Zionist Propaganda

The Telegram
Sat, May 18, 2024

   Pro-Palestine Freedom demonstrators gather outside Downing Street

It has been clear for many months that the civilian casualty statistics issued by Hamas-controlled organizations in Gaza are highly accurate, as testified by several organizations and international bodies. According to one study by data analysts in the US, and if you believe the cheating sheets that Zionists keep putting out to forcibly reduce the number of innocent children and women killed by Israeli terrorists, you would have to believe that, since October 7 last year, Israeli cowardly terrorists have been walking in Gaza like peaceniks preaching Christian love. The study confirmed that the number of women and children killed was exxactly what the Gaza health authorities have been updating on a daily basis.

Throughout their 125-year-long history, Zionists have become experts in the fine art of lying and subverting the truth of their genocide in Palestine with myths about how the land was given to them by some fictional god in the deserts of Arabia about 3,000 years ago; illegally migrating to a land they don't own; inviting pity about their eternal victimhood to be exploited as a tool of psychological blackmail and their need for a place to shelter themselves from global hatred, even as they began rampaging in Palestine, plundering and pillaging and destroying Palestinian villages and towns, expelling and killing and massacring hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians.

The Zionists are so good at lying and blackmailing that their own tormentors in their native Europe - from which they illegally came to Palestine - fell for it and have, since Holocausting them by the millions, supported them out of both guilt (by those naive Europeans) and of a desire to keep them out of Europe (by their Anti-Semitic European fake friends).

It should be a statement of the obvious that nobody knows the true number of civilian casualties in Gaza, since tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children remain buried under mountains of rubble. The readiness of pro-Zionist politicians and rabid ultra-religious Jewish activists to try and force on the world Israel's distortions of the official Palestinian authorities' tallies of the dead and injured - which every expert on the planet confirmed by looking at the methods they used - are proof that the terrorist Zionist colonial state is desperate to quickly inject fake facts and create false records because it fears the judgment of history. It is already trying to alter the facts before history is written, just as it did with its so-called "War of Independence" in 1948, which was in reality a massive ethnic campaign of killings, massacres, rapes, expulsions and demolitions of entire villages of native indigenous people from their millennial ancestral lands. 

Israel has of course a vested interest in minimizing the number of women and children who have been killed in order to keep claiming the higher moral ground and delegitimize the Palestinian national resistance, just as it long tried - but failed - to delegitimize the very existence of the Palestinian nation. "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people" once said the uglier-than-hell Golda Meir, she whose so-called "Jewish people" are a hodge-podge of unrelated ethnicities, races, and linguistic groups from the far corners of the planet forcibly amalgamated together by the archaic and primitive criterion of religion, not unlike the chimera of a "Muslim people" that Islamist fundamentalists invent to sow terror around the world. The likes of the US, the conservative Zionist toilet paper The Telegraph, and the imbeciles of Fox News should not be aiding them.

It is too late to inject the Zionist lies this time around. Unlike in 1948 when they had a monopoly over the information and could comfortably make up history as they wish it, the times have changed and the truth is free to circulate thanks to the Internet and social media. Still, fake facts continue to fall on fertile ground in the ignorant Republican backwoods of America who have been brainwashed by the Zionist-promoted fictional garbage of the Bible and their established ignorance of the world outside inbred moonshining Appalachia. The history of Israel as falsely written by the Zionists is wuickly unraveling. Israelis are foreign, non-native “settler-colonizers” who have committed genocide in 1948 and 1967, and continue to commit the same genocide in Gaza. It is the indigenous Palestinian people who are the rightful owners of the land and ever since the rape of Palestine was undertaken by white colonial foreigners they have remained a free people defending themselves and their land against Zionist and Jewish terrorists.

 

A Palestinian Giant: Edward Said

University Professor Edward Said [correctly pronounced Sa'eed] is one of those Palestinian intellectual giants whose life was a bridge between East and West. He is virulently hated by the Zionists for his achievements, including his rejection of the Oslo process - he knew back in the mid 1990s that the Zionists were lying and that the Oslo accords were a trap for the Palestinians. The English pricks of the toilet paper The Telegraph still refer to this University Professor at Columbia University (the hightest honor the college bestows) as a charlatan, years after his death. Why? Because his insights on Palestine, on Israeli-Arab relations, on "Orientalism" as a cover for colonialism, and the future of Israel-Palestine make him a herald, a prophetic visionary of the deadend in which Zionists find themselves today with their supremacist and exclusivist ideologies.

Excerpts from a May 1997 Christian Science Monitor article on Said by Robert Marquand in his "Conversations with Outstanding Americans" column:

On the Oslo peace process: "The whole idea of trying to produce two states is probably at an end. The Oslo peace processis really in tatters...The lives of Israelis and Palestinians are hopelessly intertwined. There is no way to separate them. You can have fantasy and denial, or put people in ghettos. But in reality there is a common history. So we have to find a way to live together. It may take 50 years. But ... the ISraeli experience will gradually turn back towards the world they really live in, the Islamic Arab world, and that can only come through the Palestinians".

