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As 2024 dawns, Palestinian detainee Abdul-Rahman al-Bahsh assassinated in Zionist jails

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | January 1, 2024

As the new year dawns on 2024, amid the ongoing Zionist genocide in occupied Palestine — and the heroic resistance confronting the occupation war machine — the Israeli occupation forces are continuing their war on the Palestinian detainees and the prisoners’ movement. On 1 January 2024, 23-year-old Palestinian detainee, Abdul-Rahman Bassem Al-Bahsh was assassinated by occupation forces inside the colonial Zionist Megiddo prison.

The 23-year-old Palestinian struggler had been detained since 31 May 2022, and sentenced by a Zionist military court to 35 months in occupation prisons, making him the first martyr of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement in 2024. He is the seventh Palestinian martyr inside the occupation prisons since 7 October 2023 and the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood. We note that this is not the complete number of Palestinian detainees who have been killed by Israeli occupation forces since 7 October; in addition to the numerous reports of horrific torture, mutilation and inhuman treatment against Palestinian detainees from Gaza, a number of Palestinian civilians kidnapped from Gaza by occupation soldiers were reported to be killed where they were held in a camp near Bir al-Saba. Their names and identities have not yet been disclosed.

This also comes amid the ongoing reports of torture and abuse within the Zionist prison system, with multiple testimonies by Palestinian prisoners, their lawyers, and especially the Palestinian women and children detainees liberated by the Palestinian resistance during the prisoner exchanges of November 2023. One of the child detainees released in November was an eyewitness to the murder of Thaer Abu Assab and spoke about the assassination immediately upon his release; reports now indicate that at least 19 occupation prison guards participated in the assassination.

The Palestinian prisoners assassinated inside Zionist jails since 7 October are:

  1. Omar Daraghmeh of Tubas
  2. Arafat Hamdan of Ramallah
  3. Majid Zaqoul of Gaza
  4. Palestinian detainee from Gaza (identity still not known)
  5. Abdel-Rahman Mar’i of Salfit
  6. Thaer Abu Assab of Qalqilya
  7. Abdul-Rahman al-Bahsh of Nablus

Mar’i, Daraghmeh and al-Bahsh were all assassinated inside the colonial Megiddo prison; with the assassination of al-Bahsh, the number of martyrs of the prisoners’ movement rises to 244 since the 1967 occupation. (There are greater, yet not entirely known, numbers of Palestinians detained since the beginning of the Zionist occupation in 1948, not to mention the British colonial regime that sponsored the Zionist colonization of Palestine.)

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society emphasized the responsibility of the Zionist regime and of the Western imperialist powers who continue to support it, arm it and provide it with impunity for its ongoing genocide: “In light of the intensity of the crimes that the occupation continues to commit against imprisoned detainees, we hold that all international powers that continue to support the occupation in its ongoing genocide against our people in Gaza and the continuing aggression against our people everywhere, including our prisoners in occupation jails, hold full responsibility for these crimes alongside the criminal occupation.”

The number of Palestinian prisoners in occupation jails has risen to over 7,000 since 7 October, including over 2,000 jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention. The prisoners are subjected to collective punishment, including the confiscation of all electrical devices, including heating plates, televisions and radios (denying them access to news of the assault and the resistance); cutting electicity to the sections throughout the day; denial of access to the courtyard; destruction of sports equipment; cutting off of all hot water; closure of the kitchen; constant room searches and raids; overcrowding of the prison rooms; and the continued escalation of administrative detention orders. Mass food poisoning has broken out in Ofer prison, and multiple released detainees reported being served uncooked or spoiled food, while their own access to the kitchen was barred. Palestinian prisoners whose sentences have ended are being ordered jailed without charge or trial rather than released.

It is important to note that the war on Palestinian prisoners did not begin on 7 October but rather has continued; prior to 7 October, the notorious fascist Itamar Ben Gvir was placed in charge of the Zionist prisons, banning family visits, ordering ongoing raids and assaults against the prisoners, and cutting food and water alongside the massive escalation in the use of administrative detention (a policy initially introduced to Palestine by the British colonial regime and then taken up by its Zionist successor).

