Hands and feet in shackles. Eyes blindfolded. No moving. No talking. And, sometimes, violent beatings. Days upon days, weeks upon weeks pass like this at the Sde Teiman facility for Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians from Gaza. These interviewees know. They served there
Shay Fogelman was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1971, raised in Petah Tikva. Graduate of History and Philosophy from Tel Aviv University. Worked as a researcher, cinematographer and script editor in various documentaries. He works as an investigative journalist for Ha'aretz supplement. Editor of Hebrew literature. The documentary CHASING YEHOSHUA (2019) is his latest work.
In the days after the surprise attack on southern Israel on October 7, a total of some 120 Hamas militants, members of the movement's Nukhba military wing and Palestinian civilians from the Gaza Strip were taken into custody in Israel. They were sent to a detention facility specially created on a military police base at the Sde Teiman camp, between the town of Ofakim and Be'er Sheva in the Negev. In the months that followed, more than 4,500 additional inhabitants of the Strip, among them terrorists from various organizations, and civilians, were incarcerated there.
Two months ago, it was learned that the Israel Defense Forces was conducting a criminal investigation against soldiers allegedly involved in the death of 36 detainees in the camp. Last month, 10 reservists were arrested there on suspicion of brutal sexual abuse of an inmate. Regular or reservist soldiers assigned to Sde Teiman are subordinate to the military police, which has ultimate authority over the goings-on there.
In the wake of the many testimonies that surfaced, five human rights organizations petitioned the High Court of Justice, calling for the site to be shut down. In early June, the state announced in response that it intended to transfer most of the detainees to facilities run by the Israel Prison Service and to restore the camp to its original mission "as a facility for temporary, short-term [incarceration] for purposes of interrogation and classification only." In another response to the High Court of Justice earlier this month, the state declared that there were now only 28 detainees in the facility.
Since the war broke out, thousands of Israeli soldiers in regular and reservist forces have served at Sde Teiman. Most were posted there within the framework of a mission with which their unit was tasked. Others volunteered to serve there for a variety of reasons. In recent months, a number of soldiers and medical professionals agreed to talk with Haaretz about their time there. Eight of the testimonies follow, anonymously and in chronological order, from the earliest stint to the most recent.
N., a student from the north, reservist
"I was mobilized with the whole battalion on October 7. We were sent to secure communities in the western Negev, and after two weeks we moved to Be'er Sheva. I was involved in activity not related to the battalion when I saw on the company's WhatsApp group announcements that we had another mission – something new: guard duty at Sde Teiman. It wasn't so clear at first.
"When I got back to my company people were already whispering about the place. Someone asked if I'd heard about what was happening there. Someone else said, 'You know you have to hit people there,' as though he was taunting me and wanted to test my reaction, whether I was a leftist or something like that. There was also a soldier in the company who boasted that he'd beaten people at the facility. He told us that he had gone with a shift officer from the military police and they had beaten one of the detainees with clubs. I was curious about the place, and the stories sounded a little exaggerated to me, so I pretty much volunteered to go there.
"In Sde Teiman we guarded the detainees' lockup. We did 12-hour shifts during the day or night. The battalion's doctors and medics did 24-hour shifts at the field hospital. At the end of each shift we returned to Be'er Sheva to sleep.
"The detainees were in a large hangar with a roof and walls on three sides. Instead of a fourth wall, facing us, there was a fence with a double gate and two locks, like in dog parks. A barbed-wire fence surrounded everything. Our positions were close to the two corners of the fence, at a kind of diagonal, behind concrete blocks in a U shape. A soldier stands at each post, watching the detainees and guarding the military police personnel in charge of operating the place. We did shifts of two hours on, two hours off. If you weren't guarding you could go to the rest area, a kind of tent that had drinks and snacks.
"The inmates sat in eight rows on the ground, with about eight people in each. One hangar held 70 people and the second around 100. The military police told us that they had to sit. They were not allowed to peek out from their blindfolds. They were not allowed to move. They were not allowed to talk. And that if… what they [the military police] said was that if they broke the rules, it was permitted to punish them."
How were they punished?
"For minor things, you could force them to stand in place [for about 30 minutes]. If the person continued to make trouble, or for more serious violations, the military police officer could also take him aside… and beat him with a club."
Do you remember such an incident?
"One time someone took a peek at a female soldier – at least, that's what she claimed… She said he peeked at her from under the blindfold and was doing something under his blanket. The thing is that it was winter and they had 'scabies blankets'… like army issue [rough, coarse blankets]. And they were always scratching underneath. I was at the other post and wasn't looking in that direction. Then she called the officer and told him. The detainee was sitting in the first row and he was like… well, sort of a problematic guy. After all, they're not allowed to talk. It seemed to me that over time, some of them became on edge… unstable. Sometimes they would start to cry, or begin to lose it. He was also one of those, who didn't look very stable.
"When the military police officer arrived, the shawish [a derogatory term with many connotations in Arabic, but used to describe an inmate put in charge of other inmates here] tried to explain to him, 'Listen, it's tough. He's been here for 20 days. He doesn't change clothes and barely ever showers.' Like, the guy tried to mediate for him. But the female soldier said again that he had looked at her. The officer told the shawish to bring the guy to the double gate and to take him outside. In the meantime he [the officer] called another soldier from his company, who was then in the rest area, who was always talking about how he wanted to beat the detainees.
