Senior Palestinian politician says Israel torturing Gaza abductees
A senior Palestinian official says testimonies from released Palestinian abductees from the besieged Gaza Strip reveal they had been subjected to torture by Israeli forces.
Mustafa Barghouti, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative party, said in a statement on Wednesday that the abductees were subjected to all forms of beatings and ill-treatment during their detention.
“More than a thousand detainees, including the director of al-Shifa Hospital, are being subjected to brutal torture and severe beatings,” Barghouti said in a statement, adding that a number of elderly and sick prisoners died as a result.
“The Israeli interrogators use torture with electricity, waterboarding, hanging stress positions, and psychological pressure.”
“The detainees are held in barracks that are unfit for life, exposed to the cold, and are given scarce food,” Barghouti said. “No one, including the Red Cross, is allowed to contact them or know anything about them."
The testimonies came from abductees who said they were held in a makeshift detention camp in Beersheba, also known as Bir as-Sab.
A Geneva-based rights group recently called for an urgent international investigation into torture and murder of Palestinian abductees held in Israel’s “Guantanamo-like” jails.
In a statement released on Monday, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said it had gathered testimonies confirming recent reports in Israeli media about the regime’s field execution of the Gaza abductees.
The Sde Teman Israeli army camp has been turned into “a new Guantanamo-like prison,” where detainees lose their lives after being subjected to extreme torture and mistreatment, it added.
The Israeli army uses open-air chicken coops to house the inmates and withhold food or drink for long periods of time.
The rights group also noted that the Palestinians held in Sde Teman are caged in inhumane conditions, blindfolded and subjected to harsh interrogations with their hands tied.
The testimonies affirm that multiple elderly abductees endured cruel beatings and humiliating treatment, Euro-Med said.
One of the released detainees has said that he witnessed Israeli soldiers directly shooting and killing five abductees in separate incidents.
SS
