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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/cnn-reports-israels-centers-for-torturing

https://theduran.com/cnn-reports-israels-centers-for-torturing-gazans/

CNN Reports Israel’s Centers for Torturing Gazans

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

On May 11th, CNN published a harrowing report based on satellite photos, courageous Israeli whistleblowers, and some surviving Gazans, describing various forms of torture by Israel’s Government, against captured Gazans. Since the report was badly written and edited, it failed to say anything about why they had been selected for torture, but, even if all of them were from the 20 thousand or so members of the strictly Palestinian organization Hamas (though some of these torture-victims were doctors from Indonesia and other Muslim countries and were otherwise not credible to have been members of Hamas), Israel here is committing international-war crimes. 

The report is headlined “Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center”, which actually understates the horrific reality that their reporters describe. The article says:

CNN spoke to three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the Sde Teiman desert camp, which holds Palestinians detained during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. All spoke out at risk of legal repercussions and reprisals from groups supportive of Israel’s hardline policies in Gaza.

They paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.

We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.

An Israeli whistleblower recounting his experience at Sde Teiman

According to the accounts, the facility some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.

“They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” said one whistleblower, who worked as a medic at the facility’s field hospital.

“(The beatings) were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” said another whistleblower. “It was punishment for what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”

Responding to CNN’s request for comment on all the allegations made in this report, the Israeli military, known as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said in a statement: “The IDF ensures proper conduct towards the detainees in custody. Any allegation of misconduct by IDF soldiers is examined and dealt with accordingly. In appropriate cases, MPCID (Military Police Criminal Investigation’s Division) investigations are opened when there is suspicion of misconduct justifying such action.”

That’s one of three such camps.

The Israeli military has acknowledged partially converting three different military facilities into detention camps for Palestinian detainees from Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, in which Israeli authorities say about 1,200 were killed and over 250 were abducted, and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza, killing nearly 35,000 people according to the strip’s health ministry. These facilities are Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, as well as Anatot and Ofer military bases in the occupied West Bank.

The camps are part of the infrastructure of Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, an amended legislation passed by the Knesset last December that expanded the military’s authority to detain suspected militants.

So, these are “suspected militants.” So too might be called the students and others throughout the world who are publicly demonstrating (and being punished for it) against what Israel is doing to Gazans. Even if these are authentically “suspected militants,” that does not justify or make legal these tortures. George W. Bush and other extremist far-right persons who claimed to be following the law after invading Iraq on the basis only of his outright lies, might think that the actions of Israel are legal or even necessary, but torture never extracts truth form a detainee and always extracts instead whatever the detainee thinks that the torturer wants him or her to say so as to produce fake ‘evidence’ which the torturing regime wants in order to ‘justify’ itself.

The report goes on to say:

CNN interviewed over a dozen former Gazan detainees who appeared to have been released from those camps. They said they could not determine where they were held because they were blindfolded through most of their detention and cut off from the outside world. But the details of their accounts tally with those of the whistleblowers.

“We looked forward to the night so we could sleep. Then we looked forward to the morning in hopes that our situation might change,” said Dr. Mohammed al-Ran, recalling his detainment at a military facility where he said he endured desert temperatures, swinging from the heat of the day to the chill of night. CNN interviewed him outside Gaza last month.

Al-Ran, a Palestinian who holds Bosnian citizenship, headed the surgical unit at northern Gaza’s Indonesian hospital, one of the first to be shut down and raided as Israel carried out its aerial, ground and naval offensive.

He was arrested on December 18, he said, outside Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, where he had been working for three days after fleeing his hospital in the heavily bombarded north.

He was stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where, he said, the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.

The details in his account are consistent with those of dozens of others collected by CNN recounting the conditions of arrest in Gaza. His account is also supported by numerous images depicting mass arrests published on social media profiles belonging to Israeli soldiers. Many of those images show captive Gazans, their wrists or ankles tied by cables, in their underwear and blindfolded.

Al-Ran was held in a military detention center for 44 days, he told CNN. “Our days were filled with prayer, tears, and supplication. This eased our agony,” said al-Ran.