This ongoing policy of extreme torture, abuse and isolation aims to target the Palestinian prisoners’ movement as a whole, to undermine the prisoners’ unity and steadfastness in confronting the occupation. It particularly comes as the Palestinian resistance has captured prisoners of war in order to seek a prisoner exchange to liberate the Palestinian prisoners jailed by the occupation and its imperialist allies and backers. These assassinations also shine a spotlight on the immense disparity in the treatment of Palestinian prisoners by the Zionist regime in comparison to the way in which Zionist detainees captured by the Palestinian resistance in order to secure a prisoner exchange have been treated, as witnessed before the world in the November exchanges of women and children detainees.

January 1, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Detained Palestinians in Gaza reveal torture by Israel forces

MEMO | December 30, 2023

Palestinians taken hostage by Israeli soldiers during a ground operation in the Ez-Zeytun neighborhood to the east of the besieged Gaza Strip, have alleged that they were subjected to various forms of torture by military personnel, Anadolu Agency reports.

Those detained during Israel’s Oct. 27 ground operation in the neighborhood spoke to Anadolu after their release.

They described enduring threats and brutal torture, including severe beatings, electric shocks and hanging by their legs for hours, during the time they were detained.

Blindfolded, taken to unknown locations

Cihad Yasin, 43, said his detention was terrifying and brutal.

Yasin told Anadolu that the Israeli army detained him for 11 days and he was tortured with electric shocks.

He was chained and endured severe and lasting torture.

Yasin stated that Israeli forces blindfolded and transported Palestinians to unknown locations.

Israeli soldiers detained people, keeping them bound without food for two days, he said.

Yasin said Israeli soldiers sprayed unknown substances on them that attracted insects.

Emphasizing that the soldiers took them to different unknown places, he said: “Later, they left us naked outdoors in the cold.”

Yasin revealed that due to torture, including electric shocks, the detainees could not sleep and were forced to remain on their knees until midnight.

He mentioned being woken up by soldiers in the early morning after they managed to sleep for a few hours.

Stressing that Israeli soldiers gave them bad food with mold, he said, they were forced to ingest hallucination-inducing pills.

“I still suffer headaches and dizziness from beatings and pills. No news about my family in Gaza; worried about their safety,” he added.

Israeli soldiers were given spoiled and moldy food

Mahmud el-Alul, another detainee who was released in the Ez-Zeytun neighborhood, said soldiers gave them spoiled food.

Al-Alul said soldiers brought three pieces of spoiled bread for each detainee. Despite having their hands and feet tied, they would place the bread in front of them.

“We couldn’t take and eat it. During my week of detention, I refused to eat due to the spoiled food and remained hungry,” he said.

“Israeli soldiers refused to untie our hands and feet when we needed to use the restroom,” he said.

Detainees faced torture for talking among themselves

Alul said soldiers subjected him and others to severe beatings and described being forced to stay on their knees with hands tied for six hours at the beginning of the detention.

He recounted being marched to different areas in Israel for at least six hours, during which soldiers brutally beat those who could not recall their ID numbers and punished detainees who spoke among themselves by hanging them by their feet for hours.

Severe attacks launched on Ez-Zeytun neighborhood

Due to the attacks on the Ez-Zeytun neighborhood, forcibly displaced Palestinian Hanan Avde told Anadolu that Israeli forces suddenly attacked homes in the early morning, even though there were people inside.

“We thought our house would collapse on us. Later, women and children started screaming in fear. We heard Israeli soldiers instructing us to come out of the house one by one. Israeli soldiers didn’t allow us to take any bags or belongings with us,” said Avde, adding that the soldiers separated women and children from the men.

Despite the cold weather, they told men to remove their clothes, confiscated their IDs, phones and money, then took them outside, said Avde.

Later they heard gunshots but they have no information about the fate of the men, he said.

Avde pointed out that Israeli soldiers detained children, including a 16-year-old, and she was threatened with death when she tried to resist.

