Description

Photos: Published by Haaretz

Scenes at Sde Teiman.
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Hands and feet in shackles. Eyes blindfolded. No moving. No talking. And, sometimes, violent beatings. Days upon days, weeks upon weeks pass like this at the Sde Teiman facility for Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians from Gaza. These interviewees know. They served there

Shay Fogelman
Aug 16, 2024 6:00 am IDT

In the days after the surprise attack on southern Israel on October 7, a total of some 120 Hamas militants, members of the movement's Nukhba military wing and Palestinian civilians from the Gaza Strip were taken into custody in Israel. They were sent to a detention facility specially created on a military police base at the Sde Teiman camp, between the town of Ofakim and Be'er Sheva in the Negev. In the months that followed, more than 4,500 additional inhabitants of the Strip, among them terrorists from various organizations, and civilians, were incarcerated there.

Not long after the facility began to operate, testimonies were published in both Israeli and foreign media to the effect that detainees there were being starved, beaten and tortured. It was also alleged that the conditions of detention did not conform to international law. Further allegations were made concerning the treatment at the field hospital set up nearby. Staff testified that detainee-patients were fed through a straw, forced to relieve themselves in a diaper and handcuffed so tightly, for 24 hours a day, that there were a number of cases of amputation of limbs.

Two months ago, it was learned that the Israel Defense Forces was conducting a criminal investigation against soldiers allegedly involved in the death of 36 detainees in the camp. Last month, 10 reservists were arrested there on suspicion of brutal sexual abuse of an inmate. Regular or reservist soldiers assigned to Sde Teiman are subordinate to the military police, which has ultimate authority over the goings-on there.

In the wake of the many testimonies that surfaced, five human rights organizations petitioned the High Court of Justice, calling for the site to be shut down. In early June, the state announced in response that it intended to transfer most of the detainees to facilities run by the Israel Prison Service and to restore the camp to its original mission "as a facility for temporary, short-term [incarceration] for purposes of interrogation and classification only." In another response to the High Court of Justice earlier this month, the state declared that there were now only 28 detainees in the facility.

Since the war broke out, thousands of Israeli soldiers in regular and reservist forces have served at Sde Teiman. Most were posted there within the framework of a mission with which their unit was tasked. Others volunteered to serve there for a variety of reasons. In recent months, a number of soldiers and medical professionals agreed to talk with Haaretz about their time there. Eight of the testimonies follow, anonymously and in chronological order, from the earliest stint to the most recent.

N., a student from the north, reservist

"I was mobilized with the whole battalion on October 7. We were sent to secure communities in the western Negev, and after two weeks we moved to Be'er Sheva. I was involved in activity not related to the battalion when I saw on the company's WhatsApp group announcements that we had another mission – something new: guard duty at Sde Teiman. It wasn't so clear at first.

"When I got back to my company people were already whispering about the place. Someone asked if I'd heard about what was happening there. Someone else said, 'You know you have to hit people there,' as though he was taunting me and wanted to test my reaction, whether I was a leftist or something like that. There was also a soldier in the company who boasted that he'd beaten people at the facility. He told us that he had gone with a shift officer from the military police and they had beaten one of the detainees with clubs. I was curious about the place, and the stories sounded a little exaggerated to me, so I pretty much volunteered to go there.

"In Sde Teiman we guarded the detainees' lockup. We did 12-hour shifts during the day or night. The battalion's doctors and medics did 24-hour shifts at the field hospital. At the end of each shift we returned to Be'er Sheva to sleep.

"The detainees were in a large hangar with a roof and walls on three sides. Instead of a fourth wall, facing us, there was a fence with a double gate and two locks, like in dog parks. A barbed-wire fence surrounded everything. Our positions were close to the two corners of the fence, at a kind of diagonal, behind concrete blocks in a U shape. A soldier stands at each post, watching the detainees and guarding the military police personnel in charge of operating the place. We did shifts of two hours on, two hours off. If you weren't guarding you could go to the rest area, a kind of tent that had drinks and snacks.

"The inmates sat in eight rows on the ground, with about eight people in each. One hangar held 70 people and the second around 100. The military police told us that they had to sit. They were not allowed to peek out from their blindfolds. They were not allowed to move. They were not allowed to talk. And that if… what they [the military police] said was that if they broke the rules, it was permitted to punish them."

How were they punished?

"For minor things, you could force them to stand in place [for about 30 minutes]. If the person continued to make trouble, or for more serious violations, the military police officer could also take him aside… and beat him with a club."

Continue reading here.
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A shocking testimony of an Israeli military doctor about Israel's Sde Teiman detention center - Haaretz

TEL AVIV, Friday, August 16, 2024 (WAFA-Palestinian News Agency) - An Israeli military doctor has provided a harrowing account of the inhumane conditions faced by Palestinian detainees at the notorious Sde Teiman detention center in southern Israel, Anadolu Agency quoted Haaretz, Israel's daily newspaper.

According to Anadolu Agency, the doctor's testimony which was published by the Israeli daily, Haaretz, on Friday, shed light on the brutal treatment of detainees from Gaza.

The unnamed doctor, who served at the facility during the past winter, described appalling scenes inside the medical tents.

“In one hospitalization tent, there were no more than 20 patients. All had their four limbs shackled to old steel beds, like the ones used in our hospitals years ago. All were conscious and all were blindfolded all the time,” said the doctor.

The doctor recounted that many of the detainees had recently undergone major surgeries or had suffered gunshot wounds, some occurring just hours before their arrival at the facility.

"Every physician knows that what such a person needs a day or two in intensive care and then to be moved to a ward. … But the person was sent to a pen in Sde Teiman two hours after surgery," the doctor said.

The doctor also reported the case of “another patient suffering from a systemic infection – sepsis.”

“He was in critical condition, and even according to the protocol, he should not have been there. Only patients who are completely stable are supposed to be hospitalized at Sde Teiman. But he was there and they said there was no alternative,” he added.

“To hold a person without letting them move any of their limbs, blindfolded, naked, under treatment, in the middle of the desert, … in the end, it's no less than torture,” he noted.

Reflecting on his time at Sde Teiman, the doctor said: “It all felt so surrealistic to me, just a quarter of an hour's drive from Be'er Sheva. Like, everything I'd been taught, all the years in university and hospitals, how to treat people – all that exists, but in an environment in which 20 people are being held naked in a tent. It's something you can't imagine.”

T.R.