A detainee-abuse scandal erupts just when Israel can least afford it

In such a dangerous, tinderbox environment, Israel desperately needs both international support and internal cohesion. Both are threatened by a growing scandal concerning Israeli mistreatment of Palestinian detainees at the Sde Teiman prison — a name that is now likely to enter the annals of infamy alongside Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

Since Hamas’s barbaric assault on Israel on Oct. 7, Israeli forces have been sending captured Gazans arrested on suspicion of being Hamas members to the Sde Teiman facility in the Negev desert, where they can spend weeks and even months being held as “unlawful combatants,” without charges or trials. (Under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, detainees can be held up to 75 days without seeing a judge and up to six months without a lawyer.) An estimated 4,000 Palestinian detainees have done time at Sde Teiman. Of that total, about 1,500 have been released without apology or compensation, while the rest were moved to other Israeli prisons for further investigation and possible prosecution as Hamas terrorists.

Allegations have been emerging for months about the abuse of detainees at Sde Teiman and other facilities. The Post ran one of the earliest such accounts, in January, recounting the testimony of a 20-year-old Palestinian seized in the Gaza Strip: “Jihad Hammouda said he spent 17 days blindfolded and handcuffed in an Israeli detention facility, made to kneel on the ground for hours at a time. … Interrogators beat him when he denied being involved with Hamas, he recounted; one soldier held a knife to his hand, threatening to cut off a finger unless he admitted to possessing weapons.”

As time has passed, the evidence of mistreatment at Sde Teiman, in particular, has mounted. At least 35 detainees have died either at the prison or shortly after leaving it. Israeli officials claim they died of wounds or illnesses contracted before incarceration. But an Israeli-Palestinian lawyer who has made a career of representing Palestinian detainees in Israeli military courts visited Sde Teiman and told the Israeli magazine +972: “The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

In a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a human rights group, wrote: “Mounting testimonies have exposed the unimaginable abuses at Sde Teiman — surgeries without anesthesia, prolonged restraint in agonizing positions, handcuffing injuries requiring amputation, permanent blindfolding even during medical treatment, detainees held in diapers, severe beatings and torture.”

Under pressure from the Israeli high court, the Israel Defense Forces has been transferring most detainees to other facilities, vowing to use Sde Teiman only for “intake, interrogation, and initial screening.” On Monday, members of Israel’s military police arrived at Sde Teiman to arrest nine reservists serving as prison guards on charges that they had committed “serious abuse of a detainee” — including, allegedly, rape and sexual abuse.

That’s when all hell broke loose. Dozens of right-wing protesters, including far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Knesset coalition, stormed the prison on Monday. More demonstrators later mobbed Beit Lid, the headquarters of Israel’s military courts and military police, where the nine arrested soldiers were being held.

The rioters at Beit Lid included masked soldiers, some of them wearing logos to indicate they were members of the unit that had guarded detainees at Sde Teiman. The IDF, which is facing the prospect of a two-front war against Hamas and Hezbollah, had to redeploy two combat battalions simply to protect Beit Lid from the protesters. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the police, overseen by Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, did little to stop the rioters.

Indeed, Ben Gvir appeared to incite the mob by calling the soldiers’ arrest “nothing less than shameful” and insisting that “soldiers need to have our full support.” But then Ben Gvir has already made clear that he cares nothing for the rights of detainees and even encourages their mistreatment.

On July 2, he wrote on X in response to reports of overcrowding and abuses in prisons: “One of the highest goals I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law. … Everything published about the abominable conditions of these vile murderers in prison was true.”

With such cruel bombast, Ben Gvir and his far-right ilk show they are all too ready to sacrifice Israel’s moral standing and legitimacy. They are, as a former IDF spokesman branded them, “pyromaniacs who spout nonsense.”

These Israelis are reminiscent of the right-wing Americans who celebrated Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr., the only U.S. soldier convicted in connection with the 1968 My Lai Massacre, when U.S. troops killed at least 347 men, women and children in a South Vietnamese hamlet. For many misguided Americans, Calley (who died in April) became a folk hero — his saga celebrated in a song (“Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley”) that sold more than 1 million records.

In reality, Calley and other war criminals did incalculable damage to the country they served. Their misconduct undermined support for the war effort, tarnished the reputation of the armed forces, and damaged military morale and discipline. The same was true with those Americans who, decades later, were guilty of abusing detainees in the war on terror.

As Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who knew a thing or two about being tortured, said in 2011: “It is difficult to overstate the damage that any practice of torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by Americans does to our national character and historical reputation — to our standing as an exceptional nation among the countries of the world.”

Today, the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees allegedly committed by Israeli guards is doing grave damage to Israel’s standing in the world and to its internal cohesion at the worst possible time: while it is engulfed in a seemingly never-ending and rapidly expanding conflict. The only winners will be Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists — and their terror-masters in Tehran.