“The lowest depth of hell”

As soon as I arrived at Sde Teiman — and we Gazans were new to the experience of detention — the officer in charge of the Sde Teiman camp received us. He said: "I don't know — I don't believe — there is life after death, or that there is a heaven or hell. But what I know for certain is that you will not leave here alive. Welcome to Israel's hell." 

Sde Teiman was not just hell. It was the lowest depth of hell.

As soon as we arrived at Sde Teiman, we were blindfolded, our hands bound, and we were forced to sit on our knees in the prayer position for more than 18 hours daily. This continued for between 100 and 150 days, in the same position, forbidden from speaking, from movement, from looking — blocked from consciousness, blocked from everything, isolated from the outside world, forbidden from religious practice. The camp administration imposed an organized program of torture, away from oversight. Torture took several forms and was the system in use across all sections of Sde Teiman — not in the prisons of the regular Prison Service.

The first form was traditional physical torture, by forcing us into a single sitting position and through repression operations that took place almost daily. The repression included breaking joints, torturing prisoners, wounding the face and the whole body. There were also long hours of stress positions, whether in the sections or during interrogation. They would pour boiling water on our bodies, open wounds, or scratch open wounds that had nearly healed. This is the traditional type of torture. It fell on the prisoners; no prisoner left Sde Teiman without dozens of injuries.

I remember, from the moment of my arrest, I started planning in my head a way to document everything I was going through, because as a journalist I wanted to document all the violations we were subjected to inside these prisons. I was counting the fractures I sustained — until I reached 19 fractures. Then I reached a state of despair, because if I continued counting these fractures, I would add to my psychological suffering — that I was being tortured and broken without any reason, and without any external support from societies, human rights organizations, or even the states that pride themselves on democracy.

The second form of torture was starvation. The situation in our case was somewhat different — they provided us with food most of the time, slices of bread, but they often came spoiled. Each meal contained three or four slices, and the prisoner would have to cut off the spoiled part and eat the rest. Each meal also came with a yogurt cup weighing 14 grams — the amount of a small spoonful. Every 15 to 20 days they would bring us a single spoonful of jam to compensate for the body's low sugar levels. This was accompanied by a piece of tomato, also mostly spoiled. This caused many problems. I remember once in one of the sections we had a case of mass poisoning because all the food was spoiled.

We tried to hold hunger strikes to get them to improve the food. They considered that we hadn't reached the level of being human to be entitled to food worthy of a human. The officers would tell us: "The animal at my home eats better than the food you eat. But you haven't reached being human yet. You're just a number. You don't deserve to live a human life. So don't expect me to feed you, give you good, clean food, because you're not human." This caused most of the prisoners to lose absurd amounts of weight. I, for example, lost 42 kilograms. One of my fellow prisoners lost 85 kilograms — an entire human's weight — just from going through this experience of torture by starvation.

The third form was the degradation of human dignity. From the moment you enter, your name is stripped away and you are given a new identity: a number. You become just your number. You start to crave hearing your name. You are a number transferred from place to place, moved from list to list. Often the officers would tell us: “You're just a number. No one even knows about you. If I shot you in the head, no one would know.” 

I stayed in Sde Teiman for 100 days. I didn't change my clothes — neither my underwear nor my outer clothes. All my clothes had blood on them, traces of torture. For 100 days, I didn't cut my nails, didn't cut my body hair, didn't get one clean shower. The shower was just another session of torture: they would give you three minutes to undo the cuffs, undress, shower with cold water, dress, and put the cuffs back on your hands. All of this in three minutes — sometimes only two, depending on the officer's mood.

This is a form of torture. You don't treat yourself as a human — you condition yourself that you are basically not human. The natural needs innate in people, you cannot have them — because you are basically not human.

The fourth form was psychological torture, which, in our conditions as Gaza prisoners in the midst of a war, was even harder than the physical torture. You are isolated from the outside world. You don't know anything. You don't know if your family is alive or dead, if your home was targeted or not, what happened to your loved ones, whether they were displaced. 

The army and officers would manipulate the psychological state by passing on misleading information. They would bring someone in for interrogation and tell them, "Your family is in such-and-such a place" — this happened to me personally, and to dozens, perhaps hundreds of prisoners. They would tell you the location where your family had been displaced to, that they targeted it, and start counting off the names of the people in the house who had been killed. They use artificial intelligence to design videos and pictures of the bodies of family members as a form of pressure and extortion.

