TEL AVIV and CAIRO — In the early hours of Feb. 24, Sofian Abu Salah was woken from his sleep when dozens of Israeli soldiers entered a school in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. He, his wife and four children had been sheltering there from the fighting between Israel and Hamas for more than two months, after they fled their home in a nearby town.
On that February night, Salah says Israeli soldiers separated about 80 Palestinian men from their families and told them to strip down to their underwear. Then they loaded the men onto a truck.
“We were handcuffed and blindfolded and we sat on our knees with our heads down,” says the 43-year-old former taxi driver. “They started to beat us with batons and their [steel-toed] boots which have metal in the front.”
Salah says they were taken to a prison in Israel — he doesn’t know which one — where he was interrogated for 10 days. He remained blindfolded throughout, he says, with his hands bound behind his back.
According to Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Abu Salah is one of more than 3,000 Palestinians who have been rounded up from the Gaza Strip since Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The militants killed 1,200 people in Israel that day and took some 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. Israel has been on heightened national security alert ever since.
Most Palestinians who have been rounded up since Oct. 7 are incarcerated without due process or any contact with the outside world, Israeli human rights organizations say.
Abu Salah says his left leg was seriously injured during one of the almost daily beatings he received while he was held. It took several weeks, he says, before he was treated.
“My leg swelled … it was blue from the toes to the knee ... and oozing with pus,” he says. “They took me to the hospital, cleaned it, and told me it was okay.”
Abu Salah says he wasn’t given antibiotics or other medication. About a week later, he was back in the hospital. Gangrene had set in.
His leg had to be amputated.
Abu Salah was sent back to prison after the operation. By his count, he spent 52 days incarcerated. He was never charged. At no time did he see his family, a lawyer or a representative from the Red Cross, he says.
Israeli law allows for Palestinians to be held for extended periods without a lawyer
“People are being held for months,” says Jessica Montell, the executive director of HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organization in Jerusalem which provides legal aid for Palestinians. She says after the Oct. 7 attack, Israel amended its Unlawful Combatants Law. Under the law, the state can extend the amount of time it detains people without trial if they are suspected of links to terrorist attacks.
Initially, she says, the amended law said detainees could be held for 180 days before seeing a lawyer. That was lowered in May to 90 days. Still, Montell notes, that’s a long time.
“It's kind of an enforced disappearance,” she says. “We never had this phenomenon before.”
HaMoked and other Israeli human rights groups have appealed to the country’s Supreme Court to provide better due process for prisoners from Gaza, and for more information about them. Montell says before Oct. 7, the Israeli military would confirm whether someone was being detained and where they were being held. Not now.
“As far as the military and the Israeli government is concerned … they have said to the high court … they have no obligation to provide this information to families,” she says.
The military periodically releases prisoners and sends them back to Gaza when they are deemed not to be a threat. Some recently released detainees from Gaza detail harsh interrogation tactics by Israel’s military and prison guards. Jamal Dokhan, 57, was arrested in Jabalia, in central Gaza, by Israeli soldiers in mid-May. The father of six says he was taken to a military prison in Israel, where he and other detainees were not allowed to lie down. They could only sit or stand.
But the worst, Dokhan says, was the dogs.
“They would let the dogs into the cell. They didn’t bite, but it was terrifying,” he said. “You felt if these dogs attacked … they could tear you to pieces.”
Dokhan says before each interrogation session, he was sent to what he called “the disco room,” where he was subjected to bright lights and blaring music day and night. Such tactics have been used to overload prisoners’ senses and soften them up for interrogation.
“I would stay there two or three days, the music didn’t stop, not even for a second. It hurt me mentally,” he said.
Israel denies abusing Palestinian detainees
Israel’s military would not comment specifically to NPR about Dokhan’s or Abu Salah’s cases but says many of the prisoners it holds in custody are part of Hamas and are responsible for the Oct. 7 attack. In a statement to NPR, the military said it “rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees.” It said each prisoner receives blankets, a mattress, sufficient food and medical treatment, if needed.
