Prominent Israeli human rights group denounces decision to place victim in a situation where he could face his abusers

Soldiers lock a gate at Sde Teiman detention facility, after Israeli military police arrived as part of an investigation into the suspected abuse of a Palestinian detainee on 29 July (Reuters)

By MEE staff, 1 August 2024

A Palestinian detainee hospitalised in Beersheba after allegedly being raped by Israeli soldiers in Sde Teiman detention centre has been returned to the notorious facility, according to the Israeli news outlet Haaretz.

The prisoner was discharged to a field hospital at Sde Teiman.

He suffered from “a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs”, according to Haaretz and Arab48.

On Monday, nine Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman were arrested on suspicion of raping a Palestinian detainee, sparking a riot when far-right activists and MPs stormed the facility.

The reservists, who are members of Force 100, a unit tasked with guarding the prisoners in Sde Teiman, were brought to the military court at the Beid Lid base for a bail hearing.

They claimed the prisoner attacked them during the search process, according to Haaretz.

Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights denounced the prisoner’s return to the facility where he was allegedly abused.

‘Serious ethical and professional failure’

“The return of the detainee to the clinic at Sde Teiman, the facility where he was subjected to torture, is a serious ethical and professional failure of the medical officials and hospital management who were involved in his medical care,” the organisation was quoted as saying in Haaretz.

“Through this decision, the medical teams exposed the detainee to the possibility that he would once again meet the soldiers suspected of raping him, thereby putting his life in danger.”

Yoel Donchin, a doctor at Sde Teiman who has attended the prisoner, was also quoted as saying that he “couldn’t believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a thing”.

He said: “If the state and Knesset [parliament] members think there’s no limit to how much you can abuse prisoners, they should kill them themselves, like the Nazis did, or close the hospitals… If they maintain a hospital only for the sake of defending ourselves at [the International Criminal Court] the Hague, that’s no good.”

About 4,000 Palestinians have been detained from Gaza in Israel since October 2023. Most are detained and interrogated in the enclave but many are brought to Sde Teiman, even if they are a non-combatant.

Torture, rape and murder have all been reported as rife at the facility, one of several facilities where Palestinians have been mistreated for decades.

On 15 July, Israel’s High Court issued a conditional order seeking to close Sde Teiman in response to the reports of abuse there.

The court’s order seeks an explanation as to “why the Sde Teiman detention facility is not operated in accordance with the conditions set forth in the law governing internment of unlawful combatants”.

Investigations by Middle East Eye, CNN and the New York Times found widespread examples of abuse at the centre.

Twelve US warships are assembled in the region to protect Israel

Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, August 1, 2024

President Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and promised the US would help defend Israel from any reprisal attacks it may face from Iran or its allies in response to recent Israeli escalations.

Iran is vowing revenge for the Israeli assassination of Hamas’s political chief in Tehran, and Hezbollah is warning it will escalate in response to the Israeli strike in Beirut that killed one of its top commanders.

“The President reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis,” the White House said in a readout of the Biden-Netanyahu call.

Biden also said the US was deploying more military assets to the region. “The President discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive US military deployments,” the readout said. The White House said Vice President Kamala Harris was also on the call.

A Pentagon official told The Washington Post that the US had assembled 12 warships in the Middle East that were already in the region to prepare to defend Israel. The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and six US Navy destroyers are in the Persian Gulf, while three amphibious ships and two destroyers are in the Eastern Mediterranean.

US officials told Axios that the US is preparing for a direct Iranian attack on Israel and believes it could be bigger than the April 13 missile and drone attack that came in response to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria. The next attack could include Hezbollah and other Iranian allies.

Biden, Harris, and other US officials claim they’re trying to reduce tensions. But unconditional US military aid for Israel and vows to defend Israel no matter what it does in the region only emboldens Netanyahu and leads to more escalations.

Phyllis Bennis says the killing of Haniyeh in Tehran was a deliberate provocation that matches Netanyahu’s longstanding goal of drawing the U.S. into a potential Israel-Iran war.

Ismail Haniyeh speaking in Gaza in April 2012. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

By Phyllis Bennis
Common Dreams

A new assassination campaign aimed at Israel’s opponents has erupted across the Middle East, imperiling already shaky Gaza ceasefire talks and threatening an even greater regional expansion of war. 

While Israel continues its genocidal attack on desperate Gazans, killing scores, perhaps hundreds just in the last several days, the latest moves were clearly designed to escalate Israel’s war in Gaza and expand the military tensions already simmering on its border with Lebanon, in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere into a full-scale war, potentially drawing in both Iran and the United States even more directly. 

