SDE TEIMAN, Israel >> The men sat in rows, handcuffed and blindfolded, unable to see the Israeli soldiers who stood watch over them from the other side of a mesh fence.
They were barred from talking more loudly than a murmur, and forbidden to stand or sleep except when authorized.
A few knelt in prayer. One was being inspected by a paramedic. Another was briefly allowed to remove his handcuffs to wash himself. The hundreds of other Palestinian detainees sat in silence. They were all cut off from the outside world, prevented for weeks from contacting lawyers or relatives.
This was the scene one afternoon in late May at a military hangar inside Sde Teiman, an army base in southern Israel that has become synonymous with the detention of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Most Palestinians captured in Gaza since the start of the war on Oct. 7 have been brought to the site for initial interrogation, according to the Israeli military.
The military, which has not previously granted access to the media, allowed The New York Times to briefly see part of the detention facility as well as to interview its commanders and other officials, on condition of preserving their anonymity.
Sde Teiman is now a major focus of accusations that the Israeli military has mistreated detainees, including people later determined to have no ties to Hamas or other armed groups. In interviews, former detainees described beatings and other abuse in the facility.
By late May, roughly 4,000 detainees had spent up to three months in limbo at Sde Teiman, including several dozen people captured during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Israel in October, according to the site commanders who spoke to the Times.
After interrogation, around 70% of detainees had been sent to purpose-built prisons for further investigation and prosecution, the commanders said. The rest, at least 1,200 people, had been found to be civilians and returned to Gaza, without charge, apology or compensation.
“My colleagues didn’t know whether I was dead or alive,” said Muhammad al-Kurdi, 38, an ambulance driver whom the military has confirmed was held at Sde Teiman late last year.
“I was imprisoned for 32 days,” said al-Kurdi. He said he had been captured in November after his convoy of ambulances attempted to pass through an Israeli military checkpoint south of Gaza City. “It felt like 32 years.”
A three-month investigation by The New York Times found those 1,200 Palestinian civilians have been held at Sde Teiman in demeaning conditions without the ability to plead their cases to a judge for up to 75 days. Detainees are also denied access to lawyers for up to 90 days and their location is withheld from rights groups as well as from the International Committee of the Red Cross, in what some legal experts say is a contravention of international law.
Eight former detainees, all of whom the military has confirmed were held at the site and who spoke on the record, variously said they had been punched, kicked and beaten while in custody. Seven said they had been forced to wear only a diaper while being interrogated. Three said they had received electric shocks during their interrogations.
Most of these allegations were echoed in interviews conducted by officials from UNRWA, the main U.N. agency for Palestinians, an institution that Israel says has been infiltrated by Hamas, a charge the agency denies. The agency conducted interviews with hundreds of returning detainees who reported widespread abuse at Sde Teiman and other Israeli detention facilities.
An Israeli soldier who served at the site — speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid prosecution — said that fellow soldiers had regularly boasted of beating detainees and saw signs that several people had been subjected to such treatment.
Of the 4,000 detainees housed at Sde Teiman since October, 35 have died either at the site or after being brought to nearby civilian hospitals, according to officers at the base who spoke to the Times. The officers said some of them had died because of wounds or illnesses contracted before their incarceration and denied any of them had died from abuse. Military prosecutors are investigating.
During the visit, senior military doctors said they had never observed any signs of torture and commanders said they tried to treat detainees as humanely as possible. They confirmed that at least 12 soldiers had been dismissed from their roles at the site, some of them for excessive use of force.
In recent weeks, the base has attracted growing scrutiny from the media as well as from Israel’s Supreme Court, which on Wednesday began to hear a petition from rights groups to close the site. In response to the petition, the Israeli government said that it was reducing the number of detainees at Sde Teiman and improving conditions there; the Israeli military has already set up a panel to investigate the treatment of detainees.
In a lengthy statement, the Israeli military denied that “systematic abuse” had taken place at Sde Teiman. Presented with individual allegations of abuse, the military said the claims were “evidently inaccurate or completely unfounded,” and might have been invented under pressure from Hamas.
“Any abuse of detainees, whether during their detention or during interrogation, violates the law and the directives of the IDF and as such is strictly prohibited,” the military statement said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, said in a statement that all of its interrogations at the base were “conducted in accordance with the law.”
Yoel Donchin, a military doctor serving at the site, said it was unclear why Israeli soldiers had captured many of the people he treated there, some of whom were highly unlikely to have been combatants. One was paraplegic, another weighed roughly 300 pounds and a third had breathed since childhood through a tube inserted into his neck, he said.