On Palestinian-Israeli relations: "I believe it is possible for us [Palestinians] to have a reconciliation with the Jews of Israel. But not unless we recognize their complex history, and they recognize ours. I don't think that has happened, and that is why there is no reconciliation".

On his intellectual courage: What makes Said outstanding, say admirers, is his Renaissance nature, his passionate intellectual voice on behalf of the voiceless, and his courage in speaking unpopular views. "He's an elightenment figure of an unusual type, and has been so under difficult circumstances" says writer and linguist Noam Chomsky, a longtime friend. "He's lived under police protection for a long time. It hasn't been easy". He has received death threats from Jewish extremist groups since 1985.

On identity: While many people [ignorant Americans usually] often assume he's a Muslim, he is an Episcopalian who attended Protestant schools and married a Quaker. Yet he writes piercingly about distortions of Islam in the Western press - while supporting writer Salman Rushdie who has lived under an Iranian Shiite "Fatwa" - death sentence. "My experience is one of a minority inside a minority," says Said from his book-lined Columbia University office. "Growing up, my family were Protestants in a Greek Orthodox community ...  Our truest reality is expressed in the way we cross over from one place to another. We are migrants, perhaps hybrids, in, but not of, any situation in which we find ourselves. This is the deepest continuity of our lives".

For Said, the duty of the educated person is to constantly resist the narrowing confines of an ethnic or national identity - which leads to apartheid, racism, hatred, violence and war. His scholarship itself argues that no peoples or places are ever wholly "pure". They are always hybrids, products of cultural ferment and imitation, the interchanges of East and West, North and South. ":This is not to deny one's Islamic, Christian or Jewish roots", he says, but it means not allowing one's identity to freeze -blocking growth, the evolution of ideas, a larger sense of human identity".

On his seminal masterpiece, "Orientalism": In it he argues that European powers colonized other regions partly by a systematic creation of myths about Africa and Asia that denied these places a 'narrative' of their own in western centers of learning. A kind of "intellectual dispossession", he argues. The thesis of Orientalism proposes the existence of a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture", which originates from Western culture's long tradition of false, romanticized images of Asia, in general, and the Middle East in particular. Said wrote that such cultural representations have served as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperial ambitions of the European powers and of the U.S.

On his native Palestine: "Palestine and its past seems to me to have a kind of universal quality to it that makes it interesting for reasons that have little to do with the place itself ... It is a question of justice. What happened to the Palestinians, their experience of denial and dispossession since 1948 has a kind of drama toit as a tragedy.... THE OSLO ACCORDS WILL NOT LEAD TO A JUST PEACE . When you go there and see this 'peace' on the ground, you realize the Israelis have produced a document that has tied up the Palestinians into little bantustans without any sense of fulfilled expectations." He refused to lend his presence to the Oslo signing ceremony. He feels that the issues of land and peace in historic Palestine run so deeply through the question of justice and history that silence is a betrayal...The very corruption of the Oslo process means that basic unresolved questions like the Palestinian exile of 1948 must come up again. It is not lost on him that such issues resonate at a time when Jews themselves are making inroads in reparations, recovering Nazi gold in Swiss banks, stolen Jewish art in France, synagogues in Poland. "One can admire the way Israelis have always reminded the world of what they went through in the Holocaust and with anti-Semitism, and their persistence in making sure this history is put first in the table. Palestinian leaders have simply accepted the effacement of our history in 1948. That must be put in front of Israelis.      I DON'T THINK THERE CAN EVER BE PEACE UNLESS THERE IS AN ATONEMENT, AN APOLOGY, SOME RESTITUTION FOR WHAT THEY DID.  THEY DID IT! THEY DESTROYED A SOCIETY, DISPOSSESSED A PEOPLE AND HAVE OPPRESSED THEM EVER SINCE. THIS HISTORY MUST BE FACED, JUST AS IT WAS FOR THE JEWS AFTER WORLD WAR II."

His biography:

1935-1947: A Palestinian born in the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbiya to a prominent and wealthy family. His father becomes a US citizen after escaping the Ottoman Turkish draft in 1911. His mother is half-Lebanese, born in Nazareth. His early schooling at Saint Georges, an Anglican academy in Jerusalem. The family leaves for Cairo when Jewish forces take Talbiya and loses family home and business.

1948-51: Attends British-run Victoria College in Cairo during King Farouk's last years in power. Spends summers in Lebanon. After a "rowdy" spell, his father sends him to Mount hermon Academy in Massachusetts.

1952-57: Graduates from Princeton University. Spends a year in Cairo giving piano recitals and concerts, but opts to study literature at Harvard.