The lethal attacks on top military and political officials of Hezbollah and Hamas, in Beirut and Tehran respectively within 24 hours, demonstrates the centrality of assassination — and the irrelevance of diplomacy — in Tel Aviv’s strategic calculus.

[The New York Times reports that Israel has claimed a third assassination, see Israel Claims Killing of Militant Leader as Funerals Are Held for 2 Others]

Tuesday evening in the Lebanese capital, an Israeli airstrike hit the neighborhood of Dahiyeh, destroying a residential building very close to a major hospital, killing and injuring still-unconfirmed numbers of people. 

Israel claimed it killed Fuad Shukr, a top military official of Hezbollah, and a close adviser to Hassan Nasrallah, head of the political-military resistance organization in Lebanon. [Hezbollah has confirmed Shukur’s death.]

Just hours before that Israeli strike, U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said that U.S. officials “do not believe that all-out war is inevitable and we still believe that it can be avoided.” That followed his statement that “our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad and unwavering against all Iran-backed threats, including Hezbollah, and we are working on a diplomatic solution.”

[Watch: U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham says U.S. is on the ‘verge of a major conflict’ with Iran]

But the U.S. has made clear by its actions — regardless of some politicians’ rhetorical support for ending the war — that it is not prepared to do the one thing that would result in a permanent ceasefire: stop sending Israel the weapons that enable the war in Gaza.

To the contrary, the possibility of a diplomatic solution was grievously undermined again just hours after the Beirut attack when another airstrike, widely assumed to be Israeli, assassinated the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in a guest house in Tehran. 

He was visiting the Iranian capital for the inauguration of just-elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Haniyeh, who had briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections that were initially welcomed by the United States, lived in exile in Qatar. 

In recent months he played a key role in the Qatar-sponsored and U.S.-backed Israeli-Hamas negotiations aimed at ending Israel’s assault on Gaza, ensuring access to humanitarian aid, and releasing illegally held Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages. 

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian in 2024. (Khamenei.ir, Wikimedia Commons, C BY 4.0)

All the talk about Washington and Tel Aviv supporting a ceasefire or wanting the hostages returned means little when a top negotiator on the other side can be assassinated with impunity. 

Haniyeh was widely recognized as pragmatic and supportive of negotiations; in 2006, just three months after Hamas won the Palestinian election in both Gaza and the West Bank, Haniyeh wrote to then-President George W. Bush urging negotiations between the U.S. and Hamas, and offering acceptance of a two-state solution and a long-term truce with Israel.

The current situation, he wrote, “will encourage violence and chaos in the whole region.” Bush never responded.

The negotiations the Hamas leader was participating in will almost certainly be stalled, if not derailed entirely, as a result of Haniyeh’s killing. The resulting continuation of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza matches the goal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has resisted ceasefire efforts and pledged to keep fighting until Hamas is destroyed. 

Biden announcing Israel’s three-phase ceasefire proposal for Gaza on May 31. (White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The likelihood of an expanding regional war is now exponentially higher — with the danger of a much more direct conflict between Israel and Iran, and the possibility of even greater direct U.S. involvement. 

The assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was a deliberate provocation, aimed at forcing an Iranian reaction.

Any government whose intelligence assets were powerful enough to know exactly where the Hamas leader was staying during a temporary visit to the Iranian capital would have known where he lived in Qatar, where an assassination, while of course still illegal, would not have had the same consequences.

Forcing Iran’s hand, particularly at the highly symbolic moment of the inauguration, will severely limit the options for the new president, who has called for renewed negotiations with the United States on nuclear issues and signaled the possibility of reopening the Iran nuclear deal. 

Preventing that would match Netanyahu’s longstanding goal of undermining any hint of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement and bringing the United States directly into a potential Israeli-Iranian war. 

While details on the exact nature of the missiles or other kind of projectiles used in the two assassinations have not yet been made public, it is likely that one or both were U.S.-produced and/or U.S.-funded. 

In that circumstance, the U.S. complicity in genocide by providing the weapons Israel is using in Gaza, could expand to direct U.S. involvement in what could escalate into a major regional war — exactly the war that U.S. officials claim they are trying to prevent.

The work of the movement for a permanent ceasefire — a ceasefire that includes an end to the killing, the resumption of humanitarian assistance and funding of UNRWA, and an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel — is about to get a whole lot harder, and a whole lot more urgent.

Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her most recent book is the 7th updated edition of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer (2018). Her other books include: Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer (2008) and Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power (2005).

This article is from  Common Dreams and was co-published with Foreign Policy in Focus.