RAMALLAH, (PIC)
The lawyer of the Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Authority, Khaled Mahajneh, revealed horrific details about the conditions experienced by Palestinian prisoners from the Gaza Strip in the Israeli Ofer prison.
Lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, in a press conference held in front of the authority’s headquarters in Ramallah on Monday, said that he visited yesterday detainees from Gaza in the Ofer prison, namely: journalist colleague Muhammad Arab, and Tariq Abed.
Journalist Arab recounted details of prisoners “being subjected to rape, including one of the detainees who was completely stripped and had a fire extinguisher nozzle inserted into his anus, and they sprayed the contents into him. The detainee is in a very difficult physical and psychological condition.”
He reported that another detainee “was completely stripped and beaten with an electric shock, and his genitals were pulled, in addition to other methods used to sexually assault the prisoners, which are difficult to explain,” according to his testimony.
Prisoner Arab witnessed other methods of torture, including placing the detainees on the ground with their hands handcuffed behind their heads, and then leaving the dogs to tear at their bodies, in addition to the shabeh (a very stress position) that is accompanied by assault on them through the police dogs.
Mahajneh said, “The journalist Arab did not realize that he was in Ofer prison until he was informed of this, as he was transferred from the Sde Teiman military detention camp to Ofer with about 100 other prisoners, all of them blindfolded, and the detainees thought they were being transferred to a camp near Gaza.”
He added, “A week before Arab was transferred from the Sde Teiman camp to Ofer, one of the sick detainees who had repeatedly pleaded for treatment died after being assaulted,” pointing to the presence of more than 100 sick, injured and wounded detainees screaming without treatment.
In his testimony, the prisoner Arab explained that Ofer prison contains cement cells without ventilation, measuring 5 to 6 square meters, with iron beds without mattresses, pillows or covers, and about 25 detainees are held in each cell.
He continued, “There are prisoners who eat with their hands tied, and each detainee gets 100 grams of bread, a cucumber or tomato, and a milk carton for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
Mahajneh mentioned that according to the testimony of his colleague Arab, the toilet is open inside the rooms in front of everyone, with cameras open to the bathroom. Bathing is only for one minute, he added.
Arab stated in his testimony, “In Ofer there are two wards, the Hell ward and the Purgatory ward, and the prisoners inside the rooms cannot see those who are being tortured inside these two sections, but they hear their screams during the torture,” noting that prisoners in a number of rooms were recently assaulted and many of them had their limbs broken.
Since the start of the war, the Israeli occupation army has arrested thousands of Palestinians, including women and children, and later released a small number of them, while the fate of the others remains unknown, amid testimonies of systematic torture of the detainees.
The occupation army has been waging a genocidal war on Gaza since October 7, 2023, which has left more than 38,584 martyrs, 88,881 injured, mostly children and women, and the displacement of nearly 1.9 million people, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine that has claimed the lives of dozens of children, according to United Nations data.