1957-1963: Focuses on new field of comparative literature. Earns doctorate from Harvard where he wins the Bowdoin Prize for work on Joseph Conrad. He is offered a post at Columbia.

1963-70: Establishes himself as a leading professor and gains tenure. Begins writing on Middle East after the six-day war in 1967. Visiting scholar at Harvard.

1970-76: Marries (second wife) Mariam, starts a family that includes son Wadie and daughter Najla. His year as a scholar in Beirut and a fellowship at Stanford produce his breakthough masterpiece, "Orientalism", his main theoretical work. 

1977-82: Elected to the Board of the Palestinian National Council. Achieves popular acclaim with "The Question of Palestine", and "Covering Islam".

1983-88: Visiting professor at Yale and Johns Hopkins: Four books, one film, eight endowed lectures, including Cornell and Chicago. Seminal support for a two-state solution in Palestine.

1988-92: Breaks with Yasser Arafat. Calls Oslo peace accords a "sell-out". Visits Jerusalem after 45 years in exile. 

1993-2003: Renounces "two-state" solution in favor of a "single state" with equal human, civil, political rights for all. Dies 24 September 2003 at 67 years of age in New York City. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Broumana, Mount-Lebanon, Lebanon. His headstone indicates he died on 25 September 2003. 

The Zionists hate him because he elevated the Palestinian question in the Middle East to the same level as the Jewish question in the Europe of the early 20th century. By equating Palestinian sufffering with the Jewish suffering, he forced a balanced look at the Israel-Palestine question. Zionists have long tried to erase Palestinian identity so as to create their own "pure" Jewish state. Ongoing events after October 7, 2003, have proven Edward Said was right all along.

But Zionists continue to fume with rage at his existence in the intellectual mainstream. In 2016, California State University, Fresno, started examining applicants for a newly created Professorship in Middle East Studies named after Edward Said. After months of examining applicants, Fresno State canceled the search due to pressure from pro-Israeli Zionist individuals and groups.

For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said

How Foreign Zionists Savagely Created Israel By Killing Native Palestinians

“It did not begin on October 7. What we went through in 1948 is exactly what we’re seeing now in Gaza and Rafah.”
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From one generation to the next, Palestinians aim to keep the history of al-Nakba alive
Alaa Elassar, CNN
Wed, May 15, 2024

Mohammad Zarqa trembled with fear as he watched panicked crowds of people, screaming and covered in blood, rush into his small village on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

“You have to run,” he remembers a woman crying out, shocking Zarqa out of a daze and sending him racing home to warn his family. He was only 12 years old at the time, unaware of the looming war that would soon upend his life.

It was April 9, 1948, and Jewish [terror] militias had just attacked Deir Yassin, a village about a mile northeast of Zarqa’s home in Ein Karem in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. At least 100 people, including women and children, were killed – many stripped, lined up and shot with automatic fire, according to reports from the time archived by the United Nations.

The massacre is among the events that led to al-Nakba, or “the catastrophe,” when roughly 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by armed [terrorist] Jewish groups seeking to establish the state of Israel.

A mass grave where more than 100 victims of the Deir Yassin massacre were buried in April 1948. The round stone ring is a mass grave for women and the square one is for men. - AP

“We thought we were going to be next,” Zarqa, now 88, tells CNN from his home in New Jersey. “My father said, ‘We cannot stay here. They’re going to come and massacre us.’ We had nothing, no weapons, nothing to defend ourselves. That’s the day we became refugees.”

On Wednesday, Zarqa joins millions of Palestinians across the world to mark Nakba Day with protests and community events intended to honor the memory of the Palestinians killed and displaced in 1948 and the brutal war unfolding today in Gaza.

Part of that commemoration includes a commitment to storytelling, Zarqa says, whereby survivors of the Nakba generation continue to share their experiences with younger Palestinians so the dream of liberation and return never dies. He believes it’s the only way to understand the current war and work toward a just and lasting peace in the region.

“My heart is bleeding,” he says softly. “At my age, I’m still dreaming of going back home. Palestine is something that is still implanted in my heart and my body. It’s where I was born. It’s where I have my memories. It’s my country.”Yearning for home

Zarqa, along with his parents and six siblings, fled Ein Karem on foot, taking very little with them. They walked from village to village, searching for food and sheltering in the homes and garages of kind strangers. The atrocities he witnessed along the way are seared in his memory.

“I saw the most horrific things in my life: women coming in with torn clothes and uncovered heads crying, screaming, saying that the Jews – they weren’t called Israelis at the time – attacked their village and massacred everybody,” Zarqa says.

Mohammad Zarqa proudly shows off his grape vines at his home garden in New Jersey. - Courtesy Jenan Matari

More than 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 531 towns and villages destroyed during al-Nakba, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, an institute of the Palestinian Authority.

Jewish leaders declared independence and the creation of the state of Israel on May 14, sparking a military response from Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The family hoped the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, as it would come to be known, would end in a swift victory for the Arabs.

