Ashraf al-Muhtaseb is a musician who described leaving Israel’s jails with no hearing in his left ear, four fractured ribs and a broken hand, so ill and weak from hunger he could no longer walk.

Dropped at an Israeli checkpoint on his own, he says he began crawling towards his home in the occupied West Bank town of Hebron, until a passerby picked him up.

Photo: Muhtaseb was held for six months

Muhtaseb’s wife fainted when she saw him, and his son asked: “Who are you, and where is my dad?” Picked up on 8 October 2023, he was not charged before his release on 7 April this year.

In those six months, the 53-year-old said, he passed through three Israeli prisons, enduring a marathon of torture, abuse and humiliation detailed in an interview, backed up by medical records and photos that show the impact of multiple beatings and of losing 30kg (66lbs) of body weight.

He said his hearing was destroyed during an attack in his cell in Ketziot prison in November. “I was beaten and kicked in my back, my chest and my head. I had one side of my head against the wall and was getting blows on the other,” he told the Guardian. “The next day I couldn’t hear.”

Muhtaseb says his hearing has been destroyed. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

The abuse, starvation and humiliation he said endured was part of a pattern described repeatedly in eight other interviews carried out by the Guardian, and dozens more done by the human rights group B’Tselem. They described abuse so widespread and systemic that it must now be considered state policy, said the group’s executive director, Yuli Novak. Israeli jails had become “torture camps” in which at least 60 Palestinian prisoners have died in detention since 7 October 2023, she added.

Prisoners said they were subjected to regular severe, arbitrary violence, including sexual assault. None of the prisoners interviewed by the Guardian left detention without experiencing or witnessing some form of attack. Other abuse and humiliation was constant, from starvation rations to denial of access to basic hygiene supplies including sanitary pads for women, soap, towels, clothes and clean water for drinking and showers.

B’Tselem’s descriptions of systemic abuse echo those raised in private by an unlikely ally: the domestic intelligence service. In June the Shin Bet head, Ronen Bar, warned prison officials of a “crisis” that threatened national security. In a leaked letter he says Israel is vulnerable in international courts to “well-founded” claims of committing the war crime of inhumane treatment and violating the convention against torture.

‘My family didn’t recognise me’: released Palestinian prisoner says he was beaten and tortured

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) said it operated according to law and under democratic scrutiny. “We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility,” it said in a statement.

The Israeli military said it “rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees”, and that it acted “in accordance with Israeli law and international law”. Abuse of detainees during detention or interrogation was strictly prohibited and allegations were thoroughly examined, a statement said.

No group of Palestinians appear to be exempt; women and Palestinian citizens of Israel have been caught up in the dragnet of abuse. Maryam Salhab, a 23-year-old student from Hebron, said she still had back problems from the hours she said she spent face down in mud after her arrest on 26 October, with her hands and legs cuffed, kicked and attacked for hours by Israeli soldiers.

At one point, she said, two of them stood on her back. “I was suffocated, I couldn’t breathe, I saw death with both eyes,” she said, estimating that the men stayed there, weighed down by all their gear, for two or three minutes. “They chatted to each other as if nothing was happening, as if they were standing on solid ground.”

She said she was then moved to a cell smeared with the vomit of a previous inmate who had an infectious disease. Water in the taps had been turned off so the women could not even try to clean it.

Lama al-Fakhuri, 48, a writer who joined her there, got her period soon after her arrest. Refused a pad, she bled through her clothes. Both women said they were threatened with rape and verbally abused. Neither faced charges or trial before their release five weeks later, several kilos lighter, as part of a deal to free hostages in Gaza.

‘Livestreaming for Ben-Gvir’

The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has presided, with vocal pride, over the grim transformation of Israel’s prison system. “In Ketziot [prison] they say that I am crazy and I am proud of that. I am proud that we have changed all of the conditions,” he recently told the Knesset.

Ben-Gvir also confirmed in a recent letter to the supreme court that food deprivation was ordered from the top. “There is no starvation, but my policy does call for reducing conditions, including food and calories.”

He appears to be so closely linked to abuse that far-right social networks share pictures of emaciated detainees with captions joking about a Ben-Gvir weight-loss plan.

Musa ‘Aasi, a 58-year-old painter-decorator and father of four, said he heard guards beat 38-year-old Tha’er Abu ‘Asab to death in a neighbouring cell at Ketziot in November. One guard told 50-year-old Firas Hassan, from Bethlehem: “We are livestreaming this for Ben-Gvir”.

Ben Gvir’s spokesperson said the minister was “proud” of his prison policy, and that it was in line with international law. “The conditions of the terrorists imprisoned in Israeli prisons have been tightened to the minimum required by law. In accordance with the minister’s policy, the terrorists do not receive the improved conditions they received in the past,” they said.

Musa ‘Aasi, who says he heard fellow inmate being beaten to death

What guards wanted the security chief to see, they tried to hide from the rest of the world. Ahmed Khalefe, 42, a human rights lawyer from northern Israel detained at an anti-war protest, told a court hearing about violence he witnessed in jail. On his way back to his cell, he was beaten and threatened. “They told me if I spoke again [about abuse] they would kill me,” said Khalefe, who is still under house arrest.

He described pools of blood on the floor and watching jailers jump on the back and legs of an 80-year-old man. “He just cried,” Khalefe said. “We ended up taking care of the tortured people, even though they had no medicine.”

For some prisoners, denial of medical care was in effect a death sentence. Atef Awawda, 54, shared a cell with Muhammad al-Sabbar, a 21-year-old with special needs and Hirschsprung’s disease.

Atef Awawda watched seriously ill prisoners deteriorate without medical care. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

Sabbar required a special diet and medication to prevent blockages in his intestine but when the war started, those provisions stopped. His abdomen began swelling dangerously and Awawda said they begged a nurse: “He is going to die, please help.” “The nurse replied: ‘Go bang your head against the wall,’” Awawda said.

Another medic eventually gave Sabbar an injection and Awawda helped him back towards health by managing their meagre rations, but the two were then separated. Months later Sabbar died from an intestinal blockage. “This is medical negligence in the true sense of the word,” Awawda said.

He said he also briefly shared a dirty, overcrowded cell with a paraplegic prisoner, Khalid Shamish, who had developed an infected pressure sore. “I saw maggots coming out of his back,” Awawda told the Guardian. A month later Shamish had died.

In Ketziot, jailers hung a sign with “welcome to hell” written in Arabic and Hebrew outside one wing. Another comparison occurred to Sari Huriye when he was ordered to strip by prison guards as he entered the jail. “They made me get completely naked and that’s when I realised I was entering Abu Ghraib,” he said, referring to the US jail in Iraq that became a byword for abuse two decades ago.

He is an Israeli citizen from Haifa and a property lawyer, and was arrested over Facebook posts about the war, he believes to set an example. “I ticked all the boxes – middle class, Christian, political,” he said. “Everyone told me they stopped posting on Facebook after that. That was the point.”

He spent 10 days in prison, enough to hear Abdul Rahman al-Maari die in agony in the neighbouring cell after a beating. “I feel so guilty that I couldn’t help him,” he said, breaking into tears. “Maari didn’t stop screaming the whole time. He kept saying: ‘I’m dying, I need a doctor.’

“Then he went quiet. In the morning the guards went in and kicked him, said: ‘Wake up, get up.’ After an hour they brought the medic and they put him in a bag, like trash, and took him away.”

Emma Graham-Harrison and Sufian Taha in Hebron, and Bethan McKernan and Quique Kierszenbaum in Haifa
Mon 5 Aug 2024 19.00 CEST

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