Living Hell - The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps

New report from the BTSELEM Human Rights organsiation

“Living Hell” follows on B’Tselem’s August 2024 report “Welcome to Hell.” Building on the extensive research and analysis carried out for the previous report, it provides updated figures and new testimonies from 21 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in recent months, and draws on data from other Israeli and international human rights organisations. The updated information indicates that Israeli prisons continue to function as a network of torture camps for Palestinians, with the systematic abuse even more extensive than before. This includes physical and psychological abuse, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation and denial of medical care, all of which has led to numerous deaths. Some witnesses also described undergoing or witnessing sexual violence and abuse. The transformation of prisons into a network of torture camps is part of the Israeli regime’s coordinated onslaught on Palestinian society, aimed at dismantling the Palestinian collective.

Palestinians who died in Zionist custody, from all areas - statistics report from Btselem.

Content warning: Sexual Violence

From the report:

Read also from BettBeat Media - Welcome to Trickle-Down Psychopathy:

There is no trickle-down economics. There never was. The wealth stays at the top, accumulated through exploitation and protected by violence.

But trickle-down psychopathy is real. The permission to be cruel flows downward like water, finding every crack and crevice, reaching into every institution and relationship, poisoning everything it touches.

From Trump’s rallies to the settler’s gun. From Netanyahu’s podium to the ICE agent’s fist. From the Board of Peace to the contractor’s compound. From the algorithm that amplifies hatred to the child who learns that cruelty is normal.

This is the system working as designed. Not broken but functioning. Not failing but succeeding at its actual purpose, which was never prosperity for all but impunity for the few.

The Gaza genocide is not an aberration. It is the purest expression of what we have built. It is the destination toward which we have been traveling for decades. It is the future that awaits every population once the pretense of rules and norms and law is finally abandoned.

I recently heard someone say ‘Imperialism is the logic of the pedophile.’ And he is right. Imperialism is turning the world into a utopia for the exploiter. For those who wish to abuse the weakest and most vulnerable with impunity. All the conquering and mass murder and the hoarding of wealth is for one goal: to do what Epstein did. To do what colonizers did to indigenous children. To do what slaveholders did to the children held in reproduction factories for slaves. It is to rape with impunity.

Palestine is not exceptional. Palestine is the precedent.

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