After several weeks, Zarqa’s family returned to Ein Karem. But when they entered the village, they found it had been ransacked and its residents cast out by Jewish [terrorist] militias, Zarqa says.

With nothing left to salvage, they fled to Jordan to wait out the war, he recalls.

The family initially lived in squalor, surviving off the generosity of strangers and local mosques. They shared a home with other Palestinian refugees in Jabal Al Weibdeh, a neighborhood in Amman, Zarqa says. It had a dirt floor and there were no windows, doors or bathrooms. They often couldn’t shower for months at a time.

By March 1949, Israel had won the war and forbidden the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who were expelled from returning to their homes and ancestral lands. Zarqa’s family was among them.

The family began to build a new life in Jordan, one marked by struggle and poverty, as they patiently waited for permission to return to Ein Karem. But it never came, and decades later Zarqa found himself living in the United States – even further from his homeland – trying to raise a small family of his own.

“We made a life in the US, but this still isn’t home. You never forget that you had a house and somebody kicked you out of it,” Zarqa says. “We will never stop wanting to return.”

A responsibility to teach

Neither time nor distance has blurred Zarqa’s memories of Palestine. He has passed onto his four children and eight grandchildren every bittersweet memory of Ein Karem, from its acres of orchards to the hilltop where he could see the mountains and the Mediterranean sea in the distance.

Zarqa remembers Ein Karem so vividly that despite his decades of absence, he was able to give his grandson, Zach Matari, who visited the village in 2019, directions over FaceTime to his old home, now in present-day Israel. An Israeli family is living there.

“I remember every inch of my village. If you go there I can tell you there was this apricot tree here, and there was a fig tree there, and that’s the stairs we used to climb,” he says.

Jenan Matari, another one of his grandchildren, is a writer and social media influencer who uses her platform to educate followers about Palestinian history, culture and current events, including the war in Gaza.

Mohammad Zarqa and his granddaughter Jenan Matari at her wedding henna in 2017. - Courtesy Shorouq Matari

She loves listening to her grandfather’s stories and says her work, which is rooted in his Nakba experience, is a form of resistance. All Palestinians in the diaspora, she says, should use their voices too.

“I get really sad for my grandfather, because if I’m feeling triggered by the things that are happening in Gaza, and I’m feeling this depleted and in so much pain watching this, I can only imagine what it’s doing to him and his generation to watch what they lived through happening again, but on an even greater scale,” Matari, 33, tells CNN.

Talking about al-Nakba isn’t easy, Zarqa confesses. He often pauses mid-sentence or changes the subject when it hurts a bit too much. But he refuses to be silenced by his grief and even invites other Nakba survivors to his home to share their experiences with family, friends and the wider community

Dawud Assad, one of those survivors, lives just 10 miles away. He narrowly survived the Deir Yassin massacre, which he says claimed the lives of 47 family members, including his grandmother and 2-year-old brother.

Dawud Assad, a survivor of the Deir Yassin massacre, celebrates his birthday at his home in New Jersey. - Courtesy Jenan Matari

“I was supposed to be dead,” says Assad, who is now 92 and nicknamed Al-shaheed Al-hay, or “the living martyr.” Assad survived by hiding in a shallow trench near his home, crouching and quietly praying for mercy as bullets grazed his hair.

“It did not begin on October 7. What we went through is exactly what we’re seeing now in Gaza and Rafah,” Assad says, referring to Israel’s ongoing war there. Videos of dead children are especially triggering because they remind him of his slain brother.

In the seven months since the October 7 attack, Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. It also has imposed a siege and razed entire communities, rendering nearly 90% of the population displaced and everyone food insecure.

Israel says its military tactics are necessary to defeat Hamas and return the hostages. The International Court of Justice says it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide, though a final ruling in the case could take years. Israel “utterly rejects” the allegation.

For Zarqa and Assad, the war is reminiscent of the horrors they endured during al-Nakba, and it’s important for them to draw that parallel for young Palestinians in the diaspora, as well as anyone else trying to make sense of the violence.

“Al-Nakba never ended,” Zarqa says.

They point to recent statements from Israeli officials that have alluded to another Nakba through suggestions of mass killing and displacement, or outright calling for it. In a November interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news, Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter described the war as “the Nakba of Gaza 2023.”

Following Dichter’s comments, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly urged ministers to choose their words more carefully. “We must be sensitive,” he said, according to The Times of Israel.

Hope for the future

Zarqa’s heart remains torn between nostalgia and grief as he concedes he may never again see his beloved Palestine, stroll through the quiet streets of Ein Karem or taste its delicious apricots.

But he’s sure his descendants will.

There are some 5.9 million Palestinian refugees worldwide, most of them descendants of that 1948 generation of exiles, according to the United Nations. It is “the world’s longest-standing protracted refugee crisis,” the UN said at a 2023 event marking the 75th anniversary of al-Nakba as it urged a solution grounded in international law.

