Israel and Torture
Israel has a long history of using torture against Palestinians. Legal challenges have not been sufficient to curtail it. Israel's egregious use of torture reminds us of the U.S.'s own torture history
On 12 December 1997, by resolution 52/149, the UN General Assembly proclaimed 26 June the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, with a view to the total eradication of torture and the effective functioning of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. [Link]
On 28 May 2024, Mondoweiss published an important article by Kanav Kathuria, “How Israeli prison doctors assist in the torture of Palestinian detainees.” Kathuria’s article is like a punch in the gut. Reading it also gave me a vertiginous case of déjà vu. Much of what I read was similar to what occurred in U.S. torture prisons. I was not alone in seeing this. Former Guantanamo detainees themselves are also speaking out about the torture in Israeli prisons, and how it reminds them of what they experienced.
Kathuria’s article is a devastating indictment of Israel’s use of torture, and the role of medical personnel in its implementation. It is worth quoting at some length:
When chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on Monday, he remarkably chose not to include torture or sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners in his list of Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Khan’s omission of torture is exceptional. Over the past seven months, hundreds of reports, testimonies, and investigations have shed further light on Israel’s brutal torture of Palestinian detainees and prisoners held captive in Israeli occupation prisons.
As Palestinian civil society organizations such as Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, and others have extensively documented, prisoners are being viciously beaten and abused multiple times a day, caged in cells “not fit for human life,” kept blindfolded with their hands bound with plastic ties, isolated from the outside world, stripped of their clothing, collectively punished through starvation, attacked by dogs, sexually assaulted, and psychologically tortured. At least thirteen Palestinians have been martyred in prison since October 7 as a result of torture and being denied proper medical care. Countless more have been discovered in mass graves with clear evidence of having undergone torture, executions, and other crimes against humanity.
Immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas and affiliated groups, who struck back at Israel’s Occupation regime and persecution of Palestinians, the Israeli army acted to sequester its incarceration regime and further isolate its detainees by suspending all visits to facilities by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
“We have methods no one will discover; we’ll cause you damage that won’t leave any signs but that will kill you.”
According to an ICRC representative who I had reached out to, “While we may not be as vocal as some would like, we are actively engaging the relevant authorities on this critical matter within our usual dialogue. The ICRC stands prepared to resume its regular detention visits at the earliest to continue, among other things, the monitoring of the treatment of detainees and the conditions of detention in all relevant facilities.”
The ICRC representative, who did not directly reference torture or any other mistreatment by Israeli authorities, also said they are working to get access to hostages held by Hamas.
The ICRC has not, so far as I know, directly mentioned the use of medical personnel as part of Israel’s torture regime. In 2024, it seems that questions about such behaviors should be standard operating procedure, as doctors’ collaboration with state torture goes back at least to the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes. It was also a major feature of the U.S.’s own torture program.
Almost twenty years ago now, as revelations kept spilling out over U.S. use of torture at Guantanamo, Bagram, on torture ships, CIA black sites, and in Iraq, Dr. Steven Miles, former Professor of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School, asked a very pertinent question: “Where were the doctors and nurses at Abu Ghraib, Qaim, Bagram, and the other islands of the United States prison archipelago abroad when prisoners were being beaten, suspended, and degraded?”
As Miles described it, doctors failed to document torture when they saw evidence of it. Medics who witnessed torture failed to report it. Autopsy-labelled deaths that should have been attributed to torture were instead marked as death from “natural causes.” Ultimately, Miles presented his study of doctor complicity in the book, Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors.
The Case of Mohamed Al Hanashi
As someone who worked as a psychologist myself for some twenty years, I was emotionally floored when during the unfolding of the post-9/11 torture scandal I learned that doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and other medical personnel were intimately involved with the torture. Detainee medical records were freely shared with interrogators. Some of the doctors and psychologists were deeply involved in the construction of the U.S. Pentagon and CIA torture protocols themselves.
When, around eight or nine years ago, I was researching the 2009 death in custody of Guantanamo detainee Mohamed Al Hanashi, one of the records released to me by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), was a written statement made by the young Yemeni prisoner Al Hanashi within 24 hours of his death. It directly brought home to me how doctors and psychologists and other medical personnel had abandoned their ethical creed to collaborate with state torture.