Detainees forcibly displaced

Avde revealed that Israeli forces forced women and children with white flags to move to the southern Gaza Strip.

Blindfolded, they were taken to the Al-Kuwait intersection near the checkpoint, where Israeli military vehicles and bulldozers were present.

One of the soldiers at the checkpoint randomly selected women for interrogation while instructing others to quickly leave the area. He left the women as late-night conflict sounds echoed from everywhere, she said.

Avde mentioned that her husband was released after being detained in the attack on Ez-Zeytun neighborhood, but she still does not know the fate of her child.

“My husband had some health issues before the attacks. His health deteriorated further due to the brutal torture during detention. He is currently hospitalized at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital,” she added.

December 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

UN convoy attacked by Israel on designated ‘humanitarian route’

The Cradle | December 29, 2023

The Director of the UNRWA in the Gaza Strip, Thomas White, announced on 29 December that the Israeli army had targeted one of the organization’s aid convoys as it was returning from north Gaza on a route designated by Tel Aviv itself.

“Israeli soldiers fired at an aid convoy as it returned from Northern Gaza along a route designated by the Israeli Army,” White said via social media.

“Our international convoy leader and his team were not injured, but one vehicle sustained damage – aid workers should never be a target,” he added.

Israel has shown blatant disregard for humanitarian aid workers during its campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing which began on 7 October.

As of 28 December, 142 UNRWA employees have been killed as a result of the Israeli assault on Gaza, according to the organization’s 57th situation report on the besieged enclave. According to the report, 125 UNRWA installations have also been damaged.

“At least 308 internally displaced peoples (IDPs) sheltering in UNRWA premises have been killed and 1,095 injured since 7 October,” the situation report adds.

It is worth noting that a large majority of the over 30,000 employed by UNRWA are Palestinians.

This is not the first time Palestinians and aid workers have been targeted on humanitarian routes designated specifically by Israel.

Upon resuming the assault after the seven-day truce that ended at the very start of this month, Israel published a map of so-called ‘safe zones’ for Gazans to flee to, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza do not have electricity or internet to access the map. Many Gazans reported airstrikes on a number of the zones designated by Israel.

“The so-called safe zones … are not scientific, they are not rational, they are not possible, and I think the authorities are aware of this,” a UNICEF spokesman told Al-Jazeera on 5 December.

Gazans are suffering due to a severe lack of humanitarian aid, which since the start of the war has trickled into Gaza at a pace nowhere near fast enough to address the dire situation.

Israel continues to bombard the civilian population indiscriminately, while actively pursuing plans for forced displacement.

Tel Aviv recently issued more evacuation orders for Gazans in Khan Yunis to evacuate further south, as tens of thousands of displaced Gazans are already stranded in the southern border city of Rafah.

“People forced to move once again. More people in less space. Rafah in the south is now bursting at the seams. No respite. Time for a humanitarian ceasefire,” Thomas White wrote on social media on 26 December.

December 29, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Inside a Gaza hospital under siege

The Grayzone | December 21, 2023

Suhaib spent six months in Israeli military detention without charge

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel confirms 19 prison guards beat Palestinian prisoner to death

MEMO | December 21, 2023

The Israeli occupation authorities have confirmed the involvement of 19 Israeli prison guards in the brutal beating of a Palestinian prisoner, which ultimately led to his death on 18 November.

According to Israel Hayom, Thayer Abu Assab was 38 and from the northern West Bank city of Qalqilya. An autopsy was carried out last month which concluded that he had been subjected to assault and beatings, leading to his death.

All 19 of the prison guards implicated in the assault have been released under “restrictive conditions” pending the conclusion of an investigation.

Israel’s far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has voiced his support for the guards involved in the incident, claiming that they are innocent until proven otherwise. He opposes the idea of charging any of them in connection with the killing of Abu Assab and proceeded to describe the Palestinian freedom fighters detained in Israeli prisons as “human scum” and “murderers”.

