Inside Israel’s incarceration of Palestinians since Oct. 7 attack
After nine months in an Israeli prison, Moazaz Abayat's body was battered and emaciated. The 37-year-old Palestinian fitness enthusiast and father-of-five said he lost almost half his body weight while imprisoned. Video of his release circulated widely on social media, where his dramatic weight loss and severe limp showed a major contrast to his appearance before his arrest.
Abayat was detained on Oct. 27, 2023 at his home in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, accused of having links to Hamas. He was released from jail on July 9, without charge, having spent most of his time in Israel's Ktziot Prison.
While there, Abayat said he was subjected to physical and mental abuse. He says he was routinely stripped and struck in his genitals by prison guards.
"Here on my head, they hit me with iron pipes and metal tools. My right hand broke here and I did and still do suffer from it. My foot was broken here and I am still suffering from it," he told ABC News in Arabic, 10 days after his release from jail. "I also was badly burned in my feet."
He described a prison guard accusing him of being a member of Hamas.
"I'm a lone, unarmed civilian. You did not arrest me from a combat front or from a tank," he recalled telling the guard.
The guard then accused him of being a murderer, he told ABC News, which he denied. He said he told the guard he wasn't with Israel or Hamas.
"So he put the eye cover back," he alleged. "Then a group of men entered and beat me badly."
Since Hamas' deadly Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, the Palestinian prison population in Israeli custody has almost doubled after a sweeping crackdown in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
According to Israeli human rights group B'tselem, which advocates for Palestinian rights, around half of these people have been held in administrative detention. The terms of this detention are set by the Israeli government, and it means people like Abayat can be held without charge.
Asked about Abayat's allegations, the Israeli Prison Service told ABC News that it operates under the "strict control" of official inspectors.
"All prisoners are held in accordance with the law while respecting their basic rights and under the supervision of professional and skilled prison staff," it said in a statement, which has been translated from Hebrew. "We are not familiar with the claims described and as far as we know they are not true. At the same time, every prisoner and detainee has the right to [file a complaint] in the accepted channels and his claims will be examined."
The prison service noted that Abayat's allegations will be examined by authorities if he submits his complaint "through the acceptable channels."
Since the war began, an unknown number of Palestinians arrested by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have also been taken to a now-notorious military facility in the southern Israel's Negev desert -- Sde Teiman. Some who've been inside call it "Israel's Guantanamo."
"So, it wasn't very clear to me, in the beginning, what Sde Teiman would be," a former prison guard told ABC News, with his face and voice concealed at his request. "They told us that as we're like guarding these cells, we're supposed to not allow them to, to speak or move or peek under their blindfolds. All of the detainees were blindfolded 24-7, basically."
The former guard said some soldiers were "knowingly and deliberately" violent.
"There's something about Sde Teiman which was so shocking to me is how cold blooded it all was," he said. "Because in the war in Gaza, there's this sense of, you know, danger and the urgency which sort of makes a lot of mistakes, admissible as mistakes. And I feel like this can't be a mistake. It's not a mistake. It's all done in complete calm."
A doctor who spent time at Sde Teiman said that he found those in need of medical treatment "restrained, in a way that goes beyond what I would expect patients to be restrained" in such a facility. He also requested that his face and voice be concealed.
"Which means each one of them, all of their arms and legs were strapped with handcuffs to the sides of the bed so that it would be basically impossible for them to move or try to reach with their hands, even to their own body," the doctor said.
He claimed that all the patients were blindfolded and they weren't allowed to remove them. They were also naked, aside from a diaper, according to the doctor.
"If you think about laying in a bed, unable to move, unable to see, defecating and urinating on yourself as an adult, in my book that's torture," he said.
CCTV footage of an alleged sexual assault on a Sde Teiman detainee also sparked a military police investigation. It purportedly showed the night that reservists appeared to take the prisoner behind a row of shields.
An edited 12-second clip from that footage aired on Israel's Channel 12 and became part of the visual evidence for the case, which was heard in a military court.
The detainee was taken to a nearby hospital with life-threatening internal injuries, prosecuting lawyers said in court documents seen by ABC News. Ten reservists were arrested in July in connection with the alleged assault, with five remaining under house arrest.
In a statement to ABC News, lawyers for the detained soldiers denied the allegations and said the "suspects are all normal, working people" and the prisoner made a "false complaint."
The soldiers' arrests became a rallying call for Israel's far-right, who attempted to storm both Sde Teiman and the military detention facility the accused soldiers were being held in. The crowds could be seen chanting "Release our warriors," defending the soldiers' right to treat the prisoners as they wished.
"The IDF rejects claims concerning the systematic abuse of detainees in its facilities, including through violence, sexual violence or torture," the IDF said in a statement to ABC News. "Any abuse of detainees violates the law and IDF directives and as such is strictly prohibited."
The IDF noted that they will take action when necessary, including criminal investigations of personnel.
Many Sde Teiman detainees have been either released back into Gaza or sent to the custody of the Israeli Prisons' service, run by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. He has said his goal is to deteriorate the conditions for "terrorists in the prisons" and reduce their rights to the minimum required by law.
"I have already proposed a much simpler solution, of enacting the death penalty for terrorists, which would solve the overcrowding issue," he wrote in a tweet last July.
At least 60 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since Oct. 7, Israeli human rights group B'tselem wrote in an August report.
"Sde Teiman, which is a military facility, as we understand it is really only the tip of the iceberg because those kind of of behavior became the norm in each and every detention facility, whether it is of the Israeli army or the Israeli prison system," Yuli Novak, the executive director of B'tselem, told ABC News. "When you see something that's happened in 16 different facilities to thousands of people, what else can it be rather than policy?"
The IDF, the Israeli Prison Service, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir denied ABC News' requests for on-camera interviews.
ABC News' Latifa Abdellatif, Dana Savir and Anna Burd contributed to this report.