Upset with the institution of harsher rules in the Behavioral Health Unit at Guanatamo, where he had been placed for suicidal ideation and depression, Al Hanashi reached out to the chief psychologist in the unit to make a complaint. He felt he and the other prisoners were being tortured by the harsh Guantanamo regime. By his own admission in a signed affidavit, the Guantanamo psychologist turned his back as soon as Al Hanashi brought up torture.
“This is what I usually do,” he told NCIS investigators, “when a detainee accuses staff of torture.” (See Figure 2 above.)
In a diary-like message he wrote later that day, Al Hanashi decried this psychologist’s "inappropriate behavior as someone who is supposed to be in a humanitarian position. At that time I knew that the only solution is death....” (see Figure 1 above). Indeed, before the dawn of the next day, he died either at his own hand, even as he was supposed to be under near constant surveillance, or he was murdered. I covered his death at some length in my book, Cover-up at Guantanamo.
Al Hanashi was found dead in his cell later that night, supposedly having strangled himself to death with elastic from his own underwear. Whether he really killed himself or was himself the victim of a murderer, I can’t know for sure. But if he did kill himself, the evidence shows he was driven to it, in large part, by the sense of betrayal he felt from Guantanamo’s medical personnel. A world made up of doctors who torture surely looks like a hopeless world, especially if you are imprisoned and in their power.
Medical complicity
Kathuria’s article zeroed in on the complicity of medical personnel in the torture taking place in Israeli military prisons. Doctors falsified medical records. They failed to document torture when they saw it, or were directed not to document it. Even worse, as at Guantanamo and the CIA black sites, the doctors and psychologists were made part of the torture system itself. As Kathuria explained:
Medical complicity in torture occurs in a number of ways. As explicated in Addameer’s 2020 comprehensive study, Cell 26, prior to the start of a detainee’s interrogation, Israeli physicians collaborate with Shin Bet interrogators to “certify” or approve that they are “fit” to undergo torture. Throughout the duration of interrogation, a physician provides a “green light” that torture can continue.
The Mondoweiss article, which I’ve quoted at some length here because it is so good, so comprehensive, takes up the question of how it is that a profession dedicated to healing and reducing suffering could be suborned to the cruelest sort of war crimes:
The participation of medical professionals in torture — those whose duty is ostensibly to heal, alleviate suffering, and act in the best interests of their patients — is not a contradiction. Regardless of ethics or laws, Israeli medical personnel first and foremost operate as agents of Israel’s settler colonial regime. Under settler colonialism, all aspects of a colonizer’s society serve one purpose — to further the oppression of the colonized people.
The profession of medicine is no different. In his essay, “Medicine and Colonialism,” Frantz Fanon outlines what it means to practice medicine in a colonial context. Speaking on French Algeria, he writes:
“the doctor himself… has decided to exclude himself from the protective circle that the principles and the values of the medical profession have woven around him…In a given region, the doctor sometimes reveals himself as the most sanguinary of colonizers… so he becomes the torturer who happens to be a doctor.”
A Long History of Israeli Torture
There have been a couple of other recent exposés on Israel’s use of torture during their genocidal campaign against Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. CNN published an 11 May 2024 story on Israel’s military detention center at Sde Teiman in the Negev desert. Whistleblowers described how Palestinian prisoners there were stripped, made to wear diapers, “placed under extreme physical restraint,” beaten, made to undergo amputations from being placed in too tight handcuffs, zip-tied into stress positions, had dogs set upon them, and other horrors.
The Ste Teiman scandal was taken up by The New York Times in a 6 June article:
A three-month investigation by The New York Times — based on interviews with former detainees and with Israeli military officers, doctors and soldiers who served at the site; the visit to the base; and data about released detainees provided by the military — found those 1,200 Palestinian civilians have been held at Sde Teiman in demeaning conditions without the ability to plead their cases to a judge for up to 75 days. Detainees are also denied access to lawyers for up to 90 days and their location is withheld from rights groups as well as from the International Committee of the Red Cross, in what some legal experts say is a contravention of international law.
The NYT article was based on interviews with former prisoners. These prisoners testified to having been “punched, kicked and beaten with batons, rifle butts and a hand-held metal detector while in custody…. Seven said they had been forced to wear only a diaper while being interrogated. Three said they had received electric shocks during their interrogations.”
Yet, true to the theme of this article, “senior military doctors” at Sde Teiman told NYT reporters “they had never observed any signs of torture and commanders said they tried to treat detainees as humanely as possible.”
