Israel systematically torturing Palestinians in custody: UN special rapporteur Albanese

A UN expert says that the Israeli regime systematically tortures Palestinians on a scale "that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent."

In a report released on Friday, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, said that since October 7, 2023, when the Israeli regime began a genocidal war on Gaza, Palestinians in custody “have been subjected to exceptionally ruthless physical and psychological abuse.”

Entitled “Torture and genocide”, the report “examines Israel’s systematic use of torture against Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory since October 7, 2023.”

“Torture in detention has been used on an unprecedented scale as punitive collective vengeance,” the report said.

Brutal beatings, sexual violence, rape, lethal mistreatment, starvation, and the systematic deprivation of the most basic human conditions have inflicted profound and lasting scars on the bodies and minds of tens of thousands of Palestinians and their loved ones,” the report stated.

Torture has become integral to the domination of and punishment inflicted on men, women and children, both through custodial abuse and through a relentless campaign of forced displacement, mass killings, deprivation and destruction of all means of life to inflict long-term collective pain and suffering, it warned.

Since October 2023, abduction of Palestinians in the occupied territory had “escalated dramatically,” with more than 18,500 people arrested, including at least 1,500 children, the report added.

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About 9,000 Palestinians were still in detention, while more than 4,000 have been subjected to enforced disappearance, it said.

Israel’s detention system “has descended into a regime of systemic and widespread humiliation, coercion, and terror,” according to the report.

Albanese demanded Israel “immediately cease all acts of torture and ill-treatment of the Palestinian people as part of its ongoing genocide” and urged all countries “to do everything in their power to stop the destruction of what remains of Palestine” as every delay “worsens irreversible harm and further entrenches a system of cruelty.”

She urged the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to request arrest warrants for hawkish Israeli ministers Israel Katz, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

She said she had gathered written submissions about these atrocities, including at least 300 testimonies, and is due to present her report to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) on Monday.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli regime has killed at least 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than 172,000 others, most of them women and children.

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