April 20, 2024. protests outside the Sde Teiman detention center in israel, where at least 40 Palestinian detainees have been tortured to death in the past six months. Sde Teiman was established shortly after October 7th, as an interrogation site for suspected Hamas members abducted from Gaza. Following new procedures of care that were passed by the israeli health ministry in December 2023, detainees in the facility and handcuffed 24 hours a day as a rule, in violation of israeli law and international law. In the beginning of April, a doctor who visited the Sde Teiman facility wrote an open letter about the conditions he witnessed.
“The Sde Teiman facility is supposed to operate according to the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law amended last December. In the letter, the doctor claims that the facility does not comply with the law's conditions, including the right to medical treatment and equipment in accordance with detainees' medical condition, their right to hygienic conditions and adequate sleeping arrangements that don't endanger their health or harm their dignity. They also have the right to exercise outside for two hours a day.
In his letter, the doctor asserted that detainees don't receive appropriate care, even when they are moved to a hospital: ‘No patient who was referred to a hospital has remained there for more than a few hours. It happens that patients after major operations, such as abdominal surgeries for intestinal resections, are brought back after about an hour of post-op observation during recovery to the Sde Teiman medical facility, which is staffed most of the day by a single doctor, accompanied by a nursing team, some with no more than medic training.’
‘This makes all of us – the medical teams and you, those in charge of us in the health and defense ministries – complicit in the violation of Israeli law…’