The Prisoners’ and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs Commission had confirmed earlier that the occupation authorities were responsible for the killing of Abu Assab, who was held in Al-Naqab Prison in the Negev from 2005, serving a 25-year sentence. The commission accused the Israel Prison Service (IPS) of carrying out systematic and premeditated killings of Palestinian prisoners.

As many as six Palestinian prisoners have died in detention recently, including one from Gaza who has not been identified.

There are now more than 7,800 Palestinians being held in Israel’s prisons, including more than 2,870 administrative detainees who are held with neither charge nor trial, and 260 classified as “unlawful combatants” from Gaza. The number may be higher because Israel doesn’t release the details of all of the Palestinians it has imprisoned.

December 21, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Urinating on prisoners: Why humiliation is functional in Israel’s war on Palestinians

By Dr Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | December 19, 2023

When Zionist militias, using advanced Western arms, conquered historic Palestine in 1947-48, they expressed their victory through the deliberate humiliation of Palestinians.

Much of that humiliation targeted women, in particular, knowing how the dishonour of Palestinian females represents, according to Arab culture, a sense of dishonour to the whole community.

This strategy remains in use to this day.

When scores of Palestinian women were released following prisoner exchanges between Palestinian Resistance and Israel, starting on 24 November, there was very little room to hide the facts.

Unlike the 75-year-ago Palestinian community, this current generation no longer internalises Israel’s intentional humiliation of women and men alike, as if an act of collective dishonour.

This has allowed many newly released female prisoners to speak openly, often on live TV, about the kind of humiliation that they were exposed to while in Israeli military detention.

The Israeli army, however, continues to act with the same old mindset, perceiving the humiliation of Palestinians as an expression of dominance, power and supremacy.

Over the years, Israel has perfected the politics of humiliation – a notion which is predicated on the psychological power of shaming whole collectives to emphasise the asymmetrical relationship between two groups of people: in this case, the occupier and the occupied.

This is precisely why, in the early days of the Israeli war on Gaza, Israel detained all Palestinian workers from the Strip who happened to be working inside Israel as cheap labourers, at the time of the 7 October operation.

The dehumanisation they experienced at the hands of Israeli soldiers demonstrated a growing trend among Israelis to degrade Palestinians for no reason whatsoever.

One of the worst documented episodes took place on 12 October, when a group of Israeli soldiers and settlers assaulted three Palestinian activists in the West Bank. Israeli newspapers Haaretz and The Times of Israel described how the three were assaulted, stripped naked, bound, photographed, tortured and urinated upon.

Those images were still fresh in the minds of Palestinians when new images emerged from northern Gaza.

Photos and videos published in Israeli media showed men stripped down to their underwear, being placed in large numbers on the streets of Gaza, while surrounded by well-equipped and supposedly menacing Israeli soldiers.

The men were handcuffed, tied together, forced to hunch down and then, eventually, thrown into military trucks to be taken to an unknown location.

Some of the men were eventually released to tell horror stories, which often had bloody endings.

But why is Israel doing this?

Throughout its history – violent birth and equally violent existence – Israel has purposely humiliated Palestinians as an expression of its disproportionately greater military power over a hapless, confined and mostly refugee population.

This tactic was infused more during certain periods of history when Palestinians felt empowered, as a way to break their collective spirit.

The First Intifada, 1987-93, was rife with this kind of humiliation. Children and men between the ages of 15 to 55 would be habitually dragged into schoolyards, stripped naked, forced to kneel down for endless hours, beaten, and insulted by Israeli soldiers using loudspeakers.

Those insults would cover everything that Palestinians hold dear – their religions, their God, their mothers, their holy places and more.

Then, boys and men would be forced to perform certain acts, for example spitting in each other’s faces, shouting certain profanities, slapping themselves or each other. Those who refused would be immediately overpowered, beaten and arrested.

These methods continue to be applied in Israeli prisons, especially during times of hunger strikes, but also during periods of interrogations. In the latter cases, men would be threatened with the rape of their wives or sisters; women would be threatened with sexual violence.

These episodes are often met with collective Palestinian defiance, which directly feeds into Palestinian popular resistance.

