123. Organised torture by Israel seems odd
According to a UN report released just two days back, Israel has a de facto state policy of organised and widespread torture.
The report released by the UN committee on torture has also raised concerns about the impunity of Israeli security forces for war crimes.
The UN committee was established to monitor implementation of the 1984 UN convention against torture.
The report expressed deep concern over allegations of repeated severe beatings, dog attacks, electrocution, waterboarding, use of prolonged stress positions and sexual violence.
The report said Palestinian detainees were humiliated by being made to act like animals or being urinated on and they were systematically denied medical care and subject to excessive use of restraints, in some cases resulting in amputation.
This is a very serious allegation.
Even the figures published by an Israeli human rights group said that as of the end of September the Israel Prison Service was holding 3,474 Palestinians in administrative detention, meaning without trial.
Shockingly, the new UN report says that children younger than 12 have also been detained.
The report said 75 Palestinians had died in custody over the course of the Gaza war.
And to date, no state officials have been held responsible or accountable for such deaths.
Israel’s government has repeatedly denied the use of torture.
The report has pointed out that only one conviction so far has come to light in the two-year period, when an Israeli soldier was sentenced seven-month sentence for repeatedly attacking bound and blindfolded detainees from Gaza with his fists, a baton and his assault rifle.
The media has been circulating various videos showing torture and point-blank shooting by Israeli forces especially Israeli border police officers but they are let off.
The war was triggered by a Hamas raid into Israel in October 2023. About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in that attack and 250 taken hostage. Israel’s ensuing offensive killed nearly 70,000, mostly civilians, and reduced much of the territory to rubble.
Israel has blocked international media and other independent observers.
However, Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at France’s Sciences Po university, entered Gaza evading strict Israeli vetting.
After coming back, he has published his eyewitness account in his book – “A Historian in Gaza”.
In the book, Filiu describes Israeli military attacks on security personnel protecting aid convoys which permitted looters to seize huge quantities of food and other supplies destined for needy Palestinians.
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of systematically stealing aid in order to supply its own forces or to raise funds for political or military operations, a charge Hamas has always denied.
Meanwhile even an internal United Nations memo described Israel’s passive, if not active benevolence towards some gangs responsible for looting in Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has admitted once that Israel had assisted the Popular Forces, an anti-Hamas militia that included many looters amongst its recruits.
Filiu’s one observance must be known to the world community – he writes, “Gaza is probably the place on Earth where Hamas is the most unpopular because in Gaza they know Hamas don’t have any illusions about the reality of Islamist domination and the brutality of its rules.”
Filiu writes, “I’ve always been convinced that it’s a universal tragedy. It’s not one more Middle Eastern conflict. It’s a laboratory of a post-UN world, of a post Geneva convention world, of a post-declaration of human rights world, and this world is very scary because it’s not even rational. It’s just ferocious.”
What has always intrigued me is - a race which had been subjected to the worst kind of torture by the Nazis was expected to be very careful in such matters.
But it seems they have not learnt any lesson from those days. It has only made them angry and bitter.
To the people of the world, Israel, with such actions, is reducing our intensity of sympathies towards them.
They must never forget that none of their actions should ever try to justify Hitler’s action.
What they are showing with their act is that ‘Palestinians must be eliminated’ because most of the detainees are not from Hamas but common people.
Just like all those Jews were not criminals they were like any other common people inhabiting the world.