While the world witnesses the atrocities and massacres committed by “Israels” military assault on Gaza every day, the thousands of Palestinians detained by occupation forces – before and after the events of 7 October 2023 – face torture and death behind closed doors, alone.

Worse yet, these detention horrors have been brazenly publicized and even bragged about by occupation soldiers, with violent, vocalized support from wide swathes of “Israeli” society.

In the shadows of “Israels” prisons, tens of thousands of Palestinian detainees are enduring a relentless campaign of cruelty. Reports detail harrowing accounts of beatings, gang rape, and psychological torture, compounded by the denial of essential needs such as food, water, and medical care.

This systematic abuse, carried out on an industrial scale, is staggering in its scope and savagery. Public protests have emerged – not to condemn these atrocities – but to demand the release of “Israeli” soldiers implicated in acts of sexual violence so severe that their victim tragically died from the injuries inflicted.

Secrecy and suffering inside “Israeli” prisons

Ronen Bar, the head of “Israels” Shin Bet security agency, issued a dire warning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June, describing the situation in “Israeli” prisons as a “ticking time bomb,” which may endanger senior “Israelis” abroad and expose them to “international tribunals.”

Bar’s letter revealed that over 21,000 Palestinian detainees were being held, far exceeding official figures and the capacity of the centers.

Rather than addressing these concerns, “Israels” extremist Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, who has barred Red Cross and humanitarian access to Palestinian detainees, responded by boasting about his role in worsening conditions for prisoners.

A policy paper from the Institute for Palestine Studies highlighted the draconian measures implemented as early as 17 October – a mere 10 days after the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. These measures included:

Constricting living spaces; removing detainees’ beds when necessary and replacing them with mattresses on the floor, leading to overcrowding; a policy of ‘closures’ whereby prison cells are locked, and total isolation is imposed; closing prisons to all family visits or visits by the Red Cross or by lawyers, and rescinding the possibility of bringing detainees before judges so that all judicial sessions are conducted through video conference.

The situation under the security minister has deteriorated to the point where Ben Gvir has openly called for the execution of Palestinian detainees, which he offers up as a “simpler solution.” Since 7 October, at least 35 Palestinian prisoners have died in “Israeli” jails and military detention camps.

Reports of rape and abuse despite censorship

While many details remain obscure, evidence from court documents, eyewitness testimonies, and leaked photos and videos paint a harrowing picture of the conditions inside these facilities.

One particularly disturbing case is that of Bassem Tamimi, a resident of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, who was released from administrative detention – a form of imprisonment without charge – physically emaciated and emotionally broken.

Even “Israeli” news outlet Haaretzhad its report on Tamimi’s treatment redacted by authorities in an attempt to conceal the breadth of prison brutality.

In January, a joint report published by the Public Committee Against Torture in “Israel” (PCATI) detailed what it called “systemic” torture of Palestinians. One testimony presented in the report, from a detainee called “Prisoner R” held in Ketziot Prison, revealed the following details:

The wardens would threaten to kill the prisoners as they entered the cells … Wardens would conduct searches while the prisoners were naked, place naked prisoners against each other, and place the aluminum device used in the searches in their buttocks. In another instance, the wardens passed a card in a prisoner’s buttocks. All of this took place in sight of other prisoners and wardens, while the wardens took pleasure in beating the prisoner’s genitals.

After a prisoner exchange between “Israel” and Hamas in late November, claims began to emerge of severe torture and rape – testimonies that largely fell on deaf ears. On 1 December, Baraah Abo Ramouz, a Palestinian journalist just released from prison, told the press that:

The situation in the prisons is devastating. The prisoners are abused. They are being constantly beaten. They’re being sexually assaulted. They are being raped. I’m not exaggerating. The prisoners are being raped.

Gender-based violence as collective punishment

Upon exiting the prisons, many Palestinian detainees opted to remain silent on their experiences inside “Israeli” detention facilities due to fears of retribution but also out of a deep sense of shame and the need to preserve their honor in a conservative society.

At the time, the “Israeli” security minister directed Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai to crack down on any celebrations by families of the released prisoners. As Ben Gvir publicly stated:

My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy … Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism; victory celebrations give backing to those human scum.

A UN report released on 12 June almost entirely focuses on cases of sexual abuse and rape committed against Palestinian men, women, and children while under detention. “Israeli” forces, the report says:

Systematically targeted and subjected Palestinians to SGBV [Sexual and Gender-Based Violence] online and in person since October 7, including through forced public nudity, forced public stripping, sexualized torture and abuse, and sexual humiliation and harassment.

The report further states that gender-based violence “directed at Palestinian women was intended to humiliate and degrade the Palestinian population as a whole.” The men and young boys were stripped and paraded through the streets, and the women were forced to watch as the kidnapped, cuffed, and blindfolded captives were “coerced to do physical movements while naked.”

In Gaza, not only are random Palestinian civilians rounded up and subjected to public degradation, but many are then transferred to “Israeli” detention centers, without charges, to suffer torture and even death.

