The Israelis strap Palestinians to the front of their trucks or jeeps as human shields. It is not just me saying it.  Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the oPt  (occupied Palestinian territories), noted this on X (formerly Twitter).  It is assumed Palestinians are unlikely to throw stones or attack, if one of their own is strapped to the hood of a vehicle.  This isn’t the first time the Israelis have used this technique. Israel used Palestinians as human shields on at least 1,200 occasions during the second Intifada (2000-2008).   For example, in 2004, 13-year-old Muhammed Badwan was photographed tied to an Israeli police vehicle windshield in Biddu in the West Bank in order to deter stone throwing protesters.  Arik Ascherman, director of Rabbis For Human Rights, heard about the boy and tried to intervene with the police, demanding he be released. The Israelis refused, and beat Ascherman as well as the boy.  

“The boy was sitting on the hood of a vehicle, unsuccessfully trying to hold back his tears, shivering with fright, and with one arm tied to the screen protecting the windshield,” Ascherman said.

“We tried to calm him down and reassure him. I asked if he was hurt. He said he had been beaten and was in pain.”

Today, Israel claims that the war on Gaza is an existential one; that Israel must root out Hamas even though it has cost 40,000 Palestinian lives, mainly women and children, plus 100,000 more horrifically injured. As if that permits what is clearly a war crime. 

In mid-June, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel

“found that Israeli authorities are responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder or wilful killing, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, arbitrary detention and outrages upon personal dignity. The Commission found that the crimes against humanity of extermination, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, murder, forcible transfer, and torture and inhuman and cruel treatment were also committed.”

Why is Israel brutalizing West Bank Palestinians? There is no Hamas there

But what is Israel’s excuse for brutalizing the Palestinians on the West Bank, where in the past eight months Israel has killed more than 521 Palestinians, including 126 children?  Israel has also launched  480 attacks on medical services/carers  in the West Bank.  Yet there is no Hamas insurrection on the West Bank. The same UN report said that Israel had

“committed acts of sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment and outrages upon personal dignity, all of which are war crimes. Furthermore, the Commission found that the government of Israel and Israeli forces permitted, fostered and instigated a campaign of settler violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank.”

Over the last month, I’ve found evidence that IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers have tied injured Palestinians to the hood of a vehicle at least twice; it is a form of torture. 

The first victim, Fadir Bakir was in Gaza City. The second one, Mujahid Abbadi lived in Jenin in the West Bank.  

Fadir Bakir, in Gaza City

Fadir Bakir is 25-years-old, a displaced Palestinian living in Gaza City. In January 2024, he was picked up by the Israeli military after they shot him in the stomach, the foot and the arm. He was returning home after looking for flour.  He was taken prisoner and later became a detainee at the infamous Sde Teiman detention camp in Israel’s Negev.  The New York Times ran a feature story on the Sde Teiman prison, and Fadir Bakir’s story featured prominently.  Since last October, at least 35 out of 4,000 Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman have died. Some died of disease, or abuse or from wounds. Under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, Palestinians are often detained indefinitely without due process. 

While still in Gaza, Bakir was stripped naked, tied to a truck, and moved to another location. Then he was interrogated by an Israeli officer

Here is a transcript of his interview posted on Youtube (corroborated in this article).

“He [the officer] asked me: ‘Why were you there, what were you doing?’

I said, ‘Looking for flour.’

He said, ‘No you came out of a tunnel, where is it? What organization are you with?’ 

They moved me on a tank to another location 7-8 minutes away, while I was blindfolded and stripped naked and lying on something weird that had an awful smell.  They removed the blindfold and I saw I was sleeping on a partially decomposed dead body. When I got to the Sde Teiman prison, from 4 am to 10 pm every day we had to be on our knees. If you try to move they’ll beat and torture you.

Then they took me to “the disco room”. It is the worst place imaginable.  They stripped me of all my clothes [he had to wear a diaper] and put me in a room four meters square. There was a loud speaker right behind me, you could have heard it one kilometre away. They played music so loud my left ear started bleeding.  I was naked and it was raining. 

Most of the torture was being hit in the genitals and sensitive areas.  Putting cigarettes out inside our mouths, on our bodies and our genitals.  

Then they took me to what is known as “the diaper building”, or the “electricity building”, where I stayed four days without any food or water.

On the fourth day they brought me half a piece of bread and half a cucumber.

I went into the torture room.  It was just beatings, torture, breaking and strangulation.  

I stayed in “the diaper building” four or five days. 

I was detained for a total of 40 days and was tortured with electricity.  

I witnessed Israeli soldiers tying Palestinian prisoners up and letting dogs perform sexual acts on them. “

Israeli torture was done “out of revenge” for Oct. 7

One whistleblower told CNN that beatings were “not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge. It was punishment for what they did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”

Note:  A report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights found evidence of Israeli soldiers using systemic sexual violations against Palestinians in Gaza, like women being forced to remove their clothes in public. And Israeli soldiers sexually harassing Palestinian women in front of their families.

From the Middle East Eye, 23 June 2024: you can watch the recording here

Mujahid Abbadi, in Jenin on the West Bank

On the West Bank, Mujahid Abbadi was shot, then strapped to the hood of a jeep; IDF soldiers refused to call an ambulance.  Then as you can see in this video by the German news source DW (Deutsche Welle), the vehicle with the man strapped to the hood passed two ambulances and yet no one attended to him.

“They laughed while they beat me. . . [I] can’t describe the temperature of the bonnet [hood] of the car.”

Palestinian prisoner Mujahid Abbadi in Jenin, West Bank

“They laughed while they beat me.” Mujahid Raed Abbadi, 24-year-old Palestinian man who had been shot in the leg and hand by Israeli forces then strapped to an Israeli security vehicle as it passed through a narrow alley in the West Bank city of Jenin.  He recounted the moments he was detained by the Israeli forces.  Abbadi said that the Israeli forces had started firing towards him, his cousins and friends that led to them being injured. The Israelis continued the assault on Abbadi, breaking “the bones in my hand and leg.” The family begged for an ambulance, but the Israelis told the family to bring Abbadi outside the house.  There was no ambulance.  Abbadi pointed out that the soldiers picked him up and started “waving me back and forth” before throwing him onto the front of the military car for a quarter of an hour during which, he “can’t describe the temperature of the bonnet [hood] of the car.” 

Bahaa Abu Hammad, an orthopaedic doctor at Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin believed that there was a “comminuted fracture of the right femur and humerus” for which Abbadi had a surgery that helped the fractures to stabilize externally, pointing out that an “internal fixation” will be required at a later date.

Middle East Eye, 23 June 2024

Note at the End:

Note at the End:

from Apr. 6 2024 CNN report here:

“A doctor at a field hospital for detained Palestinians at Israel’s Sde Teiman army base has described ‘deplorable conditions’ and ‘routine’ amputations due to handcuff injuries, according to an exclusive report from the [Israeli] newspaper Haaretz.

” ‘Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries which unfortunately is a routine event,’ the doctor said in a letter. According to the Haaretz report on Thursday. He wrote that inappropriate care at the detention facility has led to ‘complications and sometimes even in the patient’s death,’ adding that ‘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.'”

Nota Bene:

Also here is a very useful 4 minute video about why and how the Israelis have used Palestinians as human shields and the US’s attempt to get Israel to apologise.

Photograph at the top: Israeli soldiers next to a truck packed with bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees, in Gaza in December 2023. According to the Israeli military, almost all detainees captured in Gaza since October spent time at Sde Teiman camp. (Credit: Moti Milrod/Haaretz, via Associated Press)