We’ll call him Ilan. “I want Sde Teiman to be closed. The detainees are not treated like human beings”, says this Israeli surgeon. He entered this military camp for an hour, 30 kilometers from Gaza, at the request of the army, and agreed to respond to the international editorial staff of Radio France.
“They are blindfolded. They are naked. They wear diapers”
He then discovers a base separated into two spaces: a detention center and a field hospital. It was there that he treated a patient with a serious gunshot wound. “There are between 15 and 20 detainees. The patients do not have names. They are all tied up in the same way. They are blindfolded. They are naked. They wear diapers. It is physical torture and psychological”he assures.
The conditions of detention in the Sde Teiman camp have been denounced for several weeks by whistleblowers working there, taken up in particular in investigations by CNN and Guardian. They all speak of cases of torture and abuse, and inhumane detention conditions.
“In six months, we are talking about 40 deaths”
Prisoners hospitalized at Sde Teiman died. “At Guantánamo, in 20 years, 20 people lost their lives. But here, in six months, we are talking about 40 deaths. It is perhaps worse than Guantánamo”, assures Nadji Abbas of the Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights. He filed several appeals before the highest court in the country. No result. “No one has any information about what happens on a daily basis there. The only explanation I can find is the feeling of revenge in Israeli society. What the Israeli army is doing is called a policy of enforced disappearance“, he explains.
Faced with pressure from public opinion, and perhaps also from international justice, the army opened an investigation into Sde Teiman in the middle of last week. There are, according to Naji Abbas, other similar detention centers. Like that of Ananot, east of Jerusalem.