The image of the Palestinian fighter, dressed in military fatigue, brandishing an automatic rifle, while proudly walking the streets of Nablus, Jenin or Gaza, in itself does not serve an actual military purpose. It is, however, a direct response to the psychological impact of the kind of humiliation inflicted upon Palestinian society by the Israeli occupation army.

But what is the function of a Palestinian military parade? To answer this question, we must examine the sequence of the event.

When Israel arrests Palestinian activists, they attempt to create the perfect scenario of a humiliated and defeated community: the terror felt by the people when nightly raids begin, the beating of the family of the detained, the shouts of insults along with other well-choreographed horror scenes.

Hours later, Palestinian youth emerge on the streets of their neighbourhoods, proudly parading with their guns, amid the ululation of women and the excited looks of children. This is precisely how Palestinians respond to humiliation.

Palestinian armed Resistance has grown much stronger in recent years, with Gaza currently serving as a case in point.

As the Israeli military is failing to reoccupy Gaza and to subdue its population, utilising the politics of humiliation on a mass scale is simply impossible.

To the contrary, it is the Israelis who do feel humiliated, and not only because of what has taken place on 7 October, but everything else that has taken place since then.

Unable to operate freely in the heart of Gaza, Khan Yunis, Rafah or any other major population centres in the Strip, the Israeli army is forced to humiliate Palestinians in whatever little margins they can control, Beit Lahia, for example.

Frustrated by their military failure to deliver on their promises of subduing Gazans, ordinary Israelis have taken to social media to taunt Palestinians in their own way.

Israeli women, often along with their own children, would dress up in ways that would convey a racist representation of Arab women crying over the bodies of their dead children.

This type of social media mockery seems to have appealed to the imagination of Israeli society, which still insists on its sense of superiority even at a time when they are still paying the price of their own violence and political arrogance.

This time around, however, Israel’s politics of humiliation is proving ineffective, because the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is on its way to be fundamentally altered.

One is only humiliated if he or she internalises that humiliation as a sense of shame and disempowerment. But Palestinians, this time around, are experiencing no such feelings. To the contrary, their ongoing sumud, and unity, have generated a sense of collective pride unequalled in history.

December 19, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | 6 Comments

‘New Gitmo’: Rights group urges probe into Israel’s starving, murdering Gaza abductees

Hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including children and elderly, are held hostage in ‘Sde Teman’ military camp in inhumane conditions.
Press TV – December 19, 2023

A Geneva-based rights group has 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.

It further said that turning on lights at night, as well as barring the abductees from using phones and meeting lawyers and representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are among the torture tactics being used at the Israeli jail.

The testimonies affirm that multiple elderly abductees endured cruel beatings and humiliating treatment, Euro-Med said.

One of the released detainees, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said that he witnessed Israeli soldiers directly shooting and killing five abductees in separate incidents.

Earlier, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the deaths of six Palestinians in Israeli prisons since the beginning of Israel’s ongoing bloody war on Gaza.

Despite evidence of violence preceding the inmates’ death or medical neglect – their cause of death was not established, according to the report.

It added that Just 71 out of 500 Palestinians arrested during the Gaza war have been brought before Israeli courts, and that the remaining detainees have been moved to prisons run by the Israeli Prison Service or to detention facilities run by the regime’s so-called internal security service, Shin Bet.

Previously, the Euro-Med field teams documented the detention of more than 1,200 Palestinian civilians in random Israeli arrest campaigns across Gaza during Israel’s onslaught on the besieged territory.

The abductees were subjected to all forms of beatings and ill-treatment during their detention and purposefully left blindfolded, nearly nude, and kneeling on the ground upon their release.

Israel waged the devastating war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Since the start of the aggression against Gaza, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 19,453 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 52,286 others.

Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Gaza, which is under “complete siege” by Israel.

December 19, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | 4 Comments

Israel forced women in Gaza to abandon their children then detained them

MEMO | December 18, 2023

The Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs Commission has warned that Israel is subjecting Palestinian female prisoners held in Damoun Prison, especially those randomly arrested from the besieged Gaza Strip, to “inhumane” treatment and “horrific” detention conditions including severe punishments on a daily basis.

