WEST BANK (Dispatches) – As the Zionist regime’s aggression on Gaza started, significant arrests and violations against Palestinians took place in the West Bank camps. Violations of Palestinians arrested by the occupation troops were documented, including being subjected to torture, inhumane treatment, beatings and being dragged along the ground.
The Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR UK) emphasized that these arrests and the violations accompanying them are crimes against humanity, whose perpetrators must face deterrent penalties. Furthermore, countries that support the occupying regime must realize that they are complicit in these crimes, which are unjustifiable under any legal or humanitarian grounds.
The occupation is guaranteed impunity for all its crimes and knows that the position of the countries supporting it will not change despite the ongoing massacres it commits, including the current war on Gaza, which has left more than 9,000 dead and around 32,000 wounded so far.
The Israeli occupation is imposing a policy of collective punishment of Palestinian civilians. It publishes pictures and videos to humiliate and insult the prisoners and suppress any attempt to demand the inalienable rights of the people to reject Israeli aggression and war crimes, desecration of sanctities, illegal settlement expansion and other grave daily crimes.
Meanwhile, Palestinian workers from Gaza detained by Israel have described being abused, humiliated and tortured for four weeks after being swept up in response to the 7 October Hamas-led operation.
Around 4,500 laborers from Gaza were estimated to be in the occupied territories.
Despite being on work permits, they were all rounded up in detention facilities, and repeatedly humiliated and abused according to first-hand accounts.
Workers recently released by Israel told Middle East Eye their work permits had been revoked and they were sent back to Gaza on foot, despite the coastal enclave being under constant bombardment and now subject to an Israeli ground invasion.
The workers were forced to walk for 6km until they arrived in Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing near the southern Gaza town of Rafah.
The Palestinians told MEE of various abuses in detention, many of which appear to amount to torture.
“They took our phones. One man asked me if I wanted anything to drink, then he threw boiling water at me,” an elderly man said.
“When we were released and had to walk back to Gaza, one man died. He just dropped dead as he was walking,” another worker, originally from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, said.
“They treated us like dogs, they interrogated us while in Tel Aviv. We had our hands tied behind our backs and were barely given any food or drink,” he added.
“Young boys the same age as my children stripped us and urinated on us... no one has mentioned us workers held in Israel, not the Red Cross; the Palestinian Authority betrayed us, the whole world betrayed us,” one worker told Al Jazeera upon his arrival in Gaza.