While some countries, including the United States and United Kingdom, skipped the commemoration after Israel called for a boycott, Zarqa elsewhere sees hope: The anti-war protests taking over city streets and college campuses across the world.

“I am so proud of them,” Zarqa says. “You pass on your stories to your children and then they carry the banner and continue to teach their children, and eventually their own grandchildren.”

“Palestinians will never forget.”

For more, check out:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/palestinians-recount-painful-history-war-192917464.html

 

The US Bribed Eight "Prestigious" Countries to Vote Against Palestine

Here are the eight countries that sided with the US in opposing the recognition of Palestine as a member state of the United Nations.

Israel - ruled by the corrupt war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-religious Zionist cabal. No need to expand on why Apartheid genocidal Israel refuses to recognize the Palestinians - whose land it stole and whose people it has massacred and displaced to create itself.

Argentina - ruled by the right-wing Trump-like moron Javier Milei whose policies are taking Argentina back to the Stone Age and whose political shelf-life is expected to be less than that of a lettuce.

Czech Republic - long a pro-Israel stooge. In a United Nations General Assembly vote on 29 November 2012, the Czech Republic was the only European country to vote with Israel against upgrading the status of Palestine to a "non-member observer state". And last week it voted against Palestine at the UN General Assembly. Czech support to Israel is a combination of guilt at its Nazi past, its subservience to the US, and its military manufacturing industry that served the Nazi Germans very well during WWII. 

Hungary - Same as the Czech Republic, ruled by Viktor Orban, a right-wing populist Fascist puppet of Russia's Vladimir Putin. He has been a thorn in the side of the European Union as he has undermined the rule of law by overreaching into the independence of the Judiciary. He is a mini-Putin. Poland was briefly ruled by the PIS(S) party led by people like Orban, but the Polish people threw them out. Orban is no doubt next.

Micronesia - a hodge-podge of some 2,100 insignificant tiny atolls and islands, half of which (Guam and the Marshall islands) is owned by the US. Its insignificance, with a total land area of 2,700 km² (1,000 sq mi), is clear except for it serving as a butler for the American landlord. It probably was bribed with a few million dollars to vote the way it did.

Nauru - With an area of only 21 km² (8.1 sq mi), Nauru is a finch's asshole of a country, the third-smallest country in the world after Vatican City and Monaco. Its population of about 10,800 is the world's third-smallest, larger than only Vatican City and Tuvalu. Very prestigious and relevant.

Palau - Another finch's asshole of a country comprising approximately 340 islands with a total area of 466 km2 or180 sq mi). 

Papua New Guinea - another hodge-podge of pacific islands cobbled together after 250 years as a colony of Holland, Germany, Britain and Japan. It is a large archipelago (462,840 km² or 178,704 sq mi), and right now it is incapable of being genuinely independent: It is still owned by the British with Charles III as its king. The people of Papua New Guniea consist of rural remote communities (90%) whose people have no idea what Palestine is. The government, on the other hand, is easily bribed to vote ignorantly for whatever the US tells it to vote. For a former colonized people, the Papuans New Guineans must be really obtuse to endorse a savage colonialist entity like the Zionist colony in Palestine.

How can pathetically insignificant countries like Nauru, Micronesia, Palau and such be declared sovereign member states of the UN, while historic Palestine with its 6 million people is deliberately kept out? These three countries are smaller than the smallest US state of Rhode Island (1,214 square miles, or 3,144 km² ), which makes them easy to bribe and buy. Their governments probably can't locate Palestine or Israel on a map, let alone vote on rational grounds.

Let us not forget that the US engineered the creation of two new Muslim countries in the heart of Europe - Bosnia and Kosovo - by detaching pieces from Serbia without the approval of the latter. But in Palestine, the US is conditioning its acceptance of a sovereign Palestinian state on the approval of Israel, whose criminal government denies even the existence of a Palestinian nation.

Jewish Israel Introduces Morality to the Near East

[Warning: This piece contains material that can hurt sensitive people. You may choose not to read or view it. Americans don't mind the cruelty because they themselves practiced it at Guantanamo and Abu-Ghreib. That is why the US and Israel are so close: They share the Judeo-Christian family value of wanton brutality as a means to achieve peace around the world. It's been said that you can tell a civilized country by the way it treats its animals. Here is how Israel treats its "human animals"].

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Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center
CNN's International Investigations and Visuals teams
Fri, May 10, 2024 at 12:28 PM GMT+3·16 min read

Israeli whistleblowers reveal shocking mistreatment of Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman military detention camp in the Negev desert.
 

Detainees subjected to extreme physical restraint, medical procedures by underqualified medics, and routine abuse including beatings and unleashing of dogs.
Israeli military denies allegations of misconduct, claims detainees are treated in accordance with proper conduct and security protocols.

