During reserve duty I was in Sde Teiman. [There was] this kind of haziness around it. They’d say not to take pictures. It was a little hush-hush, compared to stuff we’d done until then, which wasn’t hush-hush. I get [to Sde Teiman] and they start talking to me, I hear stories. They tell me: “What? You’re going on that mission? You know you have to beat them up,” and “be prepared, there’s an unpleasant smell there, rough scenes;” stuff like that. I hear that [the hospital] is like a test lab. [They say] that it’s a total shitshow, and that it’s complicated because you have to take care of terrorists. I’d been on a guarding mission [at the Sde Teiman detention facility]. We were in a facility that had two cells. When I say cells, I mean large cells. They called [them] “pens.” One pen [had] 70 people and one [had] 100 people [sitting] in rows on ultra-thin outdoor mattresses. An asphalt floor under a covered enclosure, like a cowshed. Spotlights are on all the time. What I see when I walk in [is] everyone with blindfolds on and hands tied with zip ties. The first two rows maybe, people are allowed to lie down. All the rest are sitting cross-legged. [Guarding] is in shifts. We got there in the morning and we saw them like that, all sitting [dressed] in identical gray sweatsuits, only men, aged 16 to 50-60, I assume.
Are there any more pens in Sde Teiman?
Yes. There is a geriatric pen, with really old people. Like, I saw them at the hospital later. And there are pens for leg amputees, say, with wheelchairs and things like that, who are in the geriatric pen, I think. The compound is fenced with barbed wire, and there are walls on all sides. There are two port-a-potties and a hand-washing area, where they are allowed to shower once a week. Besides the mattresses, they have "Scabias" (military-issued wool blanket) that they cover themselves with. There’s some sunlight, but the spotlights are always on, at night too. We are the security force, and there are the military police, who are inmate instructors. There’s a three-sided elevated concrete structure, two for each pen, and we had these “turtle shells” (old vests), helmets, and a box with crowd control weapons: all kinds of stun grenades and tear gas canisters in case there was a riot. Aside from security duty, we had to make sure they didn’t talk to each other, that they were sitting properly.
What does it mean sitting properly?
They had to sit cross-legged and upright. They sit cross-legged all day, so sometimes, some of them would lean forward or back. They weren’t allowed [to do that]. Looking under the blindfold is also [not allowed]. [If they try to] peek [under the blindfold], and if they break the rules, then we’re officially allowed to punish them. [The punishment is] to bring them to the front of the pen and have them stand with their hands above their heads for a while. If it happens too often, [the inmate instructors said], “Tell us and we will punish everyone.” There is an escalation of measures of things that can be done to them. Also, there are people who lie down and people who sit. There are two [guys] in every pen who aren’t blindfolded and handcuffed. They’re the “Shawishes,” which means they have good Hebrew, they’ve been interrogated, cleared, and they’re not Hamas. We ran it all through them. They can move freely and they also help us punish them. Because as a soldier, you don’t know, if someone was talking, you can’t point them out; you don’t speak Arabic, no one expects you to speak Arabic either; the military police officers don’t, no one speaks Arabic. Meaning, you can’t say ‘third row on the left’ - no one can say that. So you tell the shawish: “Get that guy.” Then the shawish brings the guy over. We use the Shawish and tell him: “Tell them that if they don’t shut up, everyone is going to be standing up now for half an hour,” like that; [or] “Tell him that if he doesn’t shut up, he’s coming [with us] now.” There’s all kinds of rounds of medicine, they bring in food, the shawishes help; they hand out the food.
They execute the orders.
Yes.
Were you given instructions about the rights of the Palestinian detainees?
They said they could go to the bathroom one by one, handcuffed and blindfolded. The shawish would lead them. In terms of rights, they said, say, that some had permission to lie down. But they didn’t say if it was okay to punish them if they talked. They didn’t go into that. They gave us free rein. It really depended on who [the soldier] was. Some took more initiative, and some didn’t.
What were they called?
“The inmates.” A lot of people just said terrorists. That was a strange encounter too, my first encounter with Gazans. Tons of Gazans. It was also the first time since the start of the war that any of the soldiers in the company saw the “enemy.” It was clearly like: “Okay, this is our chance to, like, take part.” It’s this combat thing all of a sudden that you can do, even though it’s guarding, across two fences, one of which is barbed wire, people who are handcuffed and blindfolded. That’s how [the soldiers] treated it.
How did this manifest?
First of all in this talk of “yeah, they have to be beaten up, they have to...,” like, looking for opportunities. There was a soldier with me on duty who told me: “I’m going to go see if they’ll let me beat him up,” to a guy who was being interrogated [by intelligence soldiers]. So, I kind of didn’t know how to react, and I tell him: “Don’t do it.” I just didn’t know what to say to him except “don’t beat him up; you don’t know what he did or didn’t do,” and his mood was like, “shut up, you leftist, these are Gazans, terrorists, what’s the matter with you?” I don’t think they let him join. But that was the kind of thing they did, or, for instance, punishing. Out of say 70 or 100 people, most of the time, there were 10 people standing with their hands above their heads, handcuffed to the fence above the head, so that they physically wouldn’t be able to put them down. The zip ties would be tied to the fence. And it was clear that people (soldiers) were really looking for these kinds of things, to punish, yes, to yell at them too.
Do you feel this was their way of participating in combat?
Yes, really. They called them Nukhbas sometimes (Nukhba is the Hamas commando unit that led the attack on IDF posts and the massacre in southern Israel on October 7); [even though] some of them hadn’t been interrogated yet. Some of them had been interrogated and had been cleared, like the “Shawishes”, who the army explicitly said were okay.