DETENTION CAMPS OPENED by Israel following major concerns of the treatment of Palestinian detainees at another facility have now faced criticism themselves in a new report.

Israeli human rights organisations that interviewed dozens of current and former detainees are now asking the same court that ruled on the original facility to force the military to fix the problem once and for all.

The alleged abuses at the sprawling Ofer Camp and the smaller Anatot Camp, both built in the West Bank, include beatings, excessive handcuffing, and poor diet and health care.

What the detainees’ accounts show, rights groups say, is that instead of correcting alleged abuses against Palestinians held without charge or trial, Israel’s military just shifted where they take place.

“What we’ve seen is the erosion of the basic standards for humane detention,” said Jessica Montell, the director of Hamoked, one of the rights groups petitioning the Israeli government.

Asked for a response, the military said it complies with international law and “completely rejects allegations regarding the systematic abuse of detainees”.

First-hand experiences

Some of the starkest comments in the report come from a surgeon from Gaza, Khaled Alserr who spent months at Ofer Camp and agreed to speak about his experiences.

“They would punish you for anything,” the 32-year-old Alserr said.

He was released after six months without charge.

Alserr said he lost count of the beatings he endured from soldiers after being rounded up in March of last year during a raid at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

“You’d be punished for making eye contact, for asking for medicine, for looking up towards the sky,” said Alserr.

The Ofer Camp and the Anatot Camp were supposed to resolve problems rights groups documented at a detention centre in the Negev desert called Sde Teiman.

That site was intended to temporarily hold and treat militants captured during Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

But it morphed into a long-term detention centre infamous for brutalising Palestinians rounded up in Gaza, often without being charged.

Detainees transferred to Ofer and Anatot say conditions there were no better, according to more than 30 who were interviewed by lawyers for Hamoked and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

Other detainees’ accounts to the rights groups remain anonymous.

Their accounts could not be independently confirmed, but their accounts, given separately, were similar.

The Supreme Court has given the military until the end of March to respond to the alleged abuses at Ofer.

With reporting by PA