Human Rights Lawyer: Palestinians Face “Severe Torture” In Israeli Prisons

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Christiane. Sarah Leah Whitson, thank you so much for speaking with us.

 

SARAH LEE WHITSON: Thank you for having me.

 

MARTIN: I wanted to speak to you because you are a human rights lawyer. Your work focuses on the Middle East. In the wake of the – I’ll call it a deal, the agreement — to at least bring a ceasefire to the Gaza war, a lot of attention has been focused on the harrowing conditions that Israeli hostages had been living under. What’s also been taking place is that Palestinians who had been held by the Israeli authorities have also been released. And I think at this point, about 2,000 prisoners have been released. And I don’t know that there has been as much attention on the conditions that they have been living under. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is why were these people detained or arrested to begin with?

 

WHITSON: Sure. There was a massive uptick in imprisonment of Palestinians — primarily from Gaza, but also from the West Bank — in the immediate wake of the October 7 attacks. The number of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli military camps or, or in Israeli prisons more than quintupled. Many of these, most of these from Gaza, were detained under Israel’s so-called “Unlawful Combatants Law,” which allows it to detain people outside of the state of Israel on allegations of membership in terrorist organization. But many are also detained under Israel’s administrative of detention law, which allows Israel’s defense minister or military commanders to detain anyone —  typically a Palestinian, of course — on the basis that they pose a security risk, on the basis of secret evidence that can be renewed indefinitely in perpetuity without the detainee ever even knowing why they’re being detained.

 

MARTIN: About 1,700 of the 2,000 people who were released had never been through any kind of a process, a judicial process, is that right? 

 

WHITSON: That’s accurate, because under the administrative detention law, no one needs to be prosecuted or sentenced in order to remain imprisoned. There are cases of Palestinian detainees who’ve been held for over a decade under so-called administrative attention on the basis of secret evidence that their lawyers never have an opportunity to actually challenge. And in the wake of these, the past two years, detainees have technically had their detention renewed in some kind of a judicial process. 

But that judicial process has entailed, typically, a military judge — so a soldier who has a video call with the detainee lasting in some cases less than two minutes where the detention is automatically renewed. So there’s no actual substantive review or opportunity to appeal or opportunity to defend oneself for these thousands and thousands of Palestinians who are detained under administrative detention or under the Combatants Law, the Unlawful Combatants Law — which is even worse, because under Unlawful Combatants Law, the burden of proof is on the detainee to prove that they are not a security threat to Israel, even if they don’t know — and may never know — the basis on which the secret evidence on which they have been detained.

 

MARTIN: I understand that about 1700 of them were held under these terms that you’ve, you’ve been describing this administrative detention. What about the rest?

 

WHITSON: So 250 to 300 of those who were exchanged as part of the hostage deal include Palestinians who were convicted by Israeli criminal courts under Israeli criminal law for various offenses, some of whom had life sentences against them for crimes committed against Israelis from decades ago, some of whom had been convicted of lesser offenses, membership in Hamas a variety of different offenses — some from the West Bank. I believe about 150 of those who were released have been exiled. So not only were they released, but they were forced to leave Palestine completely.

 

MARTIN: No Western journalists have been able to enter Gaza since the — Israel’s military campaign began there when the war broke out in October of 2023. So we are now relying on accounts from people who have been released, family members, et cetera. Do you know, what were their circumstances? Like who are they?

 

WHITSON: We know that among the 1,700 released were a handful of children. some women — a few dozen over the age of 60. And so primarily a male population detained under administrative detention and released without any charge ever having been brought against them. So these are people who were never charged with anything.

 

MARTIN: And by children, you mean, what do you mean? 

 

WHITSON: The legal definition of a child under international law, and actually most U.S. states is 18.

MARTIN: 18.

WHITSON: So I don’t know the numbers, but I do know that the United Nations has classified and reported on them as children. They’re probably teenagers. We have a case of one teen who died in custody among the 80 Palestinians who died in custody over the past two years, which, you know, is a shocking, shocking number. 

