Video posted to social media on Monday showed the crowd rattling the base’s metal gates before running inside behind lawmakers.
“That’s Zvi Sukot,” one protester yelled, before the far-right lawmaker burst through the gates. Online, political allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including members of his cabinet, were quick to seize on the moment.
“I call on the Chief of Military Prosecutors: Keep your hands off the reservists,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote on X. “Keep your hands off the reservists,” posted Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister, who oversees the prison system.
Prime Minister Netanyahu condemned the incursion and called for calm, while army chief of staff Helgi Halevi described the incident as “extremely serious and illegal.”
“We are at war and actions such as this endanger our national security,” he said in a statement. “We are working to restore order at the base.”
of Abuse of Palestinian prisoners The criminal justice system as a whole Hamas Human rights groups, lawyers and former detainees say the Syrian government launched an attack on Israel on October 7 and that torture, sexual abuse and food deprivation have become commonplace.
The Israeli army said the nine suspects were being detained “for questioning on suspicion of serious ill-treatment of detainees.”
Military detention camps like Sdeh Teyman have served as the first point of detention for Palestinians detained in Gaza. After weeks, sometimes months, those suspected of having extremist ties are usually transferred to the Israeli prison system. Others are often released without charge after weeks of mistreatment and interrogation, according to former detainees.
Newly released Palestinian detainees from Sde Teyman say they were beaten for days, denied medical treatment, and forced to kneel while handcuffed and blindfolded. CNN investigation The camp was found to be divided into two parts: an enclosed area holding handcuffed prisoners, some of whom were cuffed so tightly that body parts had to be amputated, and a field hospital where blindfolded, diapered patients were strapped to beds and force-fed through straw.
In June, Khaled Mahjna, a Palestinian lawyer with Israeli citizenship, became the first lawyer allowed to meet with detainees at Sde Teyman Prison, telling Al Arabi News Agency he had heard reports of detainees being raped and tortured.
Naji Abbas, head of the prisoner and detainee department at Physicians for Israeli Human Rights, said the group has interviewed former detainees at Sde Teyman prison who have reported cases of rape and sexual assaults by others there and in Israeli prison facilities.
Human rights groups on Monday welcomed the detention of Sde Teyman’s soldiers but warned that a single investigation was not enough.
“While it is important that guards are investigated and held accountable, this investigation does not address the widespread torture described in the countless testimonies accumulated over the past months,” said Ali Remez, a spokesman for the legal rights group Adalah.
He said the elected lawmakers’ opposition to a military investigation on Monday reflected “a deep-rooted culture of impunity in Israel, rooted in years of Israeli authorities and courts shielding perpetrators of extreme violence against Palestinians.”
The Israeli government in May publicly reported on previously secret detentions for the first time, saying authorities had detained about 4,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the war began and released 1,500 of them for lack of evidence.
Israel’s far-reaching Unlawful Combatants Law allows for administrative detention, or imprisonment without trial. Under a 2002 law, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip can be jailed for up to 45 days without a detention order, held for up to 75 days without access to a judge, and held without legal consular authority for up to six months. They are not classified as prisoners of war.
Human rights groups say the law has created a black hole for the mistreatment and torture of Gaza detainees who disappear into military detention facilities.
After months of international scrutiny and growing domestic legal challenges, Israeli authorities announced in early June that they had begun transferring hundreds of detainees from the Gaza Strip to other military-run facilities. The move came in response to a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court challenging the lawfulness of the detention centers and calling for their closure due to alleged ill-treatment and torture.
“The egregious violations committed in Sde Teyman make the deprivation of these people’s liberty clearly unconstitutional,” the Tel Aviv-based Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), one of five human rights groups that filed the petition, said in a statement at the time.
According to ACRI, as of July 18, the government had transferred more than 700 detainees from Sde Teyman, but approximately 40 Gaza detainees remained in the facility. Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are currently being held in other military detention facilities, primarily in Ofer and Anatot in the occupied West Bank and Ketziot in the southern Negev Desert, as well as in makeshift facilities run by Israeli intelligence services.
“The conditions at Sde Teyman are a flagrant violation of both Israeli and international law,” ACRI said in a statement last week. “The continued operation of the facility is not only illegal but a possible war crime. … Holding detainees there, whether 10 or 100, for a week or six months, is unlawful.”
In a new legal battle, human rights groups are seeking access to detainees in Gaza and holding the government to account for the thousands of men who have disappeared into the system and remain missing for months. Israel has barred the International Red Cross from accessing detainees since October 7.
Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
