Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Israel is brutally torturing Palestinian detainees in Gaza

Spread the love

Original article by Abdul Rahman republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Reports show that Israeli forces are executing Palestinian civilians in Gaza in front of their families and keeping detainees in open air concentration camps in violation of international laws on warfare

Photo: Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

A new video has emerged showing occupying Israeli forces using different forms of torture against scores of Palestinian detainees from Gaza in complete violation of established rules of warfare and human rights norms.

The video footage, released this past week by several media channels, showed Israeli forces stripping dozens of Palestinian detainees in an open field (apparently a stadium) and making them sit in a single file line. Some of the Palestinian detainees were blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs and it is clear that there were children and toddlers among the detainees.

This was second such incident in less than a month where Israeli forces have been found clearly violating norms of warfare, laws related to prisoners of war, and laws prohibiting torture.

On December 7, a similar set of videos and photos were broadcasted on an Israeli TV channel in which dozens of men stripped to their underwear were seen sitting in the middle of a street or taken away in a truck by Israeli forces. The report had claimed these were men affiliated to Palestinian resistance group, Hamas. Israelis also circulated a video wherein some of the detainees appear to surrender weapons.

Following the publication of those photos and videos, individuals on social media had questioned the claims of Israeli forces and identified their relatives, friends, and colleagues among those detained. They alleged that most of those in the video had nothing to do with Hamas and they were detained, humiliated and tortured by the invading Israeli forces. Many have also claimed that the Israeli forces who had filmed the Palestinian detainees, staged a fake surrender.

Al-Jazeera reported later that most of the men in the video were kidnapped by the Israelis from Khalifa Bin Zayed and New Aleppo schools used by the UNRWA to shelter some of the nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians, forced out of their homes because of Israeli bombings.

Urgent and impartial investigation in Israeli crimes is required 

Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian National Initiative Party wrote on X (formerly Twitter), on December 20, that more than a thousand detainees, including the director of Al-Shifa hospital, are being subjected to brutal torture and severe beatings by the Israeli forces.  

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based human rights organization, has been gathering the testimonies of the Palestinians tortured under Israeli detention, and has called for an urgent and impartial investigation into those allegations of human rights violations and war crimes. 

Some of the Palestinians released from Israeli detention narrated their harrowing experience to the media saying that they were drugged and beaten by the Israeli forces to force them to admit they were Hamas fighters. 

Some of them had visible marks of torture on their bodies. The released detainees also said that some of their fellow prisoners have not been released and have probably been killed. 

Two such former detainees, 22-year-old Nayef Ali and 55-year-old Khamis al-Bardini were quoted by the AFP saying that Israeli forces, after arresting them from eastern Gaza’s Zaitun suburb, tied their hands behind their backs for two full days.  

“We were not allowed to eat or drink, neither we were…allowed to use toilets” Nayef Ali had stated. He also added that during the entire time of their detention they were beaten up by the Israeli troops who also “threw cold water on us before transferring us to a prison.” They were beaten up and tortured in the prison as well.   

Israeli soldiers have also been accused of killing Palestinians detainees in Gaza at point blank range on several occasions since October 7. Some of these killings have been acknowledged by the United Nations. 

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a statement on December 20 confirming the news of 11 Palestinians killed in cold blood, in front of their family members, by the Israeli armed forces in Al-Remel neighborhood in Gaza on December 19.   

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has also documented that one of the camps run by the Israeli forces to keep the Palestinian detainees, Sde Teman, is like a new Guantanamo Bay, the infamous US detention center created during the so-called war on terror on occupied Cuban land used to torture hundreds of detainees allegedly involved in terrorist activities.

Original article by Abdul Rahman republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

As Israel’s war on Gaza completes 82 days, it continues to torture, …

Khalida Jarrar arrested in West Bank as Israel continues its genocidal …

US attacks multiple sites in Iraq as it faces backlash for backing Israeli genocide in Gaza

Normalization with Israel has been ended by its brutal war on Gaza

Continue ReadingIsrael is brutally torturing Palestinian detainees in Gaza

Probe Demanded Over ‘Absurd’ Israeli Narrative About Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital

Spread the love
2023.10.08 Pro-Palestinian Rally, Washington DC. Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
2023.10.08 Pro-Palestinian Rally, Washington DC. Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

“Israel needs to offer the outside world more than a few rifles and other armaments to justify its attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and ill and injured civilians,” said Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

A human rights monitor in Geneva on Friday called on the United Nations to help get to the bottom of Israel’s claim that its bombing and raid of Gaza’s largest medical complex this week was necessary to stop Hamas from running a vast military compound beneath it—an allegation that more than two days after the attack began, has been backed up only by images Israel released of a small cache of weapons.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the time has come for an independent international investigation into “Israel’s absurd narrative” about al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, and noted that administrators at the facility are also demanding a probe “that includes a United Nations inspection.”

