On torture – Ghada Alkurd, Nikolai Antoniadis, Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Thore Schröder in Der Spiegel:

‘After being taken prisoner, according to Zuweidi’s account, he was brought to the Israeli camp Sde Teiman, where he spent 18 days, hands bound and blindfolded. He and the other prisoners were rarely allowed to use a toilet; most of the time they had to relieve themselves where they were crouching. They were not allowed to lie down, not allowed to speak, not allowed to raise their heads. At night they were only permitted to sleep for five hours. They were, he says, beaten over and over again.’

(…)

‘Zuweidi was one of around 1,700 Palestinians from Gaza who were captured during the war and released in mid-October. The vast majority of them were civilians who were imprisoned without charges as so-called irregular combatants. Many of them, like Zuweidi, have since told stories of hunger, abuse and unbearable detention conditions. Their accounts are consistent with reporting by international media, including DER SPIEGEL, since mid-2024 as well as reports by Israeli and international human rights organizations. Sde Teiman has since gained notoriety as "Israel's Guantanamo." But the abuse is not limited to the military camp in the Negev Desert. It also appears to be commonplace in almost all other detention camps and prisons. Israel denies that this is the case.’

(…)

‘Hussein al-Zuweidi, the released prisoner, confirms that violence was commonplace not only in Sde Teiman, but also in the three other detention sites where he was held. During one interrogation, he says, the men questioning him tied him to a chair for 12 hours and repeatedly beat his penis. Afterwards, he says, he had blood in his urine. He received brutal beatings, he says, in particular when he was transferred from one place to another. On one occasion, he says, a fellow inmate told him that he had been raped with a baton.’

(…)

‘In two years of war, only one single soldier was convicted of beating Palestinian prisoners in Sde Teiman. He received a sentence of seven months in prison, a verdict that human rights organizations criticized as too lenient.
"The army is still considered sacred in Israel," says Israeli international law expert Eitan Diamond from the Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre. In addition, he says, the Netanyahu government has created a political culture "that feeds on hatred." As a result, he sees "a widespread dehumanization of Palestinians." All of this leads to lawless behavior becoming commonplace, he says.
His conclusion: "An army that allows crimes to become the norm is unable to prosecute individual crimes." All the more important, he says, is that the International Criminal Court continue its investigations and be supported in doing so, even against the resistance of the U.S. and Israel.’

Read the article here.

The Israeli Gitmo, as if one Gitmo wasn’t more than enough already.

The idea that you can do with your enemies as you please, the belief that some people cannot expect to have the right to have rights, it all points in one direction: the jungle.