Another form of psychological torture is what they called the "disco hall" — they would put you in a hall with extremely loud music around the clock. You might stay there a day, two, three. Some people stayed a month or more, without sleep, without food, without any form of worship, without even a chance to go to the bathroom, while the loud music played twenty-four hours a day, as a way of breaking the prisoner before he went through interrogation.

The fifth and last form of torture — and the most severe — was sexual torture. Sexual torture was practiced on Gaza prisoners specifically; later it was practiced on all prisoners, but it began concentrated on Gaza prisoners. It took several forms. The first was naked strip searches. We were repeatedly searched naked — every time you were transferred, every time you were brought for interrogation, every time you were taken anywhere, you were searched completely naked. The second method was harassment and striking of the genitals. This happened almost daily during the repression operations. Prisoners were constantly subjected to harassment and to striking of the genitals — fatal striking, with the aim of castration, if I can put it that way. The third was rape using solid objects. We witnessed many times prisoners being raped during repression operations using sticks and other solid objects designated for this purpose, usually during repression. The fourth method was rape using trained animals. During the repression operation, they would bring in dogs trained for this purpose, and the prisoner would be raped through these dogs, repeatedly and at intervals. The last form is human rape. There are testimonies from male and female prisoners of being raped — gang rape or repeated rape, whether in interrogation rooms or in the isolation and torture cells.

The truth is that we as Gaza prisoners were not military people, university people, intellectuals, or businessmen. The occupation, through this systematic torture program — organized, repetitive, varied — wanted to carry out a process of consciousness-branding on Gazans generally, because over the last two decades, Gaza has been one of the most consistent geographic areas in Palestine in supporting and embracing the Palestinian resistance. The officers would repeatedly tell us that this repression was a result of the people's general embrace of the resistance in all its forms — even if you don't belong to Hamas or Islamic Jihad or any other resistance faction in Gaza, you belong to this category spiritually, because you didn't turn against it, didn't break from it, didn't revolt against it, over the past twenty years or since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. So all the torture you reap, you reap on yourselves, as a result of your direct or indirect support for the resistance.

The prison was an organized process of consciousness-branding for Gazans, so that these prisoners would become ambassadors of the distorted consciousness the jailer wanted to produce through this torture.

The truth is that the death penalty law is just a cosmetic, decorative form of what is already happening inside the occupation's prisons. Execution didn't stop, and genocide didn't stop, inside the occupation's prisons. Dozens of martyrs have been documented, but what was not documented and what didn't make it to the media is much greater.

For us in Gaza, the prisoners are a constant cause for us, a driver of all action. We are willing to sacrifice for them; this is Gaza's experience in recent years. We sacrifice everything we have for the prisoners. Even if our homes are demolished, even if we lose our loved ones — if the price is the prisoners' freedom, all of this is bearable. But what is painful today, with the legalization of the death penalty — after the magnitude of sacrifices we made, and the abandonment we felt in Gaza from our Arab and Muslim brothers — is that after all these sacrifices we cannot get the prisoners out or empty the prisons. So the death penalty law comes as a complementary link in the chain of genocide for us. Despite everything we offered, it comes as the culmination of these sacrifices: that we have not reached the result we were sacrificing for, and that our prisoners — our children, our brothers, our loved ones — may be subjected to execution. Whether the October 7th prisoners, or even symbolic prisoners like Marwan Barghouti, Ahmad Saadat, Abdullah Barghouti, and others among the symbols of the prisoners' movement.

We must protect the human narrative of the prisoners. The occupation always tries to portray the prisoner in the mold of a criminal or a security element. The truth is completely different. We are rights-holders. All the prisoners who have been arrested, before and after, were arrested on the basis of resistance work, and this is a right guaranteed by all laws.

In order to protect this human narrative of the prisoners, behind every prisoner is a whole story. There is a mother waiting, and there are children growing up away from their fathers. There is a bride being given to her husband without her father by her side. So at minimum — since we are unable to engage in armed resistance, or unable to take practical steps to free the prisoners and ease their conditions — we must tell their stories, as people, as persons. As fathers, mothers, brothers. Not as statistics and numbers. Not as people subjected to periodic torture and the testimonies of prisoners being crushed inside the prisons.

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