Israel did extensive damage to al-Shifa’s cardiac care department, surgical ward, and a pharmaceutical warehouse when it began bombing the hospital at dawn on Wednesday in just one of more than 245 attacks on medical facilities in Gaza since October 7. Israeli officials said they expected to find “the beating heart” of Hamas’ military operations in the hospital.

But after searching basement areas and several health departments as well as conducting a “violent interrogation campaign” targeting displaced people and medical personnel, Euro-Med said, Israel has so far produced only a video showing a small number of weapons.

“The absence of any neutral international party’s involvement in the Israeli military raids and searches of al-Shifa Medical Complex and other hospitals in the strip raises widespread doubts about the Israeli narrative,” said Euro-Med. “Israel needs to offer the outside world more than a few rifles and other armaments to justify its attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and ill and injured civilians.”

“We are left with nothing—no power, no food, no water. With every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight, we lost 22 persons.”

Separately, the BBC aired a segment on Friday in which the network noted the Israel Defense Forces first released a seven-minute video displaying the weapons it found—a video that appeared to be edited despite IDF claims that it was filmed in a single shot with no edits, and that raised several other questions.

“This IDF video was posted, then deleted, then reposted, this time without a section referring to an Israeli soldier who’d been held hostage,” reported the BBC.

Reporters from the network arrived at al-Shifa a few hours after the IDF released the original video, and were shown a different selection of weapons than those that appeared in the military’s video.

“What we see in this IDF video doesn’t equate Israel’s description of an ‘operational command center for Hamas,'” the BBC reported.

The footage, released late at night “after long hours of searches and fruitless inspections,” said Euro-Med, “raises a lot of questions, especially since no gunman has been arrested and no evidence has been found to back the previous claims about the presence of tunnels beneath the hospital.”

The IDF has also claimed that Hamas “knew we were coming” and had likely “made off with or hidden traces of their presence” at al-Shifa, The New York Times reported.

Israel’s narrative about al-Shifa has also drawn scrutiny from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, who said that even if the hospital were being used as a command center for Hamas, “protecting [patients] is paramount.”

“Even if health facilities are used for military purposes, the principles of distinction, precaution, and proportionality always apply,” Tedros said.

The director of al-Shifa, Muhammed Abu Salmiya, toldAl Jazeera Friday that staff are still trying to save as many of the 7,000 patients and refugees in the hospital as they can amid Israel’s ongoing siege, but they “lost all those who were in the intensive care unit” following the attack on Wednesday.

“We are left with nothing—no power, no food, no water,” said Abu Salmiya. “With every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight, we lost 22 persons.”

The Biden administration, which has continued supporting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as the death toll has grown to at least 11,470 in less than six weeks, said this week it believed the IDF’s claims about al-Shifa, with President Joe Biden saying it was a “fact” that Hamas has “their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital.”

A day after the bombing, as observers awaited evidence of an extensive command center beneath the hospital, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller appeared less confident in Israel’s narrative, telling reporters that the White House “never said there were command posts in every hospital in Gaza.”

“We don’t want to see hospitals struck from the air,” said Miller. “We understand that Hamas continues to use hospitals in places where they embed their fighters.”

After the BBC reported on the IDF’s changing video documentation of its findings, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft called Israel’s “propaganda” supporting its onslaught in Gaza “increasingly clownish.”

“Only Joe Biden seems to believe it,” said Parsi.

Journalist Jeremy Scahill pointed out that Israel itself is known to have built “an underground operating room and tunnels under the hospital” in 1983.

“This is not a secret,” Scahill wrote on social media, noting that Israel has claimed Hamas expanded the tunnels in recent years.

Allegations of a Hamas command center, supported by the U.S., said Scahill, “should be backed up by clear evidence, not a Geraldo Rivera/Al Capone’s vault-style video presentation featuring an English-speaking IDF soldier.”

“No matter what is or is not found, there is no justification for the repeated attacks against civilian hospitals—in fact al-Shifa is the largest hospital treating the most vulnerable people in Gaza, including NICU babies,” he added. “The mere existence of tunnels, originally built by Israel, does not prove the specific allegations made by the U.S. or Israel. The standard for such evidence should be very, very high.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingProbe Demanded Over ‘Absurd’ Israeli Narrative About Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital