No charges filed after scores of Palestinian detainees died in IDF custody – Haaretz

The Israeli military has reportedly launched 57 probes into deaths that happened at CCTV-equipped military facilities, but indicted no one

 

The Israel Defense Forces opened 57 criminal investigations into the deaths of multiple Palestinian and Lebanese detainees in Israeli military custody but never indicted anybody, according to Haaretz. Seven of the cases reportedly relate to captives who suffered fatal gunshot wounds.

In an article on Friday, the Israeli newspaper cited filings obtained by the human rights group Hatzlacha through Freedom of Information requests. Most of the deaths in question reportedly occurred inside IDF military detention facilities that are equipped with CCTV cameras, the publication notes.

Yet, the Israeli military failed to identify suspects in most of the cases, according to Haaretz.

Another 19 probes have reportedly been launched into alleged beatings, violence, and the “unlawful use of force” toward detainees. However, only two indictments were filed as a result, one of which was later dropped after the alleged victim was returned to Gaza before testifying in court, Haaretz claimed.

Most IDF investigations into suspected looting by Israeli soldiers in Gaza and Lebanon have likewise resulted in no charges brought, according to the publication.

In response to a request for comment, the IDF confirmed that “several investigations were opened into suspected violations,” insisting that the Israeli military “operates in accordance with international law,” as quoted by Haaretz.

Israel has for years faced accusations of abuse against Palestinian detainees inside IDF holding facilities.

The report also came out after a photo showing a semi-naked and blindfolded Palestinian man bound to an iron rod surfaced on social media earlier this month. The Israeli military confirmed its authenticity and promised to launch a probe. However, human rights groups argued that it was emblematic of widespread abuse of Palestinian detainees at what Physicians for Human Rights Israel described as IDF “torture camps.” 

In March, the Israeli military dropped charges against troops accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner at a detention facility at the Sde Teiman base in July 2024. The IDF cited insufficient evidence to secure a conviction and procedural concerns after disturbing footage of the incident was leaked to the media.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the decision, saying that “Israel must pursue its enemies, not its heroic fighters.” 

Meanwhile, last month, Italy and France launched investigations into the alleged mistreatment of activists who were detained by Israeli troops while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla in May.

After being expelled from Israel, numerous activists hailing from several countries alleged that they had been subjected to beatings, torture, sexual assault, and in some cases outright rape at the hands of Israeli troops.

https://www.rt.com/news/643216-zero-charges-filed-palestinian-detainee-deaths-idf-custody/

 

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In Australia we investigate doctors who talk about Gaza. In Israel they beat one with an iron hammer. Dr Hussam Abu Safiya believes he is about to die in an underground cell. By Andrew Brown.

There is a doctor in an underground Israeli prison who believes he is about to die.

His name is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya. He is 53. He is a paediatrician. He ran Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza and held it together through a siege that lasted 85 days, filming himself pleading for help while the health system collapsed around him. He stayed with his patients.

Then Israel took him. That was 27 December 2024.

More than 555 days later he has not been charged with anything. No trial. No tested evidence. He is held under Israel’s law on unlawful combatants, a device that permits indefinite detention on secret material.

Tortured

On 10 June he appeared before Israel’s Supreme Court by video link, handcuffed, pale, with marks resembling lash wounds on both arms. The court rejected his appeal anyway.

According to his lawyer, Nasser Odeh, guards then stormed his cell at Ganot Prison and attacked him with an iron hammer and batons. On 24 June he was moved to Rakefet, an underground section of Nitzan Prison. Odeh says he has been beaten daily since.

Odeh visited him on 2 July. Guards brought Abu Safiya in with his hands and feet bound, ringed by masked officers. The lawyer barely recognised him. Injuries to his head, his eyes, his ears, his neck. He could not breathe properly. He could not stay upright.

Then he said the words no civilised country should be able to ignore.

“They brought me here to kill me. I don’t see myself surviving. This is the end.”

The Israel Prison Service calls the allegations false and entirely without factual basis.

Held without charge

Even Israel’s own Supreme Court is not content with that answer. After Physicians for Human Rights Israel warned that his life is in immediate danger, the court ordered the state to respond by Tuesday to a petition it had stalled since April. The petition seeks the release of 14 Palestinian doctors from Gaza, all held without charge.

Fourteen.

Sit with the arithmetic. One doctor. Eighteen months. Zero charges. One hammer.

Now come home.

This month Michael West Media published my investigation into AHPRA’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. AHPRA regulates nearly one million Australian health practitioners. 

Doctors. Nurses. Psychologists. Paramedics. Pharmacists. The people we trust to tell the truth about suffering.

