‘They told me to strip.’ Former Palestinian detainee says he was sexually abused in an Israeli prison

Editor’s Note: This story contains graphic and disturbing descriptions of sexual violence.

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Ibrahim Salem, 34, said he felt a deep sense of dread when a soldier ordered him to undress during his captivity in Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman prison.

“They told me to strip,” the Palestinian said, reflecting on the torment he endured during his eight months in Israeli detention. “That’s when I knew I was beginning my journey to hell.”

An Israeli airstrike hit Salem’s home in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza on December 8, killing eight of his relatives and injuring his wife and two of his three children, Salem told CNN. Four days later, while staying with his children who were being treated in the intensive care unit of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, he was arrested by Israeli troops during a raid, he said.

“I was confused. Why was I arrested? I have nothing to do with resistance groups … There were no accusations against me,” Salem told CNN in an interview at a displacement camp in Al-Mawasi, southern Gaza. “I am a barber.”

He and other Palestinians at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia were handcuffed, blindfolded, and transported on trucks “like animals,” he recalled.

No one heard from him for eight months.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the hospital was being used as a command-and-control center by Hamas. The militant group has repeatedly denied using hospitals in its war with Israel. CNN cannot independently verify the IDF’s claims.

In May, CNN published an investigation into Sde Teiman, a shadowy military base in Israel’s Negev desert near the Gaza border, where detainees were held in extreme conditions. Among the pictures published was one of a blindfolded prisoner standing behind a barbed fence with his hands above his head. The day the investigation was published, Salem’s twin brother Waseem reached out to CNN saying the man in the picture was Salem.

On May 23, Saja Mishreqi, a lawyer at the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), who represented Salem, was informed by the Israeli Supreme Court that he was in Ktzi’ot Prison, a detention facility in the Negev run by the Israel Prison Service (IPS). He was eventually released without charge on August 1.

Speaking to CNN, Salem said that it was indeed him in the picture, adding that he was initially held at a facility he heard other Palestinian detainees refer to as “Sde,” before being transferred to Ktzi’ot .

“We would hear screams. And then the sound of a bullet, followed by silence,” Salem told CNN. This would terrify the men, he said. “It was a nightmare.”

During interrogations, Salem said, he would be asked: “Where are the hostages? Where are Hamas’ weapons? Are you Hamas? Are you Qassam (Hamas’ military wing)? Are you Islamic Jihad?”

Salem alleges to have been beaten, verbally abused, had hot water poured on him, and told by soldiers that the rest of his family had been killed.

But the worst part, he said, was the sexual abuse.

Salem said much of prisoners’ time in detention was spent in their underwear, but before each interrogation session, soldiers would order him to strip naked.

“They would bring the metal detector and run it all over our bodies, then they would hover it over private parts and hit me there,” he said. As he crouched in pain, naked, with five or six soldiers looking, he said he felt the troops violate him from behind.

“With the pain, I would lean forward. Then suddenly, they would push it (a baton) into my butt,” he said. “Inside.”

After interrogation, he was given only “seconds” to put his underwear back on, he said, adding that any perceived delay in doing so would result in another beating from the soldiers.

The IDF told CNN that Salem was detained on December 12 on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities and held at Sde Teiman for “approximately a month and a half” before being transferred to the prison service, where he spent six of his eight months of detention.

The IDF added that it “cannot address the conditions of his arrest and detention for most of that period,” noting that misconduct during detention is “contrary to the law and IDF orders, and is therefore strictly prohibited.”

CNN reached out to the prison service about Salem’s detention and his claims of abuse and was told that requests for information on legal process, arrest policy and interrogations that have “allegedly taken place in military facilities and involve national security prisoners who are not Israel residents” should be addressed to the IDF and the Israel Security Agency, known as Shin Bet.

The Shin Bet hasn’t responded to CNN’s request for comment.

Salem was released to the Gaza Strip on August 1 after an assessment found that releasing him wouldn’t pose a risk to national security, the IDF said, adding that he was brought before a judge in a district court for a judicial review during his detention.

He told CNN that he wasn’t represented by a lawyer in court.