According to eyewitness testimonies collected by the Palestinian Prisoners Club (PPC) in July, four blindfolded detainees held without any charge were summarily executed in front of other inmates at the Kerem Abu Shalom site located along the perimeter of Gaza.

Palestine’s Abu Ghraib

Perhaps the most infamous cases of abuse, torture, and rape against Palestinian detainees have emerged from the Sde Teiman detention center, a facility located at an “Israeli” military site in the Naqab (Negev) desert that is specifically designed for people abducted from Gaza.

Per an amendment to “Israeli” law back in December, the military is permitted to hold ‘suspected terrorists’ for up to 45 days without charge before transferring them to the “Israeli” Prison System (IPS). Many of the Palestinian abductees, however, were held for much longer using loopholes in “Israels” legal and prison system.

Despite countless leaked reports on the conditions faced by detained Gazans, including women, children, doctors, people with disabilities, and the elderly, the first real expose that broke through the English-language mainstream media barrier was an investigative piece published by CNN in May.

The US outlet leaked photos of prisoners kept bound, blindfolded, and held behind barbed wire fences in stress positions, and quoted “Israeli” whistleblowers who worked in the facility.

The testimonies attested to the horrifying sanitary conditions and routine torture practiced there, which one “Israeli” whistleblower said had “stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings.”

Later, the New York Times went on to publish its own three-month-long investigation into the Sde Teiman facility, confirming three cases of electrocution, two cases of prisoners having their ribs broken during arbitrary beatings, and heinous crimes such as the anal rape of detainees.

It also detailed how prisoners were humiliated and forced to wear only diapers during interrogations. Corroborating the investigative piece’s evidence, a leaked segment of a UN report on the facility quoted prisoners directly, revealing stomach-churning details.

‘We saw worms coming out of his body’

In testimony collected by UNRWA, a 41-year-old former detainee said:

They made me sit on something like a hot metal stick, and it felt like fire – I have burns [in the anus]. The soldiers hit me with their shoes on my chest and used something like a metal stick that had a small nail on the side … They asked us to drink from the toilet and made the dogs attack us … There were people who were detained and killed – maybe nine of them. One of them died after they put the electric stick up his [anus]. He got so sick; we saw worms coming out of his body, and then he died.

A woman in her thirties also testified to being shown the aerial view of her neighborhood and threatened with the bombing of family members. While another 32-year-old woman described her harrowing experience while being transferred between different detention facilities:

They asked the soldiers to spit on me, saying, ‘She is a b****, she is from Gaza.’ They were beating us as we moved and saying they would put pepper on our sensitive parts [genitals]. They pulled us, beat us, they took us on the bus to the Damon prison after five days. A male soldier took off our hijabs, and they pinched us and touched our bodies, including our breasts. We were blindfolded, and we felt them touching us, pushing our heads to the bus. We started to squeeze together to try to protect ourselves from the touching. They said ‘b****, b****.’ They told the soldiers to take off their shoes and slap our faces with them.

Dehumanization of Palestinian prisoners

Confirming previous reports on the issue, Haaretz also published a piece on the amputation of prisoners’ limbs by unqualified individuals, which was performed due to the extended periods detainees were shackled, leaving their circulation-deprived flesh to rot and get infected.

A 32-year-old Gazan man, speaking to The Cradle on the condition of anonymity, says “Israeli” guards “beat me repeatedly and then urinated on me” while held at Sde Teiman detention center. He testifies to being severely tortured, too.

“There were even doctors there, disabled people and young people, but they didn’t care who you were; we were all treated below animals,” he says, explaining that sounds were constantly played to disrupt sleep and make it impossible to tell what time it was.

He goes on to say that he was beaten with metal tools and that the prison guards would mock him and threaten to kill the rest of his family, with full knowledge that his brother had been murdered in a previous series of “Israeli” airstrikes prior to his abduction, and using the information to torment him mentally.

The director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, Dr Mohammad Abu Salmiya, who was released after spending seven months in “Israeli” detention without any charge, testified to what he witnessed after being ferried through a range of detention facilities, including Sde Teiman.

Dr Abu Salmiya stated that “prisoners in ‘Israeli’ jails endure different types of torture. The army treats them as if they were inanimate objects, and ‘Israeli’ doctors physically assaulted us.”

He went on to say that there were “severe torture and almost daily assaults inside the prisons and were denied medical treatments,” adding that “no international organization visited us in ‘Israeli’ prisons, and we were prohibited from meeting any lawyers. Many detainees are still left behind in very poor health and psychological conditions.”

Showers come with severe punishments

Beyond the countless makeshift detention facilities hastily erected inside Gaza – where prisoners were stripped, blindfolded, and left in the sand to endure harsh weather conditions – there are three official detention centers specifically for Palestinians from Gaza, surrounding the besieged coastal territory.

Palestinian lawyer with Israeli citizenship, Khaled Mahajneh, provided an insightful first-hand account of the conditions faced in the Sde Teiman detention camp after being granted a rare visit, stating that “the treatment is more horrifying than anything we have heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

Mahajneh recounted the testimony of one prisoner, who revealed that the only time shackles were removed was during a weekly one-minute shower. But Palestinian detainees began refusing these showers because exceeding the one-minute limit, without a timer to guide them, resulted in “severe punishments, including hours outside in the heat or rain.”

