July 29, 2024
Leaked Reports of Torture from Sde Teiman Death Camp
Following leaked reports of torture and rape from Sde Teiman death camp, a “debate” has raged today within Israel’s parliament, military, and across settler society. The hotly contested question: whether IOF soldiers have a right to rape Palestinian prisoners with impunity.
Zionist politicians and military officials expressed their public outrage today at the brief detention of IOF soldiers at Sde Teiman death camp by Israeli military police, following the leaked reports of IOF soldiers raping and torturing Palestinian detainees held there. A specific case cited prior to the raid involved insertion of a rod up the anal cavity of one detainee, causing him severe internal injuries that required hospitalization.
A fight broke out at the death camp between soldiers who have carried out routine torture and sexual violence against Palestinian men at the facility, and military police who ultimately arrested 9 soldiers at the site and brought them in for questioning. The outrage across the Zionist government, military, media, and settler society was specifically at the fact that 9 IOF soldiers were arrested for raping and torturing Palestinian prisoners at the death camp.
In one televised argument between Knesset members, an MK blasts the prosecutors who issued arrest warrants for the soldiers accused of rape and torture, stating that he does not understand how it is possible for military police to come arrest IOF troops for anything they do to “Nukhba terrorists.”
The MK’s rhetoric and the rhetoric of other Knesset members toward Palestinian detainees is openly genocidal. Western media frequently portrays such language as characteristic of only the most extreme settlers, however these are elected members of parliament who represent the dominant parties in Israeli politics.
Torture and abuse of Palestinians is so widely accepted and normalized among Israeli settlers that the internal Israeli “debate” surrounding Sde Teiman centers not around the death camp itself, but rather around whether soldiers confirmed to have raped and tortured detainees should face consequences or not for having done so. The parameters of the debate, and what their very terms imply, illustrate how profoundly violent, dehumanizing, and genocidal Zionist thought is — not merely at its outer fringes, but within its mainstream.