At a military base that now doubles as a detention center in Israel’s Negev desert, an Israeli working at the facility snapped two photographs of a scene that he says continues to haunt him.

Rows of men in gray tracksuits are seen sitting on paper-thin mattresses, ringfenced by barbed wire. All appear blindfolded, their heads hanging heavy under the glare of floodlights.

A putrid stench filled the air and the room hummed with the men’s murmurs, the Israeli who was at the facility told CNN. Forbidden from speaking to each other, the detainees mumbled to themselves.

“We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.”

Guards were instructed “to scream uskot” – shut up in Arabic – and told to “pick people out that were problematic and punish them,” the source added.

A leaked photograph of the detention facility shows a blindfolded man with his arms above his head. - Obtained by CNN. 

 

They paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.

CNN spoke to three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the Sde Teiman desert camp, which holds Palestinians detained during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. All spoke out at risk of legal repercussions and reprisals from groups supportive of Israel’s hardline policies in Gaza.

According to the accounts, the facility some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.

“They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” said one whistleblower, who worked as a medic at the facility’s field hospital.

“(The beatings) were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” said another whistleblower. “It was punishment for what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”

Responding to CNN’s request for comment on all the allegations made in this report, the Israeli military, known as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said in a statement: “The IDF ensures proper conduct towards the detainees in custody. Any allegation of misconduct by IDF soldiers is examined and dealt with accordingly. In appropriate cases, MPCID (Military Police Criminal Investigation’s Division) investigations are opened when there is suspicion of misconduct justifying such action.”

“Detainees are handcuffed based on their risk level and health status. Incidents of unlawful handcuffing are not known to the authorities.”

The IDF did not directly deny accounts of people being stripped of their clothing or held in diapers. Instead, the Israeli military said that the detainees are given back their clothing once the IDF has determined that they pose no security risk.

Reports of abuse at Sde Teiman have already surfaced in Israeli and Arab media after an outcry from Israeli and Palestinian rights groups over conditions there. But this rare testimony from Israelis working at the facility sheds further light on Israel’s conduct as it wages war in Gaza, with fresh allegations of mistreatment. It also casts more doubt on the Israeli government’s repeated assertions that it acts in accordance with accepted international practices and law.

CNN has requested permission from the Israeli military to access the Sde Teiman base. Last month, a CNN team covered a small protest outside its main gate staged by Israeli activists demanding the closure of the facility. Israeli security forces questioned the team for around 30 minutes there, demanding to see the footage taken by CNN’s photojournalist. Israel often subjects reporters, even foreign journalists, to military censorship on security issues.
Detained in the desert

The Israeli military has acknowledged partially converting three different military facilities into detention camps for Palestinian detainees from Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, in which Israeli authorities say about 1,200 were killed and over 250 were abducted, and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza, killing nearly 35,000 people according to the strip’s health ministry. These facilities are Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, as well as Anatot and Ofer military bases in the occupied West Bank.

The camps are part of the infrastructure of Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, an amended legislation passed by the Knesset last December that expanded the military’s authority to detain suspected militants.

The law permits the military to detain people for 45 days without an arrest warrant, after which they must be transferred to Israel’s formal prison system (IPS), where over 9,000 Palestinians are being held in conditions that rights groups say have drastically deteriorated since October 7. Two Palestinian prisoners associations said last week that 18 Palestinians – including leading Gaza surgeon Dr. Adnan al-Bursh – had died in Israeli custody over the course of the war.

The military detention camps – where the number of inmates is unknown – serve as a filtration point during the arrest period mandated by the Unlawful Combatants Law. After their detention in the camps, those with suspected Hamas links are transferred to the IPS, while those whose militant ties have been ruled out are released back to Gaza.

CNN interviewed over a dozen former Gazan detainees who appeared to have been released from those camps. They said they could not determine where they were held because they were blindfolded through most of their detention and cut off from the outside world. But the details of their accounts tally with those of the whistleblowers.

“We looked forward to the night so we could sleep. Then we looked forward to the morning in hopes that our situation might change,” said Dr. Mohammed al-Ran, recalling his detainment at a military facility where he said he endured desert temperatures, swinging from the heat of the day to the chill of night. CNN interviewed him outside Gaza last month.

Al-Ran, a Palestinian who holds Bosnian citizenship, headed the surgical unit at northern Gaza’s Indonesian hospital, one of the first to be shut down and raided as Israel carried out its aerial, ground and naval offensive.

He was arrested on December 18, he said, outside Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, where he had been working for three days after fleeing his hospital in the heavily bombarded north.

He was stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where, he said, the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.

The details in his account are consistent with those of dozens of others collected by CNN recounting the conditions of arrest in Gaza. His account is also supported by numerous images depicting mass arrests published on social media profiles belonging to Israeli soldiers. Many of those images show captive Gazans, their wrists or ankles tied by cables, in their underwear and blindfolded.

Al-Ran was held in a military detention center for 44 days, he told CNN. “Our days were filled with prayer, tears, and supplication. This eased our agony,” said al-Ran.

