media spoke to several released detainees about their ordeals in Israeli holding facilities.
Though it has yet to respond to media’s request for comment, Israel continues to push back against the accusations of torture levelled at its armed forces in an unpublished report by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
The report details the extensive use of torture against Palestinians taken prisoner by the Israeli military in Gaza, including 21 UNRWA staff members and 15 family members of UNRWA staff, an accusation Israel has denied.
Findings in the report tally with testimonies media has gathered from people detained in Gaza and tortured by Israel since the beginning of its war on the besieged enclave.
There have also been well-documented cases in which arbitrarily detained Palestinians were subjected to deeply degrading treatment, a circumstance that was also detailed in the UNRWA report.
According to the February report, UNRWA had documented the release of 1,002 detainees – ranging in age from six to 82 – by Israel at the Karem Abu Salem crossing (called Kerem Shalom by Israel) between December 18 and February 19.
The released detainees included UNRWA staff, women, children, the elderly and vulnerable people living with conditions like Alzheimer’s and cancer – all of whom were taken from Gaza and held at various locations within Israel.
To help these individuals, UNRWA set up a reception facility at Karam Abu Salem where they provide food and water to the released persons and help them try to reach their families.
“In most instances, the released detainees are extremely disoriented, hungry, physically exhausted and exhibit visible signs of physical and mental trauma, and are wearing dirty clothes, sometimes with visible blood stains.
In detention, the people taken were interrogated, with UNRWA staff being of particular interest to Israeli interrogators who reportedly tried to coerce confessions of complicity with Hamas or the October 7 attack on Israel, which killed 1,139 people and the capture of 253 who were taken back to Gaza.
Practices recorded by UNRWA include the use of a nail gun on prisoners’ knees, sexual abuse against both men and women and the insertion of what appears to be an electrified metal stick into prisoners’ rectums.
“They were beating me with an extendable metal bar. There was blood on my trousers and when they saw it, they beat me there. They used a nail gun on my knee. These nails were kept in my knee for about 24 hours until I was transported to Naqab prison,” one 26-year-old male told UNRWA of his 56 days in Israeli custody.
Mahmoud Abd Rabbu, 62, from Jabalia, told media he had been displaced to the Indonesian Hospital and, during the last days of the Israeli siege on the hospital, he was told everyone should move to the south.
He headed for a checkpoint that had been determined as “safe” by Israeli forces where he and one other man were picked out of a group of 80 people and detained.
Torture
He recounts being held in a group of more than 100 men who all endured days of “beatings, hunger and cold”, adding that they were kept blindfolded, not allowed to sleep and were forced to spend most of the day kneeling.
“If someone lifted the blindfold off their eyes,” he said, “he would be called over by the soldiers and beaten then strung up on the barbed wire fence.”
Khaled el-Nabreis from the Khan Younis refugee camp told media that he and several other men spent three days with no food or water, “only beatings, and when we slept they would cover us with wet blankets in the bitter cold” after they were detained by Israeli forces, taken to a location he did not recognise.
Several of the individuals tortured and then released by Israel told media the soldiers tormenting them were asking the same kinds of questions, including: “Where are the tunnels?”, “Where is [Hamas leader] Sinwar?”, “Where are the captives?” and “Who do you know who is a Hamas fighter?”
Rami Abu Daqqa from Bani Suhaila in Gaza told media that he and his family had tried to return to their home from Rafah in late January. As they approached the house, he said, Israeli snipers opened fire, shooting him in the leg. His voice breaking, he added that his brother, Hani, was shot and killed in the same barrage.
He went on to describe how Israeli soldiers both administered first aid for the gunshot wound in his leg and beat him to get him to confess to knowing Hamas fighters. Then he was transferred to an Israeli hospital, where a platinum plate was inserted into his leg, all the while he was blindfolded, handcuffed around the clock and interrogated regularly.
The accounts of mistreatment released detainees gave media at the hospital where they were being treated matched those in the UNRWA report. The report went further to say that all of the released detainees needed medical attention and were transferred to hospital immediately from the border crossing wherever possible, given the dire condition of Gaza’s health sector after nearly six months of Israeli attacks.
In one case that the report detailed, urgent medical transport was arranged for a child who was released at Karam Abu Salem with dog bites visible on his body and a bruised face.
Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last week, the body’s international expert on torture, Dr Alice Jill Edwards, told Reuters she had asked to visit Israel to investigate widespread reports of torture against both sides within the conflict.
In January, Israel accused several UNRWA employees of participating in the attacks of October 7
In a reported attempt to coerce confessions to support the accusations, Israeli interrogators tortured UNRWA staff they detained in Gaza, some of whom they took as they were carrying out their duties as staff of the international relief agency.
In detention, the UNRWA staff endured “severe physical beatings; waterboarding; exposure to dogs; threats of violence … rape, and electrocution; verbal and psychological abuse; threats of murder, injury or other harm to their family members; humiliating and degrading treatment; being forced to strip naked and subjected to photographs,” according to the report.
A probe was launched by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) into the already highly audited agency to determine the extent of any alleged complicity in the October attack and nine UNRWA employees were dismissed as a result of the allegations.
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