More than 1,400 practitioners and over 60 organisations objected, warning the IHRA framework would chill health workers who criticise Israel or describe what is happening in Gaza. 

Days earlier the British Medical Association, representing more than 200,000 doctors, rejected the definition for exactly that reason. Britain’s doctors saw a muzzle. Australia’s regulator saw policy.

Then came my interview with Dr Muhammad Mustafa. Dr Mo. An Australian doctor back from Gaza. Surgery without adequate anaesthetic. Children with catastrophic wounds. Theatres lit by torches. Members of his own family killed.

And what did Australia give him when he spoke about it? Complaints and professional scrutiny. A quiet warning that there may be consequences for saying too much.

So let us be precise about the comparison, since precision is supposedly what the IHRA definition protects.

In Gaza, Israel deals with a doctor’s testimony by removing the doctor. In Australia, we deal with a doctor’s testimony by processing the doctor.

One system breaks the body. The other files the complaint.

The paperwork differs. The purpose does not.

Silence.

For two years we have been lectured that words are the danger. That a doctor’s social media post threatens community safety. That Australian medicine urgently required a politically contested definition to police what its practitioners may say about a foreign state.

Fine. Take these people at their word. Then where are they?

The real threat

A paediatrician reports being assaulted with a hammer after eighteen months in detention without charge. Where is the joint statement? Where is the emergency press conference? The politicians who can produce outrage within the hour when a slogan is chanted at a rally have managed nothing for a doctor who says he is being beaten to death.

Apparently the great threat to medicine is an Australian registrar with opinions about international law. Not the guards. Not the hammer.

Perhaps the organisations that campaigned for AHPRA will now campaign for independent medical access to Dr Abu Safiya. Their machinery is formidable. This would take one afternoon.

I am not holding my breath.

Because silence is not always the absence of politics. Sometimes silence is the politics.

Australia should demand immediate independent medical access to Dr Abu Safiya and to every Palestinian health worker held without charge. AHPRA should explain why, at this exact point in history, Australian medicine needed a framework capable of making practitioners think twice before describing what Israel does. And every group that campaigned for that decision should face one question. 

You told us this was about protecting doctors. Prove it.

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya is still alive. He has never been charged. We know his name. We know where he is being held.

History will remember who spoke.

It will remember the silence longer.

https://michaelwest.com.au/ahpra-dr-hussam-abu-safiya/

 

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

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Israel’s latest prison proposal has drawn attention in Israeli media, but its limited coverage in the Anglosphere points to a deeper failure to confront the treatment of Palestinian prisoners.

Israel’s environment ministry has removed the protected status of Nile crocodiles to allow them to be used in a moat guarding the country’s largest prison, a move requested by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The story has been widely covered by Israel’s English-language press, alternative media worldwide, and news sites in non-English-speaking countries. But, in the Anglosphere, there is a virtual news blackout.

Searching within New Zealand and Australian internet domains yields nothing. In the UK, only The Telegraph has reported the story; the BBC and The Guardian do not deem it newsworthy. In the US, the only report I have seen was by the progressive independent outlet Democracy Now.

It feels nigh on impossible that a similar event in Putin’s Russia, Iran, or any number of dictatorships would go unreported by the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, The Age, the NZ Herald, or the English-language newswires.

Veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz: “National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is taking Israel to the next stage in its development: barbarism as a legal and explicit state policy.”

“Sadism is no longer just for deviants; it is the new political correctness,” he continued. “After years in which barbarity and sadism toward Palestinians were hidden as something shameful and repressed – and mainly as the exception to the rule – Ben-Gvir is moving them to centre stage to great applause from some of the crowd and silence from the rest.”

That Ben-Gvir is monstrous is not news. The Australian and New Zealand governments, along with those of the UK and Canada, have banned him from entering their countries for inciting pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank and promoting the expansion of illegal settlements.

But the monstrousness of Israel’s gulags is newsworthy – if underreported.

In March, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese released a report stating: “Since October 2023, more than 18,500 Palestinians have been detained across the occupied Palestinian territory, including at least 1,500 children. Thousands remain in detention without charge or trial. Many have been forcibly disappeared. Nearly 100 detainees have died in custody. Detainees have been abused in unfathomable ways, including rape with bottles, metal rods and knives, starvation, breaking of bones and teeth, burning, being spat upon, and being attacked and urinated upon by dogs.”

“A system that has long been used to dominate, degrade and break Palestinians has evolved and hardened into state doctrine,” Albanese said.

“It is defended by politicians, rationalised by legal institutions, sanitised by media narrative and tolerated by governments that continue to arm and shield Israel.”