As the Mondoweiss article made clear, the torture at Sde Teiman was not something new. In fact, there is a long history of exposing Israel’s use of torture. As far back as June 1977, “the Insight Team of the Sunday Times of London reported Israel’s use of torture against Palestinians was ‘systematic’ and ‘appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy.’”
Human rights activists were successful in getting the issue heard before Israel’s Supreme Court back in the 1990s, only to have the latter leave a loophole for prisoner abuse via a claim of “necessity”, such as the so-called “ticking time bomb” excuse, a means of defense for interrogators for use of torture, which the court called “special interrogation means.”
In 2007, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel showcased the testimonies of nine Palestinian prisoners, all tortured under the faulty premise that they represented “ticking time bombs”, or otherwise presented cases where torture was deemed “necessary.” It is a harrowing read.
In just one example, Muhammad ‘Abd al- Rahim Barjiyye, a fourth-year business student at Bethlehem University, was arrested in June 2005. Barjiyye was blindfolded, put in extreme stress positions, violently shaken, beaten and subjected to sleep deprivation. He described what one of his interrogators told him:
He told me that Abd al-Samed Harizat hadn’t wanted to confess and they had broken his back on this chair, and he didn’t make it, and died. ‘We’ll do the same to you, with new methods. We have methods no one will discover; we’ll cause you damage that won’t leave any signs but that will kill you.’ [pg. 44]
More recently, the World Association Against Torture reported on the Tbeish case, a 2019 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court. The ruling allowed for limited, after the fact (or aposteriori) approvals of torture that had taken place. In essence, it was yet another exercise in providing what were supposed to be very limited loopholes for use of torture. But as we’ve seen in reports from Sde Teiman and elsewhere, these are loopholes that tanks can drive through!
The case concerned Firas Muhammad Tbeish from Hadb al-Fawwar in the West Bank, who was interrogated at the Shikma ISA interrogation facility in Ashqelon, Israel, between September 2012 and March 2013. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) complained in March 2013 of what they described as the torture of Mr Tbeish, which included sleep deprivation, beating and slapping, holding in the painful ‘banana’ and ‘frog’ positions, threats, curses, humiliations and much more. PCATI requested, among other things, that a criminal investigation be launched against those who tortured Mr Tbeish. The case saw twists and turns over the next five years before the Supreme Court, sitting as High Court of Justice (HCJ), ruled for the state….
In a landmark ruling almost two decades ago,[2] the Court emphasised the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in international law and ceremoniously closed the door on the routine, pre-authorised use of the torture methods most prevalent during the 1990s – sleep deprivation, prolonged shackling in contorted positions (often combined with blindfolding and loud music), violent shaking. However, at the same time the Court opened a window for ISA interrogators to continue resorting to torture – the word the Court used was “physical interrogation methods” – in what it called “ticking time-bomb” situations. While not authorised to do so, the Court said, after the fact the Attorney-General could decide that ISA torturers (not so described) would not face trial, or even be subjected to a criminal investigation….
In the 20 years that have passed, the Supreme Court has upheld the legalised torture system it had created against all challenges by PCATI. Not a single one of over 1,000 complaints has led to even one criminal investigation to be opened against an ISA interrogator, let alone a trial, conviction or punishment. ISA interrogators have continued to torture, safe in the knowledge that they enjoy total impunity, thanks in no small measure to the Supreme Court. However, until very recently its Justices were careful, like they were in the 1999 ruling itself, to avoid referring to ISA interrogation techniques as “torture.”
The Future
Terry Hackett, the Head of Division Persons Deprived of Liberty, International Committee of the Red Cross, was quoted in an email I received from the ICRC:
"On International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, we remember the profound physical and psychological trauma endured by countless detainees in armed conflict and situations of armed violence, who are subjected to ill-treatment and torture. Their suffering erodes their sense of self and tears at the fabric of societies long after the last shot has been fired and detainees have returned to their loved ones. The pain and fear affect families and futures, as the trauma of torture goes beyond physical scars. The way an enemy is treated influences whether hatred grows or how fast and deep reconciliation holds. Torture and ill-treatment are a crime, inhumane and never justified."
We are still a long way from ending torture. The impunity with which Israel, and before it the U.S., have turned to torture is almost too awful to contemplate. Torture acts as a terror action against an entire society, or even, against the civilized world itself. One wants to turn away, but we can’t. We must fight against torture and its adherents. To remember is to recommit ourselves against this evil.