In a report issued yesterday, the rights group quoted its lawyer saying that since 7 October, Israeli occupation forces have launched a massive arrest campaign in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem, inside Israel and in Gaza, specifically targeting female prisoners, who were tortured and abused from the moment of their arrest.

“The female prisoners were subjected to degrading treatment including beating and insults, strip searches, isolation and deprivation of the most basic rights,” the lawyer said.

The prison administration deliberately singled out female detainees from the besieged Gaza Strip for the worst type of torture, according to one female prisoner.

In her testimony, the prisoner said: “A few days ago, an elderly woman [80 years old] from Gaza arrived at the department, walking on a crutch and without a cover on her head. Her body and clothes were covered with blood and she appeared to suffer from Alzheimer’s.”

According to the report, all the female prisoners from the Gaza Strip had their clothes taken away and replaced with summer clothes, and had been tortured before arriving at Damoun Prison and were subjected to physical and verbal abuse.

“Some of them had spent seven days outdoors in the rain and in the cold, and all of them arrived at the prison in a deplorable condition both physically and psychologically.”

The report lists the case of a female prisoner from Gaza who is a mother of four children and who was forced to hand her children to an unknown man in the street when she was detained.

“Other female prisoners were also forced to leave their children in the street when they were arrested by the Israeli army forces,” the detainee said.

December 18, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | 2 Comments

Business as usual for Israeli forces

Arbitrarily detaining, torturing, prosecuting, and imprisoning Palestinian children in military detention

Defense for Children Palestine | September 2023

DCIP estimates an average of 165 Palestinian children were held in Israeli military detention each month in 2023. Each year, Israeli forces detain between 500 and 700 Palestinian children and prosecute them in military courts.

Children typically arrive at interrogation bound, blindfolded, frightened, and sleep-deprived. Children often give confessions after verbal abuse, threats, physical and psychological violence that in some cases amounts to torture.

Israeli military law provides no right to legal counsel during interrogation, and Israeli military court judges seldom exclude confessions obtained by coercion or torture.

From testimonies of 75 Palestinian children detained by Israeli forces from the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, DCIP found that:

  • 61 percent experienced physical violence following arrest
  • 96 percent were hand-tied
  • 88 percent were blindfolded
  • 47 percent were detained from their homes in the middle of the night
  • 69 percent faced verbal abuse, humiliation, or intimidation
  • 65 percent were subject to at least one strip search
  • 71 percent were denied adequate food and water
  • 65 percent of children were not properly informed of their rights
  • 97 percent were interrogated without the presence of a family member
  • 95 percent were not informed of the reason for their arrest
  • 37 percent were subject to stress positions
  • 43 percent were shown or signed documents in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children don’t understand
  • 24 percent were isolated in solitary confinement for two or more days

The average amount of time that a Palestinian child detainee was isolated in solitary confinement in 2023 was 26 days, according to evidence collected by DCIP. The longest period of solitary confinement documented by DCIP was 40 days in 2023.

Israeli authorities held at least 36 Palestinian children in administrative detention in 2023, according to documentation collected by DCIP. Administrative detention is a form of imprisonment without charge or trial regularly used by Israeli authorities to arbitrarily detain Palestinians, including children. Palestinian children held under administrative detention orders are not presented with charges, and their detention is based on secret evidence that is neither disclosed to the child nor their attorney, preventing them from preparing a legal challenge to the detention and its alleged basis.

Israeli forces escalated arrest operations throughout the occupied West Bank after October 7, arresting more than 200 Palestinian children to interrogate, prosecute, and imprison in the Israeli military detention system, according to estimates by DCIP.

DCIP estimates that 130 Palestinian child prisoners were released by Israeli forces as part of a truce agreement with Hamas in November, including 17 children in administrative detention.

DCIP published a report on May 31, 2023, titled “Arbitrary by Default,” asserting that Israeli authorities’ systematic denial of fair trial rights to Palestinian children detained by Israeli forces from the occupied West Bank and prosecuted in Israeli military courts constitutes arbitrary detention.