Also in a statement to NPR, Israel’s Prison Service said it was “not aware of” Dokhan’s and Abu Salah’s “claims” of mistreatment. “All prisoners are detained according to the law,” the statement said. “All basic rights required are fully applied by professionally trained prison guards. ... Nonetheless, prisoners and detainees have the right to file a complaint that will be fully examined and addressed by official authorities.”
Israel's Sde Teiman facility has been the site of human rights violations, rights advocates say
Most Palestinians rounded up in Gaza are first brought into a military base in southern Israel called Sde Teiman, says Noa Sattath, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. She says a makeshift prison was built at the base after Oct. 7.
“It's not even a prison in the sense that there are no cells, there are no beds, it's just cages,” she says. Neither the prison officers nor the soldiers have been trained to hold the detainees, she says.
“In Sde Teiman, we have been hearing about the most serious violations of human rights,” she says.
Sattath’s group has been collecting testimonies from Israeli doctors working at Sde Teiman, as well as from former prisoners, about the conditions there. Some ex-prisoners reported being held in diapers, she says. Others said they were handcuffed in extreme stress positions, cutting off their circulation. Some needed to have limbs amputated as a result, she says.
“Part of Israel's international obligations is to treat detainees humanely according to international law,” she says. “And Israel's violating that right now.”
Her group has joined with others to petition Israel’s Supreme Court to close Sde Teiman.
Naji Abbas, the director of detainee issues at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, says a field hospital was also erected at Sde Teiman after Oct. 7. Starting in December, his group began gathering testimony from Israeli doctors who worked at and visited the hospital.
“The doctors reported Gazan prisoners being handcuffed for weeks or months, daily beatings, amputations due to infections, and severe lack of food for the prisoners,” he says. “One of the doctors … in the end of March, sent a letter to the Israeli army, to the Minister of Health,” he says. He quotes this doctor as writing, “You are making us all criminals.” NPR has not independently confirmed the letter.
The reports of mistreatment of Gazan prisoners are reminiscent of detainee abuse by U.S. soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in the early 2000s.
Montell, with HaMoked, says the Oct. 7 attack left Israelis deeply shaken.
“Of course, that has created, you know, really a desire for vengeance,” she says. “And I think we see that both in the conduct of the fighting in Gaza, as well as the treatment of prisoners.”
More than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to Gaza's health ministry. Most of the enclave’s population has been displaced by the fighting.
Israel's Supreme Court is weighing a petition to close Sde Teiman
In mid-May, the military’s top lawyer, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, said the military was investigating about 70 cases of suspected violations of the laws of war, including at Sde Teiman.
"These investigations also address allegations raised about the incarceration conditions at Sde Teiman detention center and the deaths of detainees in IDF custody. We are treating these allegations very seriously and are taking action to probe them,” she told an Israeli Bar Association conference.
Israel’s military and its prison service will not publicly say how many Palestinians have died while incarcerated since Oct. 7. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reports that investigations are currently taking place into 48 deaths.
Israel’s Supreme Court is weighing a petition by human rights groups to close Sde Teiman. The military has already been moving hundreds of detainees from there to other prisons due to overcrowding. Dozens of detainees who Israel deems to pose a low risk have been released back to Gaza because the prisons are running out of room.
One of those released was Sofian Abu Salah. He says once he got off the Israeli military truck in Gaza in April, his handcuffs and blindfold were removed for the first time in nearly two months. It took him several minutes for his eyes to adjust. Abu Salah says there were people waiting for him in Gaza. He was transferred to an ambulance.
“There was a foreign lady from the U.N. or Red Cross,” he said. “I felt like I was going from hell to paradise when they told me that I was going home.”
NPR international correspondent Jackie Northam reported from Tel Aviv. Ahmed Abuhamda reported from Cairo. Itay Stern reported from Tel Aviv, where Shir David also contributed reporting.
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