“We cried and cried and cried. We cried for ourselves, cried for our nation, cried for our community, cried for our loved ones. We cried about everything that crossed our minds.”

Dr. Mohammed Al-Ran headed the surgical unit at Gaza’s Indonesian hospital, one of the first to be raided and shut down by Israel. - From Social Media

Al-Ran is pictured on the day of his release from a detention camp, in a visibly worse physical condition. - From Social Media

A week into his imprisonment, the detention camp’s authorities ordered him to act as an intermediary between the guards and the prisoners, a role known as Shawish, “supervisor,” in vernacular Arabic.

According to the Israeli whistleblowers, a Shawish is normally a prisoner who has been cleared of suspected links to Hamas after interrogation.

The Israeli military denied holding detainees unnecessarily, or using them for translation purposes. “If there is no reason for continued detention, the detainees are released back to Gaza,” they said in a statement.

However, whistleblower and detainee accounts – particularly pertaining to Shawish – cast doubt on the IDF’s depiction of its clearing process. Al-Ran says that he served as Shawish for several weeks after he was cleared of Hamas links. Whistleblowers also said that the absolved Shawish served as intermediaries for some time.

They are typically proficient in Hebrew, according to the eyewitnesses, enabling them to communicate the guards’ orders to the rest of the prisoners in Arabic.

For that, al-Ran said he was given a special privilege: his blindfold was removed. He said this was another kind of hell.

“Part of my torture was being able to see how people were being tortured,” he said. “At first you couldn’t see. You couldn’t see the torture, the vengeance, the oppression.

“When they removed my blindfold, I could see the extent of the humiliation and abasement … I could see the extent to which they saw us not as human beings but as animals.”

A leaked photograph of an enclosure where detainees in gray tracksuits are seen blindfolded and sitting on paper-thin mattresses. CNN was able to geolocate the hangar in the Sde Teiman facility. A portion of this image has been blurred by CNN to protect the identity of the source. - Obtained by CNN

Al-Ran’s account of the forms of punishment he saw were corroborated by the whistleblowers who spoke with CNN. A prisoner who committed an offense such as speaking to another would be ordered to raise his arms above his head for up to an hour. The prisoner’s hands would sometimes be zip-tied to a fence to ensure that he did not come out of the stress position.

For those who repeatedly breached the prohibition on speaking and moving, the punishment became more severe. Israeli guards would sometimes take a prisoner to an area outside the enclosure and beat him aggressively, according to two whistleblowers and al-Ran. A whistleblower who worked as a guard said he saw a man emerge from a beating with his teeth, and some bones, apparently broken.

That whistleblower and al-Ran also described a routine search when the guards would unleash large dogs on sleeping detainees, lobbing a sound grenade at the enclosure as troops barged in. Al-Ran called this “the nightly torture.”

“While we were cabled, they unleashed the dogs that would move between us, and trample over us,” said al-Ran. “You’d be lying on your belly, your face pressed against the ground. You can’t move, and they’re moving above you.”

The same whistleblower recounted the search in the same harrowing detail. “It was a special unit of the military police that did the so-called search,” said the source. “But really it was an excuse to hit them. It was a terrifying situation.”“There was a lot of screaming and dogs barking.”
 

Strapped to beds in a field hospital

Whistleblower accounts portrayed a different kind of horror at the Sde Teiman field hospital.

“What I felt when I was dealing with those patients is an idea of total vulnerability,” said one medic who worked at Sde Teiman.

“If you imagine yourself being unable to move, being unable to see what’s going on, and being completely naked, that leaves you completely exposed,” the source said. “I think that’s something that borders on, if not crosses to, psychological torture.”

Another whistleblower said he was ordered to perform medical procedures on the Palestinian detainees for which he was not qualified.

“I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise,” he said, adding that this was frequently done without anesthesia.

“If they complained about pain, they would be given paracetamol,” he said, using another name for acetaminophen.

“Just being there felt like being complicit in abuse.”

The same whistleblower also said he witnessed an amputation performed on a man who had sustained injuries caused by the constant zip-tying of his wrists. The account tallied with details of a letter authored by a doctor working at Sde Teiman published by Ha’aretz in April.

“From the first days of the medical facility’s operation until today, I have faced serious ethical dilemmas,” said the letter addressed to Israel’s attorney general, and its health and defense ministries, according to Ha’aretz. “More than that, I am writing (this letter) to warn you that the facilities’ operations do not comply with a single section among those dealing with health in the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law.”

An IDF spokesperson denied the allegations reported by Ha’aretz in a written statement to CNN at the time, saying that medical procedures were conducted with “extreme care” and in accordance with Israeli and international law.

The spokesperson added that the handcuffing of the detainees was done in “accordance with procedures, their health condition and the level of danger posed by them,” and that any allegation of violence would be examined.