“We cried and cried and cried. We cried for ourselves, cried for our nation, cried for our community, cried for our loved ones. We cried about everything that crossed our minds.” …

Al-Ran’s account of the forms of punishment he saw were corroborated by the whistleblowers who spoke with CNN. A prisoner who committed an offense such as speaking to another would be ordered to raise his arms above his head for up to an hour. The prisoner’s hands would sometimes be zip-tied to a fence to ensure that he did not come out of the stress position.

For those who repeatedly breached the prohibition on speaking and moving, the punishment became more severe. Israeli guards would sometimes take a prisoner to an area outside the enclosure and beat him aggressively, according to two whistleblowers and al-Ran. A whistleblower who worked as a guard said he saw a man emerge from a beating with his teeth, and some bones, apparently broken. …

Strapped to beds in a field hospital

Whistleblower accounts portrayed a different kind of horror at the Sde Teiman field hospital.

“What I felt when I was dealing with those patients is an idea of total vulnerability,” said one medic who worked at Sde Teiman.

“If you imagine yourself being unable to move, being unable to see what’s going on, and being completely naked, that leaves you completely exposed,” the source said.  “I think that’s something that borders on, if not crosses to, psychological torture.”

Another whistleblower said he was ordered to perform medical procedures on the Palestinian detainees for which he was not qualified.

“I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise,” he said, adding that this was frequently done without anesthesia.

“If they complained about pain, they would be given paracetamol,” he said, using another name for acetaminophen.

“Just being there felt like being complicit in abuse.”

The whistleblowers are Israelis who oppose what Israel’s Government is doing. A Reuters news-report on 10 November 2023, just weeks after the start of Israel’s all-out invasion of Gaza started, stated that, “Among Israel's Jewish majority, 94% feel part of the country,” and that this was a “peak.” So, any such whistleblower would probably be viewed as a traitor by the vast majority of Israelis. On 10 March 2024, the Times of Israel headlined “Poll: 75% of Jewish Israelis back Rafah operation”. This means that very close to 75% of Israeli citizens backed Israel’s invading Raffah. Any such whistleblower would be viewed as a traitor by 75% of Israeli citizens, and any support within Israel that that person would have would need to come only from some of the 25% who dissent, and who have the courage to express publicly that they dissent from what is so popular amongst the other citizens of the country. Perhaps many of those people are already emigrating from Israel. Even if Israel were to ‘win’ in Gaza, the country would be even far more of an international pariah than it has been.

A 2018 study published by the Middle Eastern Policy Council reported (buried deep down in it) that

An EU-sponsored poll in 2003 showed that respondents [all of whom were in only EU countries] considered Israel to be a more dangerous threat to world peace than any other country.85  In 2006, this finding was dramatically confirmed in a "national brand" study commissioned by the Government of Israel.  The survey included 25,903 online consumers across 35 countries and found that Israel, by substantial margins, had the worst public image in every category.86

This fact (of Israel’s long having been a pariah-country) is hidden by the major ‘news’ media. For example, Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper headlined on May 8th, “Israel Is Already Becoming an International Pariah. Do Israelis Care?”, and this liberal (Labour Party, like Democratic Party in U.S.) ‘news’-paper hid the fact that Israel already was and long has been “an international pariah.” How did it hide that? The long (2,000-word) article excluded the word “poll,” which was necessary to be in — and discussed in — the article if it were to be anything more than Labour Party propaganda against Israel’s long-ruling Likud Party. It was merely political propaganda, which was pretending that this is only a ‘Party’ problem, instead of a Nation-problem. But the reality is that when similar polls will be done from now on, Israel will likely be even far more of an international pariah-nation than it has previously been; and (just like had happened before, when the Zionist, or fascist-Jewish, ADL, blamed that 2003 EU poll-finding as showing “nothing less than anti-Semitism”) these new poll-findings will become proclaimed to be showing nothing less than soaring anti-Semitism. Yes, there is, now, increasing anti-Semitism among the many people who think in racist categories instead of in individual ones; and, so, they will blame even non-racist Jews; and, so even non-racist Jews will now be suffering anti-Semitism from those individuals who blame even non-racist Jews for the racism of Israel’s government ever since it was founded in 1948. Israel’s founders, Zionists, learned deeply from Hitler and other racist-fascist imperialists, or ‘nazis’, and now they’re copying the Hitlerites virtually 100%, but replacing the victim-category as being Palestinian instead of Jew. 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.