An army probe into the abuse prompted backlash from soldiers and right-wing Israelis [Getty]
A Palestinian prisoner who was sexually abused by Israeli soldiers has been returned to detention after being discharged from an Israeli hospital, Israeli media reported on Thursday.
The unnamed detainee has been sent to a field hospital at Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman detention facility — the site of the man’s reported abuse, Haaretz reported. Israel’s military has not officially confirmed the man’s whereabouts.
Israel detained the man in Gaza under a permanent detention order over his alleged involvement with Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades. He was initially sent to Israel’s Ofer prison, then to the Sde Teiman base after an alleged revolt against his jailers.
It is at Sde Teiman where prosecutors say the man suffered broken ribs and was raped by soldiers from Israel’s Force 100 military unit.
The Israeli Honenu legal aid organisation, which is representing four of the nine soldiers, claimed they were acting in self defence.
Nine reservists stationed at Sde Teiman were arrested on Monday by military police officers after an investigation was launched into the abuse. At least one soldier has since been released, according to Israeli media reports.
The investigation into the soldiers prompted a violent backlash from members of the army, Israeli public, and far-right politicians.
In a Knesset committee hearing, a shouting match broke out between Likud MK Hanoch Milwidsky and Ahmed Tibi, an MK from the Ta’al party which represents Palestinian citizens of Israel, over the legitimacy of the use of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.
Milwidsky said that “If he is a Nukhba [a synonym for Hamas fighter] everything is legitimate to do”.
Far-right Israeli activists and politicians, including prominent cabinet ministers, expressed outrage at the soldiers’ arrests.
This culminated in activists and soldiers storming the Sde Teiman detention facility and the Beit Lid army base where the suspects were held. Many of those who participated in the riots are still serving at the Sde Teiman facility.
“The return of the detainee to the clinic at Sde Teiman, the facility where he was subjected to torture, is a serious ethical and professional failure of the medical officials and hospital management who were involved in his medical care,” Physicians for Human Rights Israel was quoted by Haaretz as saying.
“Through this decision, the medical teams exposed the detainee to the possibility that he would once again meet the soldiers suspected of raping him, thereby putting his life in danger. If the medical authorities were meeting their obligation according to medical ethics, they would have insisted that he be moved to a safe place, where he could recover from his severe injury and recuperate from the severe trauma he experienced.”
The allegations of sexual abuse against the detainee are the latest in a series of mounting allegations of systematic abuse at the Sde Teiman facility, reported by The New Arab, CNN and New York Times for the past several months.
This has prompted Israel’s high court to demand reports on conditions at the facility following a lawsuit in May.
Palestinian Lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, who visited the facility to see journalist Mohammed Arab, an employee at The New Arab’s siter network Al-Araby TV, said that the site was “unlike anything I’ve ever seen or heard before.”
Around 1,200 Palestinians who had been held in the facility have been released after being found to be civilians.