Whistleblowers also said that medical team were told to refrain from signing medical documents, corroborating previous reporting by rights group Physicians for Human Rights in Israel (PHRI).

The PHRI report released in April warned of “a serious concern that anonymity is employed to prevent the possibility of investigations or complaints regarding breaches of medical ethics and professionalism.”

“You don’t sign anything, and there is no verification of authority,” said the same whistleblower who said he lacked the appropriate training for the treatment he was asked to administer. “It is a paradise for interns because it’s like you do whatever you want.”

CNN also requested comment from the Israeli health ministry on the allegations in this report. The ministry referred CNN back to the IDF.
 

Concealed from the outside world

Sde Teiman and other military detention camps have been shrouded in secrecy since their inception. Israel has repeatedly refused requests to disclose the number of detainees held at the facilities, or to reveal the whereabouts of Gazan prisoners.

Last Wednesday, the Israeli Supreme Court held a hearing in response to a petition brought forward by Israeli rights group, HaMoked, to reveal the location of a Palestinian X-Ray technician detained from Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza in February. It was the first court session of its kind since October 7.

Israel’s highest court had previously rejected writs of habeas corpus filed on behalf of dozens of Palestinians from Gaza held in unknown locations.

The disappearances “allows for the atrocities that we’ve been hearing about to happen,” said Tal Steiner, an Israeli human rights lawyer and executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.

“People completely disconnected from the outside world are the most vulnerable to torture and mistreatment,” Steiner said in an interview with CNN.

Satellite images provide further insight into activities at Sde Teiman, revealing that in the months since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, more than 100 new structures, including large tents and hangars, have been built at the desert camp. A comparison of aerial photographs from September 10, 2023 and March 1 this year also showed a significant increase in the number of vehicles at the facility, indicating an uptick in activity. Satellite imagery from two dates in early December showed construction work in progress.

CNN also geolocated the two leaked photographs showing the enclosure holding the group of blindfolded men in gray tracksuits. The pattern of panels seen on the roof matched those of a large hangar visible in satellite imagery. The structure, which resembles an animal pen, is located in the central area of the Sde Teiman compound. It is an older structure seen among new buildings which have appeared since the war began.

CNN reviewed satellite images from two other military detention camps – Ofer and Anatot bases in the occupied West Bank – and did not detect expansion in the grounds since October 7. Several rights groups and legal experts say they believe that Sde Teiman, which is the nearest to Gaza, likely hosts the largest number of detainees of the three military detention camps.

“I was there for 23 days. Twenty-three days that felt like 100 years,” said 27-year-old Ibrahim Yassine on the day of his release from a military detention camp.

He was lying in a crowded room with over a dozen newly freed men – they were still in the grey tracksuit prison uniforms. Some had deep flesh wounds from where the handcuffs had been removed.

“We were handcuffed and blindfolded,” said another man, 43-year-old Sufyan Abu Salah. “Today is the first day I can see.”

Several had a glassy look in their eyes and were seemingly emaciated. One elderly man breathed through an oxygen machine as he lay on a stretcher. Outside the hospital, two freed men from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and embraced their colleagues.

For Dr. Al-Ran, his reunion with his friends was anything but joyful. The experience, he said, rendered him mute for a month as he battled an “emotional deadness.”

“It was very painful. When I was released, people expected me to miss them, to embrace them. But there was a gap,” said al-Ran. “The people who were with me at the detention facility became my family. Those friendships were the only things that belonged to us.”

Just before his release, a fellow prisoner had called out to him, his voice barely rising above a whisper, al-Ran said. He asked the doctor to find his wife and kids in Gaza. “He asked me to tell them that it is better for them to be martyrs,” said al-Ran. “It is better for them to die than to be captured and held here.”

Credits
Executive producer: Barbara Arvanitidis
Senior investigations writer: Tamara Qiblawi
Chief global affairs correspondent: Matthew Chance
OSINT reporter: Allegra Goodwin
Photojournalist: Alex Platt
Reporters: Abeer Salman, Ami Kaufman, Kareem Khadder, Mohammad Al Sawalhi and Tareq Al Hilou
Visual and graphic editors: Carlotta Dotto, Lou Robinson and Mark Oliver
3D designer: Tom James
Photo editor: Sarah Tilotta
Video editors: Mark Baron, Julie Zink and Augusta Anthony
Motion designers: Patrick Gallagher and Yukari Schrickel
Digital editors: Laura Smith-Spark and Eliza Mackintosh
Executive editors: Dan Wright and Matt Wells

Editor’s note: Tamara Qiblawi wrote and reported from London. Matthew Chance, Barbara Arvanitidis and Alex Platt reported from Sde Teiman; Ami Kaufman and Allegra Goodwin reported from London; Abeer Salman and Kareem Khadder reported from Jerusalem; and journalists Mohammad Al Sawalhi and Tareq Al Hilou reported from Gaza.