A recently-freed Palestinian prisoner has recounted his ordeal in various Israeli jails, especially the notorious Negev Prison, which he compared to the US-run Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons, respectively in Cuba and Iraq.
In a Saturday report, the London-based Middle East Monitor cited 37-year-old Louay al-Taweel as describing his nearly 10-year-long incarceration at Israeli prisons.
Al-Taweel said Israeli prisons have turned into exact copies of the infamous American jails as far as “torture, humiliation, and deprivation of food and medicine” are concerned.
“The situation in the prisons is hazardous and the lives of the prisoners are literally hell. Prisoners are treated as a criminal and a Daesh member. There are no laws and there is a complete absence of human rights organizations,” he said.
The former inmate mentioned the Israeli regime’s Negev Prison as the worst of those facilities, where prisoners were deprived of even “seeing the sun or getting fresh air.”
Al-Taweel was last time arrested in October under the occupying regime’s so-called administrative detention policy that allows the regime to incarcerate Palestinians indefinitely without pressing charges or putting them on trial.
“We were held in challenging conditions, as prisoners were always exposed to torture of all kinds, including physical and psychological torture and were deprived of food and insulted,” he said.
“After a few days of detention, I was transferred to the Negev Prison. It was extremely shocking, as prisoners are met with a trained rapid response known as Keter. Prisoners are stripped naked in a very humiliating manner and are subjected to severe beatings amidst insults and abuses,” he added.
According to al-Taweel, the injured do not receive any treatment and the prison doctor does not provide them with any care, “leaving the disease to fate.”
He added that many prisoners are ill, especially the elderly, due to medical neglect and daily abuse.
“Any form of worship is prohibited, reading the Quran is prohibited, congregational prayer and raising the call to prayer is prohibited,” al-Taweel noted.
There are reportedly more than 7,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Hundreds of the inmates have been incarcerated under the regime’s “administrative detention” policy, which has caused some prisoners to be held without a charge for up to 11 years.
On Tuesday, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz said the prisoners languishing at Israeli jails had reported being beaten by troops and threatened with violence if they refused to kiss the Israeli regime’s flag.
Detainees have reported several cases of harsh violence and abuse carried out by prison authorities, the paper wrote, saying testimonies were emerging about severely inhumane conditions.
“Eleven prisoners were put in a cell that usually held a third of that. [The guards] threw the food on the floor, sometimes they mashed it with their feet, and every day – under the pretext of a search – they would beat the prisoners with iron sticks,” one Palestinian testimony said about the treatment of prisoners.
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