The name of Ketziot Prison, where the crocodiles are to be deployed, will be familiar to some from news reports of the abuse of Freedom Flotilla volunteers held there earlier this year. News of their mistreatment and images of Ben-Gvir abusing them cut through the Western media fog and prompted rare condemnations from Western governments.

Israel’s ambassadors in Wellington and Canberra were called in for ritual reprimands. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong described the images as “shocking and unacceptable.”

Similar statements and actions were made by the US, the UK, France, Italy, and Canada. Ben-Gvir is the unacceptable face of an apartheid regime that all those countries accept and, to differing degrees, abet.

The detained Flotilla activists repeatedly pointed out that their treatment – as appalling as it was – was minor compared with what Palestinian prisoners endure daily.

There was nothing like the same reaction from Western governments when a video of Ben-Gvir taunting imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti emerged in August last year.

Following the visit, Ben-Gvir reportedly said: “We entered Marwan Barghouti’s cell and he was crying in terror. I told the jailers to keep treating them like that,” adding, “When we enter Israel’s prisons, the Palestinian prisoners piss their pants when they see us, they piss themselves out of fear.”

The video was reported by mainstream media outlets but not as prominently as the one showing the abuse of the international activists.

Ben-Gvir is not just a comic-book villain; he is a high-ranking member of the Israeli cabinet. He has a picture of Baruch Goldstein, the convicted terrorist who killed 29 Palestinians, hanging in his Knesset office, and he himself acts as a state terrorist, marshalling the full force of Israel’s prison system and police in his campaign against Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Supporters of Israel argue that the country attracts a disproportionate amount of bad publicity.

Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, told the Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that the ABC’s coverage of Gaza “created an impression of great negativity about Israel.”

Segal claimed there had been a “disproportionate” number of critical stories.

“They could run positive stories about other things Israel is doing,” she said. “The amazing startup nation, things like that. They very rarely do that. There is no attempt at that part of the agenda.”

The Jerusalem Post reported last week that Israeli defence-tech start-ups working with the Defence Ministry raised nearly US$3 billion in the first six months of 2026 – three times the amount raised in all of 2025.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon, and its bombing and assassination campaigns in the war on Iran have been a boon for the self-described startup nation.

Gaza is history’s first AI-assisted genocide, and our media are paying it too little attention, not too much.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/07/israels-prison-policy-exposes-western-media-silence/

 

כֵּלֵא

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An Israeli court has temporarily blocked National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from using Nile crocodiles to guard security prisoners, most of them Palestinians.

Ben-Gvir proposed surrounding prisons with crocodile-filled moats in December, arguing that the reptiles would strengthen security and deter escapes.

While the Israel Nature and Parks Authority initially deemed the plan unfeasible because Nile crocodiles were considered wild animals that could be be kept only in zoos and sanctuaries, the hurdle was removed last month when Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman redesignated them as “tended wild animals,” potentially allowing their deployment at prisons.

On Sunday, however, the Jerusalem District Court issued an injunction against the project following a petition by the animal-rights organization Let Animals Live.

Judge Avraham Rubin ruled that the state may not locate crocodiles or prepare them for transfer until further notice. The order will remain in effect while the court considers a longer-term injunction, with the government required to respond by August 16.

Ben-Gvir criticized the decision, accusing the judiciary of siding with “terrorists” and thwarting measures intended to strengthen Israeli deterrence.

“We know that the terrorists are worried about the arrival of the crocodiles, but today the court came to their aid,” he said, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post.

Nearly 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners are being held in Israeli prisons, according to rights group Addameer, with the number having almost doubled since the Gaza war began in October 2023. More than a third are administrative detainees held without criminal charge or trial under indefinitely renewable six-month orders, often based on secret evidence withheld from them and their lawyers.

READ MORE: US and Israel staged Spain migration invasion – Iran According to UNICEF, Israel is also the only country where children are systematically tried in military courts. At least 400 Palestinian children are currently imprisoned, most in pretrial detention without having been convicted of an offense. Defense for Children International–Palestine says between 500 and 700 are prosecuted annually, some as young as 12, most commonly for alleged stone-throwing.

At least 84 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli custody since the war began, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which has documented systematic abuse, including physical and psychological violence, deliberate starvation, denial of medical care, and inhumane conditions.

The crocodile project was expected to be piloted at Ketziot Prison in southern Israel, which holds Palestinian security prisoners, including alleged members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba force.

Israeli reports say work had already begun on an approximately 170-meter water channel around one high-security wing. The petition claims that 21 million shekels (about $6.2 million) had been allocated to the pilot.https://www.rt.com/news/643789-israeli-court-blocks-ben-gvir/  

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

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