” — is absolute horrifying.

Now, what happened on Monday was that, for some reason — we are not entirely sure why — there was an attempt on the part of the Israeli military to try to question — and that’s it, just question — nine members of the Israeli army who are accused of gang raping one Palestinian man. And rather than people backing the military police or saying, “We don’t want this done,” it was quite the opposite. We ended up seeing two riots, one in the actual prison camp itself — it’s a torture camp — called Sde Teiman, and another one in another military base, where there were not just rioters, but people who are members of the Knesset, including members of the Cabinet, who came forward to said that these people are heroes and that there should be no restraints put whatsoever on Israeli soldiers. So, the picture that is coming out is quite dire, and, of course, nobody is doing anything about it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Oren Ziv, you’re a reporter and photographer for +972 Magazine. You have a piece out just today headlined “A riot for impunity shows Israel’s proud embrace of its crimes.” If you could lay out your argument? You write that “Far-right protesters, soldiers, and MKs” — that is, members of the Knesset — “rallied for guards suspected of raping a Palestinian detainee. Once fringe, they’re now the public face of the state.” If you could elaborate?

OREN ZIV: Thank you for having me.

It’s important to notice that while the Israeli media tried to portray it as a struggle between the mob and the state or between the army and the police — that was not preventing this fight, although requested — I think it’s important to see that today, because Ben-Gvir and their allies are in the government and are leading those demonstrations, including breaking into Sde Teiman, they are the face of the state, and those people are not extremists, they are the mainstream Israelis nowaday.

In that sense, their sense of anger and surprise can be understood, because from the beginning of the war, since October, there was full or almost full impunity for soldiers. So, we still don’t know why this specific case was investigated and is being proceeded. But, as Diana said, we’re hearing many horrific evidence from prisoners that were released to Gaza, to the West Bank or into ’48 Israel, and it’s not a unique case. So, from the protesters’ side, they understood, and the soldiers — as we published in a different investigation, the soldiers on the ground understood they have full impunity. They were looting. They were killing. They were shooting from the sky, from the ground. And the Israeli public got the sense from the politicians declaring, but also just from the day-to-day war, that soldiers are allowed to do whatever they want. And when an incident like this comes, a very rare incident that the military police is coming and arresting or detaining a few soldiers for questioning and might take them to court, people are angry, because they believe that the Israeli military is allowed and have a backup to do anything. And this also shows us how Israel got to the ICC and to the ICJ with this kind of approach.

AMY GOODMAN: Oren, you were at Beit Lid army base on Monday, where the protests were taking place. Explain where that is and where Sde Teiman is, these two jails, prisons.

OREN ZIV: Sde Teiman is an army base near Be’er Sheva in southern Israel. And Beit Lid, where they were held, questioned and later also brought to a military court, is between — in central Israel, not far also from the West Bank town of Tulkarm.

So, the protests on Monday started at Sde Teiman with members of the government breaking into the place. And later, when they understood the soldiers were transferred to Beit Lid army base, to the military court and detention center, they moved there. Also there, members of the government and of the Knesset arrived and were inciting against the army. And also there, there were hundreds of people breaking into the military compound. And at the protest, you could see also armed men with uniforms and military weapons, probably soldiers, reservist soldiers, that are friends or colleagues of the soldiers arrested, and they were protesting against the army with the army uniform and weapons. And this is very common for Palestinians and activists in the West Bank, when you have soldiers that are actually settlers or a mixture of that. But inside Israel, since the beginning of the war, we haven’t seen much of that, of these kind of militias operating. And they were, of course, also masked.

And in general, towards them, but towards also the people who were breaking into the army base, the police was doing absolutely nothing. As we learned later, the police was just — despite the fact the army was calling for the police, they just didn’t show up. And the few policemen that were there were not doing much.

