The French newspaper Le Monde said that residents of the neighborhoods occupied by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip are subjected to mass arrest campaigns, including men from their teens to their sixties, where they are stripped of their clothes and subjected to beatings, intimidation, and humiliating treatment, according to some of those who were released.
The newspaper began – in a report written by Clotilde Mravko from occupied Jerusalem – the occupation soldiers took the residents of Beit Lahia out of their homes at gunpoint, one after the other, and stripped the men of their clothes, so that the lawyer and researcher at the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Ayman Labad (31 years old), found himself in his underwear, kneeling. On the sidewalk among all his neighbors.
Dozens of video clips, often filmed by the soldiers themselves – as the newspaper says – have revealed mass arrests in Gaza, where soldiers surround a group of homes, chant the names of families in the area over loudspeakers, isolate children aside, and sometimes women are separated from them. Some of them remove their veils and are arrested.
He systematically stripped the men of their clothes “to make sure they were not wearing explosive belts, and then allowed them to get dressed as quickly as possible,” the occupation army claims. But videos and testimonies collected by Le Monde show that prisoners remained half-naked for hours, and the head of the commissioner’s office said. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Ajith Songai said: “Some of the videos are extremely offensive and are a clear violation of international law.”
Deliberate targeting
Once the Palestinian detainees are collected, they are identified using a facial recognition system – according to the newspaper’s report – and then most of the time they are transferred outside the neighborhood in which they live. Some of them reported that they heard gunfire and that the people who were with them did not return, and the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights assumes Raji Al-Sourani said that many of them were killed in extrajudicial executions. “We have no video clips and no direct witnesses,” he says from Cairo, “but naked bodies were found, riddled with bullets.”
For its part, the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories stated that it “received disturbing reports indicating that Israeli forces killed at least 11 unarmed men in front of their family members in the Al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza.” The statement referred to other incidents of “targeting and killing of civilians in a manner Deliberately committed by Israeli forces.
Freelance photojournalist Saeed Kilani, who was arrested in the Israeli raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital, says that one of the soldiers threw his press card on the ground before transporting him to a nearby field with other Palestinians. He was released after 24 hours without being interrogated, and he says, “Two soldiers beat me in an ugly way.” He threatened to kill me.”
Punishments without reason
The newspaper quoted the testimony of Ayman Labad, who was transferred with his companions in distress from one street to another, then the soldiers blindfolded him and tied his hands. He believes that they were transferred first to the Zikim military base in northern Gaza, then they were transferred on a bus in a cold atmosphere, stripped of their clothes, and “they were placed In the hallway with my hands behind my back and my head down, the soldiers walked over my body, over my shoulders and over my head. I was their rug.”
After a long journey, the prisoners arrived at the “Sde Teman” camp, which is three pens built in the middle of the desert between Beersheba and Gaza in southern Israel. The army transports the men to it, while the women are detained in the Anatot military camp near Jerusalem.
In Sde Timan, the lawyer who was sent to be punished three times without knowing why says, “From five in the morning until midnight you have to stay on your knees. They force you to stand in front of the fence with your arms raised for two or three hours,” and one of them “answered to the soldiers We heard the sound of gunfire, but we don’t know what happened to him.”
Electric torture
A man said that he was subjected to “torture with electricity,” and added, “Two of us died due to the cold and lack of care.” Indeed, the army admitted the death of a number of prisoners in “Sde Timan” without specifying their number, and confirmed that an investigation had been opened in each case, knowing that all Prisoners spoke of lack of food, difficulty accessing toilets, and being beaten. Although the army denies these accusations, the testimony of an Israeli reserve soldier in charge of security adds credibility to the prisoners’ story.
Israel refuses to talk about prisoners, but the Israeli Prison Service reported the detention of 661 “unlawful combatants” as of January 1, and this situation is outside the scope of international law, as Israel is holding detainees that it does not recognize as prisoners of war, and the International Committee of the Red Cross has not been able to From contacting any Palestinian detainee in Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023.
The newspaper’s report mentioned many cases of journalists or doctors who were arrested and whose families knew nothing about them since last October 7. However, Ayman Labad was released after a week of arrest at the Kerem Shalom crossing between Gaza and Israel, and he walked several kilometers in the open to reach Rafah. He cannot join his family, which remains in closed northern Gaza.