Titled “Torture and Genocide: The Shattered Futures of Former Palestinian Detainees in Gaza”, the 129-page report is based on the testimonies of 100 former detainees.
Testimonies from 100 former Palestinian detainees revealed the extreme forms of physical and psychological ill-treatment “that bear alarming similarities to those used in notorious facilities like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,” the Palestinian Center for Human Rights has said in its latest report published on Tuesday.
Titled “Torture and Genocide: The Shattered Futures of Former Palestinian Detainees in Gaza”, the 129-page report is based on the testimonies of 100 former detainees, including 10 women, and legal visits to 53 others still in custody.
“The report concludes that the treatment of Palestinians from Gaza amounts to torture and that such torture forms an integral part of the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people,” the PCHR said in a statement.
🚨Today, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has published a 129-page report documenting the systematic use of torture and inhumane treatment of Palestinians from Gaza detained by Israel since 7 October 2023 based on the testimonies of 100 former detainees, including… pic.twitter.com/6IR8kkjP5H
— Palestinian Centre for Human Rights – PCHR (@pchrgaza) May 12, 2025
Detained ‘En Masse’
Key findings include:
- Mass arbitrary arrests of civilians, including children and the elderly, from homes, hospitals, shelters, and streets.
- Detention without charge or access to legal counsel, under inhumane conditions.
- Detainees subjected to brutal physical and psychological torture, including beatings, electrocution, suspension, sexual violence, extremely tight handcuffing and forced stress positions.
- Release of detainees injured and/or in a severely weakened state, into a war zone, without support or protection.
- Evidence of intent to destroy the population of Gaza by direct perpetrators, highlighting how genocidal and dehumanising rhetoric by senior Israeli officials has permeated down to the field, shaping the actions of lower-level personnel, including the systematic use of torture.
PCHR’s investigation, it said, revealed that the Israeli army arrested Palestinian civilians from Gaza “en masse from their homes, schools, hospitals, streets, at checkpoints, while seeking shelter from bombardments.”
Most arrests involved men (83 men, including ten health professionals), but also targeted women (10, including a breastfeeding mother), three boys (aged 15-17), and four elderly men.
Repeated Transferrals
After their arrest, the prisoners described being repeatedly transferred to various detention facilities. On average, one person was transferred around 4,5 times.
Repeated transfers, the report said, often left detainees in a state of uncertainty, confusion, and fear.
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This “was compounded by the fact that most were not informed about where they were transferred or why, even upon their release.”
Among the 100 interviewees, PCHR documented a total of at least 459 transfers from the moment of arrest until release, ranging from two to nine transfers per person, with an average of 4,5 transfers per person between the initial transfer to the first detention facility and the final transfer to their place of release.
Unlawful Combatants Law
The report said the prisoners were all arrested and detained under the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law No. 5762–2002 (the Law), enacted in 2002.
The vast majority of the interviewees “were held incommunicado throughout their detention, with no access to a judge, legal representation or their family and relatives, even when required by the Law.”
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Their families remained unaware of their whereabouts until after their release, sometimes several days later, owing to the challenges in communication and movement within Gaza. Interviewees were not provided with any information about the grounds for their arrest and the evidence against them, and all were released in Gaza without charge.
Doctors, Paramedics, a Journalist
Among the interviewees, ten were health professionals arrested at work or from home (three doctors, five paramedics, including three senior paramedics, one hospital staff member, and one physiotherapist), one was a journalist, and one was a human rights defender (PCHR’s staff member), according to the report.
Nine Palestinian detainees arrived this morning at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, after being released from Israeli detention and torture camps.
They had been abducted during the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip over the past two years. pic.twitter.com/Tf9Uy3hzXw
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) May 13, 2025
The remaining interviewees held a range of jobs “including but not limited to construction worker, taxi driver, teacher, and fitness instructor,” and 13 were Gaza workers. Interviewees recounted “how they were arrested by the IOF without distinction,
sometimes by the hundreds, and how several family members were arrested together, primarily men.”
None of the 100 individuals were provided with any information about the legal grounds for their arrest, the report said.
Violation of Genocide Convention
PCHR has analysed the information gathered for over a year, “and concluded that Israel’s actions – carried out through its state apparatus and by all individuals and entities operating under its direction, control, or influence – are in violation of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
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Key elements of genocide identified include “the deliberate targeting and killing of thousands of Palestinians, causing serious bodily and mental harm to them; deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life intended to bring about their destruction in whole or in part, including through starvation, the destruction of civilian, agricultural, educational and health infrastructures; and finally imposing measures intended to prevent births within the Gaza Strip.”
PCHR also found that Israel’s political leaders, military commanders, and persons in positions of power “have acted with genocidal intent.”
The organization highlighted that several international bodies and experts have also published their legal analysis of the situation in Gaza, “reaching the same conclusion,” including the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (UNSR), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Forensic Architecture.
Conditions of Detention
The report noted that while the conditions of detention described in prisons were dire, they were worse in military facilities (forward operating bases and military detention centres), where 95 percent of interviewees were detained at least once.
Military detention facilities, in particular, were described “as uninhabitable, unfit even for animals.”
Thirteen interviewees reported being held “in cages or in cage-like cells for several days.”
