#rakefet

Emma Graham-Harrison, Lorenzo Tondo, and Sufian Taha at The Guardian:

One of Gaza’s most prominent doctors is almost unrecognisable because of severe injuries inflicted in Israeli detention, his lawyer has said, and faces “tangible danger to his life” after being held for 18 months without charge or trial. Hussam Abu Safiya met his lawyer on 2 July, after a transfer to Israel’s notorious underground Rakefet prison in late June. He had difficulty breathing and speaking continuously, was so weak he struggled to sit upright, and repeatedly seemed on the verge of losing consciousness, said his lawyer, Nasser Odeh. Abu Safiya, who was the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza until he was seized by Israeli forces, said he feared for his life. “They brought me here to kill me. I don’t see myself surviving. This is the end,” Odeh quoted him as saying, in a joint statement with Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), who along with other organisations are calling for his release. His detention is part of a broader pattern of Israeli attacks on healthcare across occupied Palestine, said Milena Ansari, PHRI’s director for the area.

On Sunday a four-month-old Palestinian baby, Ahmad Maarouf Zaid, died after Israeli forces blocked his family from crossing a checkpoint to reach a waiting ambulance, his family told the Guardian. [...] Abu Safiya had become the face of health workers struggling to treat patients throughout the war in Gaza before his detention. He is being held indefinitely, along with thousands of other Palestinian civilians, in prisons that Israeli rights groups say have become torture camps. In late May he was transferred from Ketziot prison to the Ganot prison complex and put in solitary confinement without explanation, Odeh said. Abu Safiya described an attack there by guards using hammers and batons, shortly after appearing via video link at a supreme court appeal hearing challenging his detention. He was then moved to the Rakefet facility on 24 June, where Odeh noted a severe and dangerous deterioration in his condition.

Rakefet, where prisoners never see daylight, was built in the 1980s to hold senior organised crime figures before being closed on the grounds it was inhumane. It was reopened on the orders of the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Emma Graham-Harrison at The Guardian:

Israel is holding dozens of Palestinians from Gaza isolated in an underground jail where they never see daylight, are deprived of adequate food and barred from receiving news of their families or the outside world. The detainees have included at least two civilians held for months without charge or trial: a nurse detained in his scrubs, and a young food seller, according to lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) who represent both men.

The two men were transferred to the subterranean Rakefet complex in January, and described regular beatings and violence consistent with well-documented torture in other Israeli detention centres. Rakefet prison was opened in the early 1980s to house a handful of the most dangerous organised crime figures in Israel but closed a few years later on the grounds that it was inhumane. The far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, ordered it back into service after the 7 October attacks in 2023.

The cells, a tiny exercise “yard” and a lawyers’ meeting room are all underground, so inmates live without any natural light. The jail was initially designed for a small number of high-security inmates occupying individual cells, holding 15 men when it shut in 1985. In recent months, about 100 detainees have been incarcerated there, official data obtained by PCATI shows. Under the ceasefire agreed in mid-October, Israel released 250 Palestinian prisoners who had been convicted in Israeli courts, and 1,700 Palestinian detainees from Gaza who had been held indefinitely without charge or trial. The young trader held at Rakefet was among them.

However, the scale of detentions has been so vast that even after that mass release, at least 1,000 others are still held by Israel under the same conditions, including the nurse represented by PCATI.

“Though the war is officially over, [Palestinians from Gaza] are still imprisoned under legally contested and violent wartime conditions that violate international humanitarian law and amount to torture,” PCATI said.

The two men who met PCATI lawyers in September were a 34-year-old nurse detained while at work in a hospital in December 2023 and a young trader seized in October 2024 as he passed through an Israeli checkpoint.

“In the cases of the clients we visited, we are speaking about civilians,” said the PCATI lawyer Janan Abdu. “The man I spoke to was an 18-year-old who worked selling food. He was taken from a checkpoint on a road.” Ben-Gvir had told Israeli media and a member of parliament that Rakefet was being rehabilitated to hold Nukhba – meaning “elite” – Hamas fighters who led massacres inside Israel Oct 7th, and Hezbollah special forces fighters captured in Lebanon. [...]

Unique abuse

Conditions for Palestinians were “horrific by intention” at all prisons, said Tal Steiner, the executive director of PCATI. Current and former detainees, and whistleblowers from the Israeli military, have all detailed systemic violations of international law. However, Rakefet imposes a unique form of abuse. Holding people below ground without daylight for months on end has “extreme implications” for psychological health, Steiner said. “It’s very hard to remain intact when you are held in such oppressive and difficult conditions.” It also affects physical health, impairing basic biological functions from circadian rhythms needed for sleep to vitamin D production. Despite working as a human rights lawyer, and visiting prisons at the complex in Ramla, south-east of Tel Aviv, where Rakefet is located, Steiner had not heard of the underground jail before Ben-Gvir ordered it back into service. [...] Prisoners told the lawyers they faced regular physical abuse including beatings, assaults by dogs with iron muzzles, and guards stepping on prisoners, in addition to being denied adequate medical care and given starvation-level rations. Israel’s high court ruled this month that the state was depriving Palestinian prisoners of adequate food. They have very limited time outside the cell in a tiny underground enclosure, sometimes just five minutes every other day. Mattresses are taken away early in the morning, usually at about 4am, and only returned late at night, leaving detainees on iron frames in otherwise empty cells.