This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Sde Teiman (Hebrew: שדה תימן) is an Israeli military base located in the Negev desert near the border with the Gaza Strip.
[1][2][3] Multiple released Palestinian detainees have testified they and others, including children, were subjected to rape, gang-rape, other forms of sexual violence as well as psychological and physical torture by both male and female Israeli soldiers and medical staff.
[7] In one highly publicized incident, leaked CCTV footage showed Israeli soldiers gang raping a Palestinian detainee with a metal rod that caused him serious injuries to his anus and lungs.
[2] A doctor working at Sde Teiman stated that he didn't know why many of the prisoners he encountered had been detained by Israel; among those he treated were a paraplegic, a man weighing 300 pounds (140 kg), and another who, since childhood, has had to breathe with the assistance of a tube in his neck.
In an internal USAID document viewed by The Guardian, the "base’s name links to its Wikipedia entry, which features photos of blindfolded Palestinian prisoners and details their mistreatment.
[17] In May 2024, three anonymous Israeli employees of the camp spoke to CNN as whistleblowers, during which they corroborated and expanded upon reports of abuse and poor conditions revealed by multiple detainees who were later released.
Images leaked to CNN show rows of men wearing gray tracksuits with blindfolds, each sitting on an exceptionally thin mattress, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence.
[11] In response, far-right politicians, including Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu and Knesset Member Zvi Sukkot urged their supporters to protest at Sde Teiman against the nine soldiers' detention.
[20] Sukkot, Eliyahu, and Knesset Member Nissim Vaturi joined other right-wingers in illegally breaking into Sde Teiman, while hours later the Israeli military's Beit Lid base was also broken into by far-right activists as the nine soldiers were being detained there.
[4][5] He reported widespread torture, including by medical staff, as well as electrocution during interrogations, sexual abuse, constant beatings, forced stripping, genital grabbing, and frequent occurrences of rape and gang-rape committed by both male and female soldiers.
[24] Walid Khalili, a Palestinian Medical Relief Society paramedic and ambulance driver detained in Sde Teiman for 20 days without charge, described severe mistreatment by Israeli soldiers.
Transferred from Tel al-Hawa to the detention camp, he was forced to wear a diaper and placed in a large warehouse-like building with chains hanging from the ceiling.
[25] Palestinian healthcare workers in the Gaza Strip had been arbitrarily detained by the Israeli military during their raids on hospitals during the war, and transferred to detention centers in Israel's south, including Sde Teiman.
Human Rights Watch has documented several of these cases, in which detained health workers were beaten, stripped, handcuffed weeks on end, and subject to torture and sexual violence, as well as threats of rape and killing of their Gaza family members.
He stated that he went to the detention center seeking information on a reporter named Muhammad Arab from Al Araby TV who had been detained while covering the Al-Shifa Hospital siege.
[33] On June 5, the Israeli government told the court that they were planning to transfer most prisoners out of Sde Teiman;[34] Amnesty International noted in July that "little appears to have changed".
[37] Testimonies from Palestinian victims of sexual violence, rape, torture and genital mutilation also relate to female Israeli guards and soldiers engaging in such acts.
[16] Alice Jill Edwards, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Unlawful Combatants, called for an investigation[34][40] and later condemned the alleged sexual abuse as "particularly gruesome.