And the reports that we’re seeing of people who’ve come out —  and I imagine people are seeing them in the news —  is of severe torture, severe abuse, sexual violence, rape humiliation, degradation and, you know, virtually very limited access to medical care. The most disturbing, of course, is the recent revelations that among the bodies of Palestinians returned, 135 of them show that they were executed with their hands tied behind their backs after suffering extreme torture. And the images are so graphic that they actually haven’t been even posted on the media. But we have the journalists who’ve seen the images reporting on them.

 

MARTIN: Right. And forgive me for — let’s be clear for a minute. When we’re talking about torture, what do we mean? 

 

WHITSON: Well, what people have reported and what has been documented are cases of rape and sexual assault in some cases using something called a hot rod to penetrate the orifices. 

 

MARTIN: Are you talking about men and women? Are you talking about men, men, males, as well as, as females?

 

WHITSON: The reported cases we have of actual rape are of men, but there are cases of sexual assault and sexual violence against women detainees as well. The U.N. has put out extensive reporting on this. Physicians for Human Rights in Israel has reported on this, Btselem, an Israeli human rights organization, has extensively documented and reported on this. 

The —  includes beatings; it includes a denial of medical care. There’s one recent case of a young Palestinian boy, man, I think around the age of 17 or 18, who died of medical neglect and, and the, you know damage to his body as a result of that. One Palestinian detainee, also, a young man was just released, completely paralyzed because of infections. He suffered from scabies inside the prison, ultimately leading to blood infection and paralysis of his body.

You know, we have been warning about the deteriorating conditions in Israeli prisons for over a year now. Since minister Ben-Gvir took over the prison services in Israel, he has proudly announced the drastic new conditions that he’s imposed on prisoners depriving them of food; dramatically limiting their intake of food; limiting their access not only to medical care, but even to water, even to electricity allowing them to shower once a week in many cases; and of course dramatically restricting their ability to communicate with their family members or even their lawyers. 

 

MARTIN: Lemme, let me jump in for a second and just say, in July of 2024, Minister Ben-Gvir said on X, the social media platform, which is now owned by Elon Musk, quote, “One of the highest goals I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law.”
Now, we reached out to the Israeli Prison Service for comment about the conditions that Palestinians are being held in. We, we have not heard back as of this moment, as of our conversation, but they did give a statement to The Washington Post last week where they said, “All inmates are held according to legal procedures and their rights, including access to medical care, and adequate living conditions, are upheld by professionally trained staff.” And Israeli officials told the Associated Press that they follow legal standards for the treatment of prisoners, and that any violations by prison personnel are investigated. So I guess I would, I would ask you for your response to those comments.

 

WHITSON: Well unfortunately, I don’t believe that those claims are credible. Even the head of Israel’s Shin Bet Internal Security Forces issued a public letter lambasting the prison services and Minister Ben-Gvir for the violation of detainee rights in Israeli custody. The fact that over 80 Palestinian prisoners have died in custody and that fact that Israeli courts are now criminally investigating Israeli prison officials for the deaths of 34 of those detainees. The fact that countless human rights organizations have documented the near starvation conditions, which we can see where our own eyes with some of the released Palestinians and, and their gaunt appearance, documenting how much weight they’ve lost. The fact that the International Committee of the Red Cross has been banned from actually monitoring prison conditions is yet another indication. If Israeli Prison Services didn’t have anything to hide, they wouldn’t be prohibiting even the ICRC from access. Unfortunately the Minister Ben-Gvir and the Israeli Prison Services have, I would say, little to zero credibility in their claims, which are abundantly rebutted by the actual facts.

 

MARTIN: As you’ve pointed out, the the circumstances under which people have been detained are, are not necessarily made public, the charges are not made public, or the allegations are not made public. But do you have any sense of, of the people who remain in detention? 

 

WHITSON: So the estimates of detainees, basically over the past two years – so not people with preexisting criminal prosecutions – have ranged from 9,500 to 12,000. And part of the reason for the variance of the number is that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people missing, and we don’t actually know what’s happened to them. So, for example, the 135 Palestinian bodies that were just exchanged as part of the hostage swap had no names attached to them. They had only numbers. Israelis who had detained them never bothered or are not releasing their actual names. And it’s really part of the dehumanization process to reduce human beings to numbers. 

