Ebrahim Moosa | Palestine Information Network
June 2024
In all the temporary ceasefire proposals for Gaza advanced by the United States and Apartheid Israel over the past few months, more than any desire to arrive at a durable solution, the priority from these parties as a key desired outcome from any deal has always been the freeing of the ‘hostages’. In their petitioning, one finds an exceptionalising of the quandary faced by the Israeli citizens and soldiers held by the Palestinian resistance, and a singular focus on the distress of Israeli families.
“Heartbreaking pain’” hostages and families waiting “in anguish;” ordinary Israelis whose lives are shattered by “ruthless brutality,” are but some of the descriptions recently offered by US President Biden in his disingenuous audit of the genocide in Gaza, and his self-serving plan to stop the fighting.
If such is truly the angst felt on account of, what Israel says, are around 100 hostages still alive in Gaza, it would be mind-blowing to consider the anguish experienced by Palestinian society as a whole as a result of institutionalised hostage-taking and incarceration on an industrial scale by the Israeli Occupation for decades.
Since 1967, the Israeli State has imprisoned more than 700,000 Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories. Palestinians who are charged with an offense are subjected to Israeli military courts that have been condemned by human rights organizations. Virtually all cases of Palestinians brought before Israeli military courts end in convictions. Israel notoriously uses a procedure known as “administrative detention” to imprison Palestinians without charge or trial for months or even years. Administrative detention orders are normally issued for one to six-month periods and can be extended indefinitely.
Israel is also the only country in the world that systematically tries and imprisons children using military courts. Palestinian children are frequently arrested in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers, taken away without their parents and harshly interrogated without a guardian or lawyer present. Both children and adults are subjected to physical violence and other forms of abuse. Families of detainees are tormented too, often deprived by the Occupation from seeing their loved ones for months, or at times, years on end.
In the occupied Palestinian territories, one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged at some point by the Israelis.
If such was the norm prior to October 7, the cataclysmic events of the past eight months have only seen grave deteriorations in Israel’s torment of Palestinian society. According to the Palestinian prisoner support organisation Addameer, the genocidal Israeli war on the Gaza Strip has been coupled with wide-ranging arrest campaigns conducted by the occupying forces during their ground incursions. These arrest campaigns have been accompanied by several legal amendments that have allowed for the practice of enforced disappearance, as well as brutal and dignity-stripping practices that has led to the death of dozens of detainees in recent months.
Akin to what was witnessed during the US-led War of Terror, Palestinians are being subject to enforced disappearances, and are being held in complete isolation from the outside world.
The red alert has been sounded lately on the “Sde Teiman” Israeli army camp, located in the desert between Bir Saba and Gaza, which has been dubbed a new Guantanamo by many.
According to journalist Jonathan Cook, while the number of Palestinians passing through this secretive detention camp is unknown, satellite photos show the site to be rapidly expanding.
Testimonies received from Palestinians who have survived the camp are chilling.
Prisoners are handcuffed to gurneys in row after row, blindfolded and naked apart from an adult nappy. They are forced to sit blindfolded outdoors on a thin mattress through the desert heat of the day and sleep in the cold of the desert night. At night, dogs are set on them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks being savagely beaten till bones are broken.
According to a CNN report, people’s hands and legs are tightly zip-tied for so long that some have needed limbs amputated. Israeli medical interns at the facility have also been carrying out medical procedures on Palestinians that they are not qualified to perform. Even more disturbingly, such procedures have frequently been conducted without anaesthesia.
An Israeli whistleblower recounted that none of these abuses are about intelligence gathering. “They were done out of revenge,” he admitted. The inmates are punching bags for the Israeli soldiers and guards.
The selective sympathy and discussions about the fate of Israeli hostages – many of whom are soldiers from a belligerent army – should not be afforded carte blanche in the discourse over the measures required to end the Gaza genocide. The world needs to know what is happening to the Palestinian hostages in Israel’s prisons and black sites, which is as key a component of the war on Gaza, just as all of Israel’s other genocidal crimes. It is our religious, legal, moral, and human duty to expose these horrendous conditions of torture and abuse, shutter these black sites, and the racist ideology that sustains them, and to “bring all the hostages home.”