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Interviewees reported being held in cramped barracks or rooms. For example, one interviewee reported being held with 120 detainees in a cell designed for ten people. The overcrowding resulted in poor detention conditions, including long waiting times for toilet access.
Crowded Cells
Six interviewees were held in military facilities without shelter from the rain, and many were left outdoors in the cold, some in their underwear and reporting shivering. Similar conditions are still imposed on Palestinians currently in Israeli custody, as reported by PCHR’s lawyer following their visits.
Those detained in prisons also spoke about being held in small, crowded cells. Some of them provided specific information, such as one interviewee held in Damon prison who was among ten detainees held in a cell with five beds.
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Another interviewee reported that she was held with five other women for 20 days in a solitary confinement cell with a small window. Another interviewee reported being held in a room of 6×3 sqm with 16 mattresses with 22 detainees.
Strip Searches
Strip and body searches were a constant source of humiliation and degradation, carried out both during initial arrest and throughout detention, in military facilities and prisons alike, the report said.
“Both men and women were subjected to these invasive searches, often forced to strip down to their underwear or, in some cases, completely naked,” it noted.
The body searches, conducted without reason or justification, “were an enduring part of their torment” and “occurred frequently – sometimes every few hours – even when the detainee had not moved from their spot.”
To add to the humiliation, the report stated, they were often performed in front of others and soldiers of all genders, “stripping them not only of their clothing but of their dignity.”
The army forces “also often threatened detainees with rape or other forms of sexual violence.”
Several detainees, including a minor, reported being threatened with rape. This was used both as a direct threat against them and their families, the report noted.
Used as Human Shields
Several interviewees reported being used as human shields, including children, after their arrest and subsequent detention in private buildings within Gaza.
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During their captivity, they were deliberately positioned as protective barriers to shield Israeli soldiers from potential attacks.
This often involved “forcing them to stand in front of military assets, such as tanks, or making them enter buildings and film inside before soldiers decided whether to proceed.”
Witnessing Others Being Killed
All the interviewees reported being forced to watch other detainees being ill-treated or killed. They reported witnessing “at least 21 individuals dying while in custody, either directly killed by Israeli soldiers or dying as a result of ill-treatment.”
“There was a detainee sitting next to me while I was handcuffed and blindfolded. He fell on my feet due to the severe torture to which he was subjected,” a 52-year-old male businessman who was arrested from Gaza said.
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“I heard him screaming and saying, ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die,’ but the soldiers continued beating him more and more and of course we were beaten as well. Moments later, I heard the detainee’s death rattle, and he died,” he continued.
“After that, the soldiers took him away and told us: ‘We threw him out and you will all face the same fate.’ That detainee took his last breath below my feet, but I could not identify him because I was blindfolded, and the soldiers took him out, I do not know where,” he stated.
Mothers Forced to Abandon Babies
Half of the women who were interviewed were mothers who were forced to abandon their babies and young children during their arrest.
One mother of a 4-year-old boy and a 9-month-old baby described being separated from her terror-stricken children who had survived a missile hitting their house and witnessed family members being gruesomely injured. The mother reported that she was terrified when the soldiers questioned whether her children were hers because of their fair skin. Her family was forced to undergo DNA testing.
An Israeli soldier told me that they would take me only for half an hour to do a test and bring me back. I asked him If I could take my breastfeeding baby with me, but the soldier spoke with my father-in-law in Hebrew.
He told me that if I did [not leave my baby], they would kill us all, so I had to leave. My child was grabbing my hijab not wanting me to leave him. I gave him to his grandmother; all of us were crying,” a 24-year-old woman from Gaza City, held for 51 days, said.
“The tank drove us to a 2-story house in al-Zaytoun neighbourhood as it served as a military barracks for the soldiers. When we arrived there, a female soldier was waiting with syringes […] The soldiers took me upstairs, where the place smelt like an operating room […]. I was drugged […]. The female soldier then gave me an epidural anaesthesia and then took a sample from my back and another from my husband to do a DNA test,” she stated.
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Interviewees also explained how some detainees were deceived into thinking they would be taken back to their shelters or released and were instead taken to another detention facility.
During interrogation, some were also falsely informed that their family members, including children, had been killed.
More particularly, a breastfeeding mother, was falsely told that her entire family, including husband and children, had been killed.
Call to States to Enforce Int Law
PCHR said that to date, thousands of Palestinian detainees from Gaza arrested following 7 October 2023 remain in Israeli detention and continue to be subjected to torture and ill-treatment.
Many of them have been forcibly disappeared by the Israeli occupation authorities.
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The organization said that an online reporting platform which it launched in August 2024 “has already received hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances.”
As a result, PCHR “calls on States to enforce international law, prevent genocide and torture, and investigate crimes of genocide and torture under universal jurisdiction.”
The organization also demanded “unhindered access” to places of detention and “urgent ICC (International Criminal Court) action.”
(The Palestine Chronicle)
It sounds like the only people who the phrase “Unlawful Combatants” might in truth apply to, are the soldiers and staff of the Israel Defense (so-called) Force, because everybody (in theory at least) views civilians as inviolate. I suggest the Indonesians, Malaysians, etc, anyone who might be visited by IDF soldiers at any time, imprison them under the that law – because genocide is not in any way, “defense” unless you’re a Nazi.