Palestinian detainees from Gaza have been stripped, beaten, interrogated and held incommunicado over the past three months, according to accounts by nearly a dozen of the detainees or their relatives interviewed by The New York Times. Organizations representing Palestinian prisoners and detainees gave similar accounts in a report, accusing Israel of both indiscriminate detention of civilians and demeaning treatment of detainees.
Israeli forces who invaded Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack have detained men, women and children by the thousands.
Some were ordered out of their houses and seized while others were taken as they fled their neighborhoods on foot with their families, trying to reach safer areas after the Israeli authorities ordered them to leave.
Photographs taken by Gaza journalists have shown newly released detainees being treated in hospitals, the skin around their wrists worn down with deep cuts from the tight restraints Israeli forces kept on them, sometimes for weeks at a time.
The United Nations human rights office said last week that Israel’s treatment of Gazan detainees might amount to torture. It estimated that thousands had been detained and held in “horrific” conditions before being released, sometimes with no clothes on, only diapers.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Cold, almost naked and surrounded by Israeli soldiers with M16 assault rifles, Ayman Lubbad knelt among dozens of Palestinian men and boys who had just been forced from their homes in northern Gaza.
It was early December and photographs and videos taken at the time showed him and other detainees in the street, wearing only underwear and lined up in rows, surrounded by Israeli forces.
Photographs taken by Gaza journalists have shown newly released detainees being treated in hospitals, the skin around their wrists worn down with deep cuts from the tight restraints Israeli forces kept on them, sometimes for weeks at a time.
It said the Israeli authorities were treating detainees in accordance with international law and defended forcing men and boys to strip, saying this was to “ensure that they are not concealing explosive vests or other weaponry.”
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, said in October that designating civilians who did not evacuate as accomplices to terrorism was not only a threat of collective punishment, but could constitute ethnic cleansing.
When he repeatedly answered that he didn’t know anything and spent much of his time either at work or at home, the interrogator grew angry and hit him under his eye, he said, then put his blindfold back — tying it painfully tight.
The original article contains 1,625 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!