I think it’s important to see that this is kind of a struggle between the old establishment, maybe the center left or the old people in the army that, you know, believe that Israel has to have some legal framework, like to do the crime towards Palestinians but to keep them proportional, and something to investigate, to have some illusion or to present that Israel is investigating itself. And the other side is people like Ben-Gvir and their allies that think that soldiers should have full impunity and also are proud in their crimes, in the attacks against Palestinians. And they document it on social media, as we’ve seen. And this is kind of the clash that is happening in the moment.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Diana, could you explain? You spoke to a young man named Bilal, who described what he called “engineered torture methods” that were designed to break Palestinians.

DIANA BUTTU: Yes. What he talked to me about was that everything that was done was not — you know, people often think of torture — and, by the way, it should never be used — but people often think of torture as a means to try to extract information. And even then, it’s illegal. But in this case, it wasn’t at all designed to extract information. It was just as a form of eternal punishment to show who is supreme.

So, he talked about how his hands and his legs were shackled, that there was a circle that was drawn around him, with his eyes blindfolded, and kept in a fetal position for 24 hours a day, that if he moved outside of the chalk, that he would be tortured. But it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just him being tortured. He was then forced to witness other people being tortured, as well. So, he himself, the only time the blindfold was removed was to see other people being tortured, other people being raped.

He also talked to me about the small quantities of food that were being given to them, so much so that he got to the point where he was looking to see exactly how many calories were written on the various containers that he was given, because the whole point was to try to control how much food they were taking in. He ended up losing a substantial amount of weight while being held in prison, and is still undergoing very serious health problems because he was not allowed to use the bathroom for a number of — for about 60 days. He also talked about how — that all of the prisoners who have emerged, all these kidnapped people, have scabies on them. They were denied the ability to take showers. And they were denied the ability to have even drinking water.

So, all of this, he said, was just as a means of showing who it is who is boss. They weren’t at all doing torture to extract information. Again, that is illegal and should not be conducted. But in this case, it was a question of exerting one’s superiority over them. He wanted — they were told that they must understand that Israel is superior and that Israel can exact revenge anytime it wants.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, who himself was jailed by Israel for seven months without charge.

DR. MUHAMMAD ABU SALMIYA: [translated] We were subjected to severe torture, and my little finger was broken. I was repeatedly subjected to hitting on the head, causing bleeding multiple times. There was almost daily torture in the Israeli prisons. When prisoners’ cells were raided daily, they were severely beaten every day. We say this with full certainty, and we lived through it with great bitterness. …

Colleagues working in the Ministry of Health and other prisoners got out with us today, about 50 prisoners. We left behind many prisoners, tens of thousands of prisoners, living in hardship, experiencing psychological and physical torture that no Palestinian prisoner has experienced since the Nakba in 1948. Our brave prisoners are subjected to all kinds of tortures behind bars. Even the older prisoners who have spent tens of years in the occupation prisons have been deprived of all of their most basic rights. Many prisoners have died while they were in interrogation and were deprived of medicine and food.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that’s Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, who himself was jailed by Israel for seven months, only recently released. And then you have Palestinian attorney Khaled Mahajneh, who was the first lawyer to visit Sde Teiman. He said, “The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.” We hear about people losing their limbs because they were handcuffed so tightly for so long. Diana Buttu, as we wrap up, your final comments about what’s happening and where the investigations are going for this and who is being held accountable?

DIANA BUTTU: This is a concentration camp. It’s a torture camp, where, as Khaled has already mentioned, we’ve seen that people have had their limbs chopped off, oftentimes without anesthesia, by the way, where all segments of society are now complicit in this. And the fact that we don’t see any investigations or even a push for investigations inside Israel, but, to the contrary, we see people who are pushing for the right to be able to torture and rape, it shows you exactly where Israeli society is, and it shows you that there’s a failure on the part of the international system to hold Israel accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: Diana Buttu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization. We’ll link to your pieces in Zeteo, “Rioting for the Right to Rape Palestinians” and “I Spoke to Palestinians Tortured by Israel. What They Endured Is Unimaginable.” And we want to thank Oren Ziv, reporter and photographer for +972 Magazine. His latest article is headlined “A riot for impunity shows Israel’s proud embrace of its crimes.”

Coming up, Donald Trump questioned by three Black women reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention. You must hear this.