“Why they brought him — I don’t know,” Donchin said.
“They take everyone,” he added.
How Detainees Are Captured
Fadi Bakr, a law student from Gaza City, said he was captured on Jan. 5 by Israeli soldiers near his family home. Displaced by fighting earlier in the war, Bakr, 25, had returned to his neighborhood to search for flour, only to get caught in the middle of a firefight and wounded, he said.
The Israelis found him bleeding after the fighting stopped, he said. They stripped him naked, confiscated his phone and savings, beat him repeatedly and accused him of being a militant who had survived the battle, he said.
“Confess now or I will shoot you,” Bakr remembered being told.
“I am a civilian,” Bakr recalled replying, to no avail.
The circumstances of Bakr’s arrest mirror those of other former detainees interviewed by the Times. Several said they had been suspected of militant activity because soldiers had encountered them in areas the military thought were harboring Hamas fighters.
Younis al-Hamlawi, 39, a senior nurse, said he was arrested in November after leaving Shifa Hospital in Gaza City during an Israeli raid on the site. Israeli soldiers accused him of having ties to Hamas.
Al-Kurdi, the ambulance driver, said he had been captured while he attempted to bring patients through an Israeli checkpoint. Israeli officials say that Hamas fighters routinely use ambulances.
All of the eight former detainees described their capture in similar ways: They were generally blindfolded, handcuffed with zip ties and stripped naked except for their underwear.
Most said they were interrogated, punched and kicked while still in Gaza, and some said they were beaten with rifle butts. Later, they said, they were crammed with other half-naked detainees into military trucks and driven to Sde Teiman.
Some said they had later spent time in the official Israeli prison system, while others said they were brought straight back to Gaza.
During his month at the site, Bakr spent four days, on and off, under interrogation, he said.
“I consider them the worst four days of my entire life,” said Bakr.
How the Site Developed
During previous wars with Hamas, including the 50-day conflict in 2014, the Sde Teiman military base intermittently held small numbers of captured Palestinians.
In October, Israel started using the site to detain people captured in Israel during the Hamas-led attack, housing them in an empty tank hangar, according to the site commanders. Once Israel invaded Gaza at the end of that month, Sde Teiman began receiving so many people that the military refitted three other hangars to detain them, they said.
Classified as “unlawful combatants” under Israeli legislation, detainees at Sde Teiman can be held for up to 75 days without judicial permission and 90 days without access to a lawyer, let alone a trial.
The Israeli military says these arrangements are permitted by the Geneva Conventions that govern international conflict, which allow the internment of civilians for security reasons. The commanders at the site said that it was essential to delay access to lawyers in order to prevent Hamas fighters from conveying messages to their leaders in Gaza.
After an initial interrogation at Sde Teiman, detainees still suspected of having militant ties are usually transferred to another military site or a civilian prison. In the civilian system, they are supposed to be formally charged; in May, the government said in a submission to Israel’s Supreme Court that it had started criminal proceedings against “hundreds” of people. There have been no known trials of detainees captured since Oct. 7.
Experts on international law say Israel’s system around initial detention is more restrictive than many Western counterparts in terms of the time it takes for judges to review each case, as well as in the lack of access for Red Cross staff.
Released Without Charge
Inside Sde Teiman, Bakr was held in an open-sided hangar where he said he was forced, with hundreds of others, to sit handcuffed in silence on a mat for up to 18 hours a day. His account broadly matches that of other detainees and is consistent with what the Times was shown at the site in late May.
The commanders at the site said detainees were allowed to stand up every two hours to stretch, sleep between roughly 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. and pray at any time.
Roughly four days after his arrival, Bakr said he was brought to a separate room to be questioned, wearing nothing but a diaper.
The interrogators accused him of Hamas membership and showed him photographs of militants to see if he could identify them. When Bakr denied any connection to the group or knowledge of the pictured men, he was beaten repeatedly, he said.
After more than a month in detention, Bakr said, the officers seemed to accept his innocence.
Early one morning in February, Bakr was put on a bus heading to the Kerem Shalom crossing point, near the southern tip of Gaza.
Bakr walked for roughly a mile before being greeted by aid workers from the Red Cross. Borrowing a phone, he called his family, who were still 20 miles away in Gaza City. It was the first time that they had heard from him in more than a month, Bakr said.
“They asked me, ‘Are you alive?’”
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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