Salem said an interrogator showed him a picture of what he was led to believe were exhumed remains of six family members he had buried in the yard of Kamal Adwan Hospital. Salem said the interrogator taunted him, making him count six bodies in the picture.

“On what grounds do you take away bodies and desecrate them?” Salem recalled telling the interrogator. “These bodies are ours. We need to bury them.”

The interrogator responded that the bodies “might be hostages” abducted by Hamas on October 7, to which Salem said he responded, crying: “My nephews, are they hostages? Five years old?”

Israel has previously admitted to exhuming bodies as part of a search for the remains of hostages seized on October 7 in the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 kidnapped. The IDF told CNN in January that bodies that are determined not be those of hostages are “returned with dignity and respect.”

More than 40,200 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 93,000 injured in Israel’s assault on the strip, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Leaked surveillance footage last month from the Sde Teiman prison provided a rare glimpse into the facility.

CCTV video obtained by Israel’s Channel 12 showed Israeli soldiers selecting one of more than two dozen Palestinian detainees lying on the ground. Behind a wall of shields obstructing the view of security cameras, the soldiers allegedly sodomize the detainee. The victim was taken to a hospital with injuries to his rectum, according to Israeli non-profit organization Physicians for Human Rights Israel. The Israeli military has declined to comment on the video.

Shortly after the incident, 10 Israeli soldiers were arrested over the alleged abuse of a Palestinian detainee at the facility, according to IDF. Five have so far been released, and five are under house arrest.

Mishreqi said that Salem was detained under Israel’s controversial Unlawful Combatants Law, which rights watchdog Human Rights Watch has said “strips away meaningful judicial review and due process rights.”

The law permits the military to detain people for up to 30 days without a detention order, after which they must be transferred to prison, according to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), a Tel Aviv-based non-governmental organization (NGO). Over 4,000 Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip have been detained by Israel since the war began, PCATI said in a report last month, adding that the law deprives detainees of their rights as prisoners of war and the protections for civilian populations under humanitarian law in occupied territories.

As of April, more than 9,500 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons, including more than 3,500 without charge, according to Addameer Prisoner’s Support and Human Rights Association, a Palestinian NGO. The figure doesn’t include detainees from Gaza, the group said.

Salem is one of many former detainees who have recalled harrowing stories from their time in Israeli prisons to human rights groups and news outlets. Their testimonies have led to calls for reforms across all of Israel’s prisons.

Israel has greatly reduced the number of people being held at Sde Teiman in the wake of calls for its closure. In June, a state attorney told Israel’s Supreme Court that hundreds of Palestinian detainees have been transferred out of the facility.

“Our problem is not just with Sde Teiman… but with the systematic policies taking place there, the violations and torture that take place at the facility without any external supervision,” Mishreqi told CNN, adding that even shutting down the facility won’t help “if its policies are transferred to other prisons.”

A report published by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem this month documented “abuse and inhuman treatment of Palestinians” held in Israeli custody since October 7. The report, which collected testimonies from 55 Palestinians, showed “the rushed transformation of more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, military and civilian, into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy.” The IDF has repeatedly denied allegations of systematic abuse.

B’Tselem’s executive director Yuli Novak told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour this month that Sde Teiman was “just the tip of the iceberg” in Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinian detainees, adding that it is “organized and systematic” and only worsened after October 7.

Salem said there were some 150 detainees with him in the second facility where he was held.

On the day of his release, Salem said he was taken to the Gaza border by the IDF but was told he couldn’t return to his home in Jabalya, in northern Gaza. He is now living in a displacement camp in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.

He has moved from detention tents to displacement tents throughout his ordeal, he said, and the memories of the abuse he said he experienced continue to live with him.

“You’re exposing your body to male and female soldiers who harass you and touch you with objects on your sensitive parts,” he told CNN. “They hit you on your butt, pull you by the hair, call you obscenities … it’s humiliating.”

He has yet to reunite with his wife and children, who remain in northern Gaza, and can only communicate with them by phone. Two of his children require surgeries for injuries sustained in the Israeli airstrike, he said.

CNN’s Dana Karni in Tel Aviv contributed reporting.