Updated Dec. 19, 2023 at 1:15 p.m.
BIRZEIT — On Nov. 16, when heavily armed Israeli forces stormed her home in this town north of Ramallah, Fayrouz Salama was all alone.
While she was being handcuffed and blindfolded, she could hear that other Israeli soldiers were ransacking her house.
Salama, a post-graduate student who studies Palestinian border villages at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, told Daraj how she was then brutally dragged out to a military vehicle. Forced onto the vehicle’s floor, she was surrounded by soldiers until they reached the detention center, where she was not allowed to call her family, friends or a lawyer.
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Fayrouz said she was stunned both by the sheer number of soldiers who raided her house in Birzeit — and their brutality.
She is not alone.
Israeli soldiers have used the current war in Gaza as a pretext to carry out a multiplying number of violent detentions and home raids, citing such suspicions as “financing Hamas,” “supporting terrorism,” “celebrating terrorism,” and other ready-made charges.
The detentions have jumped to more than 3,760 Palestinians since Oct. 7, as Israeli prisons have become centers of physical and psychological torture.
The prison authority, aided by military troops and other special units, have repeatedly stormed jail cells, a measure that has become a routine that detainees have grown accustomed to. They have provoked, blackmailed, and severely beaten the detainees. They have also forced them to sleep on the room floor and denied medical treatment.
Psychological warfare
According to multiple interviews, these impromptu detentions follow a similar pattern: taken into custody, interrogation, then return to the cell, then transfer from a cell on the lower floor to another on the upper floor near the interrogation rooms. Such practices are part of the psychological warfare against the population of the West Bank.
Fayrouz faced all these conditions throughout the investigation period, saying that psychological warfare is no less serious than physical torture that the detainee is exposed to it.
“We do not know the time, we do not know the day, and we are prohibited from meeting with the lawyer,” she said. “When the jailers were taking me handcuffed and blindfolded from the cell to the investigation room, I could hear the screams of the prisoners in the other rooms.”
Gang behavior
Fayrouz said she did not know when or if she would be released, because she had been totally isolated from the outside world since her detention. When prison authorities summoned her, she thought that she would be transferred to Damon Prison, southeast of Haifa. But when she saw other female detainees, she knew that they were about to release her, with her name on the list of the fifth batch of prisoners who were released on Nov. 28 as part of last month’s prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel during a temporary ceasefire.
The world’s silence gave Israel time to commit these crimes.
Qaddoura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs Authority, said the wave of new detentions are blatantly illegal, a “comprehensive process of revenge against the Palestinian people that takes different forms and shapes, the culmination of which is what is happening in Gaza.”
Fares said Israel takes the Palestinian detainees “hostages in the strict sense of the word,” as they have detained people without justifications or indictments. This shows that Israel wants to inflict the greatest possible harm on the Palestinian people after the events of Oct. 7.
“The world’s silence gave Israel time to commit these crimes,” he said.
Fares also pointed out the inadequate food supplies in Israel’s prisons, with detainees rapidly losing weight and suffering malnutrition, as well as insufficient clothes and blankets with winter arriving. The conditions are grounds to charge Israel with war crimes, and the large number of female detainees, according to Fares, indicates that they are “hostages.” He said the number of detained women has been doubled despite the release of 71 female detainees in the prisoner exchange deal.
How they’re treated
Fares criticized the International Committee of the Red Cross, saying: “Israel has abolished the role of the Red Cross and doesn’t allow its crews to visit any of the prisons to review the conditions of the prisoners.”
“It (the ICRC) does not have lists of the names of those being detained. It has begun seeking our help instead of us seeking its help to complete the files of the prisoners, document their detention, and determine the prisons to which they are transferred,” he said. “The biggest problem is that the Red Cross does not say that Israel is hindering it from carrying out its responsibilities and duties, nor does it defend its role.”
In turn, the ICRC said on Oct. 31 that it was deeply concerned about its inability to assess the conditions of Palestinian detainees and the treatment they receive.
Ammar Dweik. director general of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, said Israeli authorities have been carrying out a massive detention campaign in the West Bank since Oct. 7.
He said an average of 50 people has been detained every day since the war began, bringing the total number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli to about 4,000 including children, woman, elderly and activist, university students and journalists.
Dweik said Israeli authorities deliberately treat prisoners in a brutal manner from the moment of arrest. He added that many testimonies documented the deliberate vandalism of household belongings during arrest operations. Detainees are then transferred to administrative detention without being charged, under what is called “the Secret Files,” he said.
“Hostages” for future negotiations
Lawyers are also unable to talk with detainees to document any assaults or violations they may have been exposed to, he said. As for detainees from Gaza, “they are held in Israeli army camps and not in detention centers, and they are kept there for 45 days without being brought to court,” Dweik said.
Nour Owdeh, a writer and political analyst, said that the detention campaign reflects that Israel views all Palestinians as “hostile and a security threat.”
She said that Israel uses such detentions to “collect hostages” to use them in future negotiations to free its hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
Israel’s campaigns of collective detentions have not changed since the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes in 1948, with the creation of Israel, she said. Its main aim is to “make life unsustainable for the Palestinians and to get rid of such people and their presence on the land, whether through murder or forced displacement,” she said.