Israeli forces shot 14-year-old Ihab then blocked an ambulance from reaching him

In June 2023, Israeli forces shot 14-year-old Ihab in the leg in Balata refugee camp, near Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank. Then, Israeli forces deliberately blocked an ambulance from reaching him to provide medical care.

Israeli forces besieged the Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza

Defense for Children Palestine | December 14, 2023

12-year-old Aboud was one of many Palestinian patients forcibly evacuated from the Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza by the Israeli military.

December 18, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , | 1 Comment

Israeli sniper kills in ‘cold blood’ mother, daughter in Gaza church

Press TV – December 17, 2023

An Israeli military sniper has shot dead a Christian mother and daughter on the grounds of a Catholic church in the Gaza Strip sheltering displaced Palestinian families.

The fatal shooting took place inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza City at around noon on Saturday, the Latin Patriarchate of al-Quds, which oversees Catholic Churches across Cyprus, Jordan, the Israeli-occupied territories, Gaza and the West Bank, said in a statement.

“Nahida and her daughter Samar were shot and killed as they walked to the Sister’s Convent. One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety,” it added.

The patriarchate also said that no warning was given before the shooting and that the victims “were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents.”

Seven more Palestinians were also wounded by gunfire as they tried to protect others at the church, according to the statement.

The patriarchate further said that an Israeli tank fired three projectiles, destroying a convent’s generator and fuel supplies, and rendering a building housing 54 disabled people uninhabitable.

“The 54 disabled persons are currently displaced and without access to the respirators that some of them need to survive,” it noted.

Meanwhile, the Vatican press agency said the Israeli strikes wounded three people.

Israeli air raid kills nearly two dozen Palestinians in Jabalia

In another development, at least 20 Palestinians were killed and some 100 others injured following an Israeli aerial assault on a residential block in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.

The attack targeted the home of the Shehab family, causing extensive damage to neighboring houses.

Israel waged the brutal war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Since the start of the onslaught on Gaza, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 19,088 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 54,450 others.

Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Gaza, which is under “complete siege” by Israel.

December 17, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | 2 Comments

Another U.S. Spy for Cuba

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 13, 2023

U.S. spies for Cuba are in the news. Last week, U.S. officials announced the arrest of Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, a former U.S. ambassador, on charges of having spied for Cuba since the 1970s. Meanwhile, Ana Montes, a former analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, was recently released from federal prison after serving a 20-year sentence for spying for Cuba. In the context of reporting on these two people, the media is also bringing up the case of Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, a husband and wife who worked for the State Department, who pleaded guilty in 2009 to spying for Cuba for 30 years.

Former US Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha

As a Wall Street Journal story last month stated, these spies were not driven by money to spy for Cuba. The article stated that they were instead driven by “ideology.” My hunch is that these four people themselves would say that they were driven to spy for Cuba by conscience.

Ever since the Cuban revolution in 1959, Cuba has been considered to be an official enemy of the United States and, specifically, of the U.S. national-security establishment (i.e., the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA), which is the driving force of U.S. foreign policy within the U.S government. 

Prior to the Cuban revolution, the Cuban government had been controlled by U.S. officials ever since the Spanish-American War of 1898. In essence, Cuba had been a U.S. colony up until the time of the 1959 revolution.

Prior to the revolution, Cuba was ruled by a brutal rightwing dictator named Fulgencio Batista, who was a loyal agent of the U.S. government. Many Cubans resented Batista, not only because of his brutal dictatorship, and not only because he was a loyal lackey of U.S. officials, but also because he had become a partner of the Mafia, the world’s premier criminal organization, which ran casinos in Havana and shared its profits with Batista under the table. One of Batista’s policies that many Cubans resented was the state-sponsored kidnapping of underaged girls in the countryside who Batista’s goons would deliver to the Mafia’s high rollers in the casinos as a sexual perk. In fact, it was that policy that set off the Cuban revolution.

