Palestine Will Be Free
Tess Adri-Soejoko
EileenMc
There is no limit to the depravities that the Israelis have been inflicting on the Palestinians since they began invading Arab lands in the late 1880s, and especially after October 7. As part of their relentless campaign to subject detained Palestinians to untold atrocities, the Israeli authorities, on September 10, 2024, reopened an underground section named Rakevet in the Ramla prison complex in central occupied Palestine. Since then, harrowing accounts of inhumane abuse at the facility have slowly trickled out through released detainees and through testimonies relayed by lawyers, whose visits remain severely restricted.
"Lawyers for Palestinians held at Rakevet, an underground wing of the Ramla (Nitzan) prison complex in central Israel, said their clients have been assaulted, starved, and denied medical care despite serious injuries," Al Jazeera reported Saturday.
"When the prisoners arrive for the interview [with their lawyer], their faces show what they've endured," lawyer Nadia Daqqa told Al Jazeera. "Particularly in this prison, prisoners are afraid to talk. The [interview] room is one square metre and the guards refuse to leave."
The Palestinian Prisoners' Media Office has published similar testimonies over the past 12 months concerning the conditions inside Rakevet, documenting abuse of those whom the Israelis claim are elite members of Palestinian resistance factions and fighters from the Radwan unit of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The truth, as usual with everything related to Israel, is the opposite of Israeli propaganda. "In the cases of the clients we visited, we are speaking about civilians," said the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (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." Since the Israelis have rounded up random individuals, including women and children, from Gaza and the West Bank, the vast majority of those suffering inside the Israeli dungeons are civilians with no ties to the resistance.
It is worth remembering that the Israelis treat every Arab as a terrorist, including infants, whom Israelis rabbis have openly proclaimed to be future terrorists, and therefore legitimate targets today. Extending the same logic, these rabbis have declared all women to be kosher targets because of their ability to produce children. "The basic law in a religious war, and in this case in Gaza, is that 'you shall not leave alive anything that breathes' (Deuteronomy), and if you do not kill them, they will kill you," Rabbi Eliyahu Mali declared last March. "Today's saboteurs are the children in the previous military operation whom you kept alive and the women are the ones who produce the saboteurs."
This genocidal bloodlust is not a development solely in the wake of the Al-Aqsa Flood. "Even infants who do not transgress the Seven Commandments of the Children of Noah are worthy of consideration for killing because of the future danger that will arise if they are allowed to grow up to be wicked like their parents, even when they do not constitute a shelter for the wicked," Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote in their 2009 book Torat HaMelech (The King's Torah). In a 2011 interview, Shapira expressed no regrets about his genocidal work which is anchored in Jewish texts.
With all Arabs treated as fair game, the branding of detainees as "elite terrorists" is merely propaganda of the most obnoxious kind, which no longer fools anyone after the live-streamed barbarism against the Palestinians - and to a lesser extent against the Lebanese and the Yemenis - over the past two years. While genocidal savagery is being carried out in the open on the killing fields of Gaza, the assaults inside Rakevet (which means "box" in Hebrew) are being executed beneath thick layers of concrete and steel - deep inside the bowels of the earth where sunlight cannot reach.
In an article published on October 20, the Palestinian Prisoners' Media Office said that Rakevet "is not merely a wing in a prison; it is a replica of hell placed underground, where voices and breaths are buried, and where human will is crushed between cold concrete walls and silent surveillance devices." The article went on to add, "It was designed as a fully sealed underground unit, outfitted with narrow cells that have no windows, no air, no light, and no sense of time."
The Prisoners' Media Office described the inhumane conditions inside the dungeon:
Detainees are confined to their cells for 23 hours a day and are allowed only one hour outside in a small concrete yard through which thin threads of sunlight pass. They are forbidden to speak to one another or from lifting their heads.On the walls of the yard hang images of Gaza's destruction with Arabic captions reading "New Gaza" - a deliberate psychological tactic meant to break the spirit before the body.
The facility is run under absolute secrecy.
Even the guards inside the unit carry digital ID numbers instead of names to preserve anonymity, and no lawyer or human-rights representative is allowed inside.
No detainee is permitted to leave the unit under any circumstances. Everything they require - interrogations, medical examinations, court proceedings - is carried out inside the box itself.
The office described daily life in Rakevet using the testimony of a detainee identified only as A.M.:
- Food is scarce and of poor quality - three meals that neither satisfy nor nourish.
- A half-hour of yard time per day, in which prisoners are shackled with hands behind their backs and heads lowered.
- Mattresses are confiscated from 4 am to 11 pm.
- Verbal abuse and beatings commence at any moment.
- A policy of "finger-breaking" is employed as a method of torture.
- Collective prayer - and sometimes even individual prayer - is banned, and no copies of the Qur'an are allowed in the cells.
- Shampoo and tissues are distributed every other day - one small sachet of shampoo for four detainees.
- Underwear is rarely changed, and prisoners must wash their clothes themselves.
Two days later, on October 22, the office published another detainee testimony from someone it only identified as M.N.:
"Our arrival there was like an epic of pain - marked by bleeding, wounds, fractures, and torture beyond description. The suffering continued: humiliation, beatings, starvation, and sleep deprivation. The section contained 25 rooms, each no more than 3×2 metres in size, barely enough for two people, yet they placed four prisoners inside, one of whom slept on the floor."From four in the morning until midnight, mattresses were confiscated and the detainees were forced to sit on a rough floor designed specifically to torment them.
"We had to sit on our knees with our heads bent to the ground. The harshest moments were when we came into direct contact with the guards - they would handcuff us from behind every day on the pretext of searching, take us to other rooms, or leave us in place while beating and insulting us."
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These inhumane conditions inside the torture dungeons, where rape and other forms of sexual abuse are routine, have caused untold suffering to the Palestinians. Since October 7, 81 Palestinians have been killed - the youngest of whom was only 17 - due to abuse and neglect inside Israeli dungeons. The actual count could be higher, as many missing Palestinians from Gaza remain unaccounted for, and the Israelis often declare the deaths of detainees months after their martyrdom.
Since Israeli Jews have proved themselves to be avid genocide connoisseurs, their genocidal leaders have been busy giving them their fill of non-stop savagery against the natives. In January this year, Israel's Channel 13 broadcast a segment documenting the abuse meted out to the Arab detainees inside the Ramla dungeon, which also houses Rakevet.
In the Channel 13 segment, Ben-Gvir - an arch-Israeli propagandist and a perfect representative of the vile Jewish supremacist state whose dungeons he oversees as National Security Minister - lied to the camera, claiming that the detainees in these dungeons were previously in a version of Disneyland, which he has now slammed shut. "Once, they used to have yard time and they had a very generous food menu and they had electric appliances and televisions and ping-pong," Ben-Gvir told the Channel 13 during its gory voyeuristic tour of the dungeon. "It is all over; it is all gone."
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Despite the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees during the " ceasefire" deal last month, nearly 10,000 remain incarcerated in various Israeli dungeons spread across occupied Palestine. On Monday, the Prisoners' Media Office published the names of 1,468 detainees from Gaza alone.
The real number, however, is still higher. "We also affirm that the occupation is still forcibly hiding other names and numbers of detainees inside its prisons and detention centres, and refuses to disclose them until this moment," the office said in a statement. "Nevertheless, we confirm that efforts are continuing around the clock to uncover their fate."