 

MARTIN: Of the people who remain in detention, do you have any visibility into who they are, what charges there may be against them, or under what circumstances they were detained? 

 

WHITSON: Of those who have been detained, let’s just say in the last two years, since the October 7 attack in Israel there have been criminal charges brought under Israeli criminal law against approximately 300 people. I believe these are people who were captured, you know, while committing the crimes and the murders on October 7. But those are the cases in which there actual criminal charges.
So for the other thousands and thousands of detainees, they’re held under two different laws. One is the administrative detention law and one is the illegal — or Unlawful Combatants Law. 

 

MARTIN: Well, first I would say Israeli officials say that these detentions are meant to protect against very real and credible security threats. And they point to October 7th as an, as an example of that. Like, how would you respond to that?

 

WHITSON: Well, I think every time anyone is detained anywhere in the world, it is to prevent further harm. It’s because the person is deemed to be a security risk, not just to punish them, but to prevent them from committing future crimes. That is the whole model of incarceration. But there are global rules that apply to every country in the world, including Israel. Israel is not above the law that applies to the United States or to China or to Russia, with respect to how detainees may be treated; with respect to their ability to have access to food, water, medical care; access to a lawyer; a right to connect with their family members. And these are all rules that are enshrined very clearly in international law and that Israel has been neglecting for a very long time but has, you know, completely abandoned in the past two years.

I would say furthermore that the notion of having a right to a judicial process, the right to having your evidence against you heard in a court of law, the right to having an independent judge determine whether or not there’s a basis for your detention — those are also a globally recognized international laws, globally-recognized human rights that the Israeli government has completely ignored. Because it has for decades imprisoned Palestinians without giving them any real opportunity to challenge their detention on the basis of secret evidence that they can never even know, and a procedure that allows them to be detained forever in perpetuity on the basis of the secret evidence.

 

MARTIN: There are some who will hear this conversation and will say that ‘That’s unfortunate, that’s even cruel. It’s possibly wrong, but it’s rough justice in a way, because Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. Women, babies, you know, children, you know, kidnapped, people were held in brutal conditions. People were killed in under these brutal conditions. People were starved. These, you know, as Israeli hostages were starved, and Hamas did not conform to any standards of, of international law or human rights.’ What would you say to someone who has that, that point of view?

 

WHITSON: Well I would say that the international rules that we have in place — which most countries have adopted, is their own laws, such as the Convention Against Torture — they are designed specifically to address circumstances where the citizenry of a nation has been wronged where they’ve suffered crimes. There is nothing unique about Israel’s experience in suffering, a terrible attack on civilians, a terrorist attack on civilians — just as I don’t think you could probably point to many countries in the world that haven’t experienced horrible crimes against their citizens. 

The point of international law is that it is the law. And it is what is going to distinguish law abiding nation’s, law abiding governments from lawless governments, because if the governments act as brutally and viciously as the people they are purporting to fight against, it’s really just a race to the bottom. And if you look at the response of Israel to the attacks on October 7, I think anyone would be hard pressed to say that Hamas’ attack and the horrible murders they committed there were somehow worse than the exponentially more massive and indiscriminate and wide-scale destruction of Palestinian lives, which has now exceeded over 60,000. And I’m sure we’ll discover exceeds much more than that, the point of international —

 

MARTIN: This isn’t like a contest of atrocities here. 

 

WHITSON: No. 

 

MARTIN: Is the issue here that Israel as a nation state, as a member of the community of nations, should be held to the same standard as other nation states? Is that the core of the argument?

 

WHITSON: I think it’s absolutely the core of the argument, but this is not just about holding Israel to the same standards of international law. It’s about recognizing and starting with the understanding that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful. And International Court of Justice and the U.N. General Assembly have ordered Israel to end its occupation, to withdraw its forces and withdraw its settlers from occupied Palestinian Territories. Occupation, illegal occupation, apartheid rule, these are also crimes. So this is not just about, well, let’s meet the standards of the rest of the international community. It’s about rightly focusing on the severe Israeli crimes that international courts of justice have ordered, be brought to an end.

MARTIN: Sarah Lee Whitson, thank you so much for joining us.