Once the revolution was won, the new regime, headed by Fidel Castro, took Cuba in a different direction. Castro refused to become a lackey of the U.S. government and insisted that Cuba would henceforth be an independent nation. He also later made it clear that he was committed to socialism and communism and, in fact, was determined to establish friendly relations with the Soviet Union and the communist world (something that President Kennedy was also determined to do, as he outlined in his famous Peace Speech in June 1963). 

Owing to these actions, Cuba was deemed to be a grave threat to U.S. “national security” (just as Kennedy was).

But there is something important to recognize about all this: Cuba never committed any act of aggression against the United States or even threatened to do so. Instead, it has always been the United States that has been the aggressor against Cuba.

For example, there were repeated assassination attempts by the U.S. government against Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Given that Castro had never initiated any aggressive action against the United States, these were nothing more than attempts at legalized murder. In fact, President Lyndon Johnson even candidly pointed out that the CIA was running a “damned Murder Inc.” in the Caribbean.

There was also Operation Mongoose, which entailed U.S. acts of sabotage and terrorism inside Cuba. 

And, of course, there has been the ongoing brutal U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, which has targeted the Cuban people with death and economic suffering in the hopes that they would rise up in another revolution, one that would replace Cuba’s recalcitrant communist regime with another U.S.-approved rightwing stooge.

Therefore, since the U.S. government has always been the aggressor against Cuba — with assassinations, terrorism, sabotage, and its deadly embargo — and since Cuba has never aggressed against the United States — it stands to reason that any information that these four U.S. spies for Cuba delivered to Cuba almost certainly involved secret information that was designed to help Cuba protect itself and its citizens from the acts of aggression by the Pentagon and the CIA.

At Montez’s sentencing, federal Judge Ricardo Urbina, stated that she had put the United States “as a whole” at risk by spying for Cuba. It would be difficult to understand how she had done that, given that it has always been the United States that has been the aggressor against Cuba, not the other way around. More likely, Montez, along with those other three U.S. spies for Cuba, provided information that assisted the Cubans to protect themselves from U.S. attempts at murder, sabotage, terrorism, and the infliction of death and suffering from the U.S. embargo. U.S. officials say that they betrayed the United States and, therefore, need to be severely punished for helping the Cuban people protect themselves from Pentagon-CIA aggression.

December 14, 2023 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Israeli military abducts Gaza hospital director after he decries siege

Press TV – December 12, 2023

The Israeli military has abducted the director of a main hospital in the northern Gaza Strip after he decried the occupying regime’s days-long siege of the facility and its draconian and deadly repercussions.

Ahmed al-Kahlout, head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Beit Lahiya, was arrested and taken to an “unknown destination outside the hospital,” Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday.

The hospital has been under siege by Israeli tanks for the past four days. Earlier on Tuesday, health officials reported that Israeli forces had stormed the hospital, rounding up Palestinian men for interrogation.

Before his abduction, Kahlout had strongly criticized the siege laid on the hospital, saying it had caused the situation at the facility to become “very difficult.”

“No electricity, water, or food at the hospital,” Kahlout had bemoaned, and noted that “three children at the hospital lost their lives in the last three days due to a shortage of oxygen.”

“Israeli drones target anyone entering or leaving the hospital,” he had also said, announcing that the Israeli military had shelled the facility’s maternity ward and water system, forcing the staff to rely on groundwater.

The Israeli military was sustaining its siege and attacks on the hospital, while the facility was accommodating “65 injuries, including 12 children in intensive care, six children with serious injuries, and 3,000 displaced people,” the hospital director had said.

The remarks came amid an ongoing war by the Israeli regime against the entire Gaza, which Tel Aviv began on October 7 in response to an operation staged by the coastal sliver’s resistance groups.

Nearly 18,500 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli attacks, most of them women and children.

Also on Tuesday, the UN said only 13 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip were partially functional as Israeli occupation forces were targeting medical centers and staff amid heavy bombardment of the besieged territory.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report that the services provided to patients at operational hospitals were “limited” as the facilities had run out of bed capacity.

December 12, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

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