After months of mounting evidence on the deadly conditions faced at Sde Teiman, 10 “Israeli” reservist soldiers were accused of gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner with a stick. Nine of the accused were arrested, one of whom would be released the next day and go on to brag about his actions on “Israeli” television.

The arrests, however, triggered the invasion of military facilities by thousands of “Israeli” protesters, backed by Ben Gvir, who lionized the rapists as “heroes.” A debate on the incident even followed in the “Israeli” Knesset, where Likud Party MK Hanoch Milwidsky argued in favor of the gang rape.

Since then, a video of the assault has surfaced, and “Israels” Honenu legal aid organization, representing four of the accused, has claimed their clients were acting in “self-defense.”

It’s not just one facility

At a press conference held in the West Bank city of Ramallah in mid-July, Mahajneh also revealed that he had learned, during a visit to the Ofer detention center located in the West Bank, that a 27-year-old Palestinian inmate was brutally raped as follows:

A pipe from a fire extinguisher was used on a handcuffed prisoner. Forcing him to lie on his stomach, stripping him of all his clothes, and inserting the pipe of the fire extinguisher into the prisoner’s rectum. Then, activating the extinguisher … in front of the eyes of the other prisoners.

The case of Palestinian bodybuilder Muazzaz Abayat from Bethlehem, who lost half his body weight during his nine-month incarceration, is indicative of the inhumane conditions that all prisoners are subjected to and that the foul treatment is in no way confined to the detention camps surrounding Gaza.

Official “Israeli” figures put the number of Palestinian political prisoners at just under 10,000, including 3,380 administrative detainees and 250 children. These numbers are clearly inaccurate, given that “Israels” Shin Bet director has already estimated detainees to number around 21,000 – in June. The exact figures remain elusive, and many prisoners remain unaccounted for. The confirmed death toll among Palestinian prisoners, currently at 53, is also likely an underestimation, as many detainees are still considered missing.

In stark contrast to the intense media coverage and political concern for the “Israeli” captives held in Gaza, the plight of Palestinian detainees is largely ignored.

There are more Palestinian children held as hostages by “Israel” than the total number of Israelis seized on 7 October, even according to the lower 10,000 prisoner estimate. In comparison to the suffering of Palestinian detainees, the issue of their “Israeli” counterparts – less than 100, by some accounts – is a mere drop in the ocean.

Robert Inlakeish
Source: The Cradle

abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/pos…

#alAqsaFlood #gaza #palestine #repression #torture #westAsia #zionistEntity

One of my freelance roles at the moment is as Developer Relations lead on the Mastodon project. It is a project and platform I’m really passionate about – I use it every day, it is Open Source and based on an open standard, and I strongly feel that federated platforms like this are the key to enabling everyone to own their own content, networks, and experiences beyond the direct reach of commercial interests.

At this stage in its history, Mastodon would I think count as an established and mature OSS project. It has been around since 2016, there are over 10,000 running instances / servers with the software, and over a million regular active users of the platform (plus, it interoperates with a much wider set of other platforms in the Fediverse, and carries posts and content from them as well. There are a number of large repositories that make up the GitHub organisation. There’s a – in my opinion – healthy and diverse set of third party apps that plug in to the network.

One of the things that some folks would say that the project has not always been great at, is communicating with the broader developer community. My own observation is that this is a large and widely-deployed codebase, and at a certain scale, stability and reliability become paramount, and it can be less straightforward to accept pull requests for new features (over prioritising security reports, for example). It is a small team supporting this project, largely underfunded1 if you look at the need to maintain the code, and to pay at least some of the folks involved to work on things full-time so that they can get by day-to-day, and that the core functionality gets the attention it deserves. When you’re coding, you may not have time to do other things like writing documentation, discussing roadmaps, and answering general questions – that’s partly where I come in, but even then, I still need to get help from the core developers to understand some of the questions…

I started working part-time with the core Mastodon team last year, with the goal to improve the experience for developers building on the platform, and also to bring my experience in working with diverse OSS projects and communities to support the Mastodon core team. As an example, last year I overhauled the existing list of known third party API libraries on the documentation site, and also updated the third party client apps page. Towards the start of this year, we started to make a few choices to improve the cadence and – I hope – quality of our external conversations further: we brought the whole team to meet the community at FOSDEM for the first time, for instance, which was a big step for the project.

Visit us at #FOSDEM, building H, level 1! You can say hi to our team or tell us what you’d like to see in Mastodon next. Mugs, t-shirts, enamel pins, and even free stickers available! #Merchtodon

— Mastodon (@Mastodon) 2024-02-03T08:56:41.576Z

Eugen and I also had the opportunity to meet with a few folks working on related Fediverse projects, as well as some Mastodon contributors and instance owners, during a whirlwind visit to the Bay Area back in May.

In the last 4 months, Renaud (the Mastodon CTO) and I have been collaborating on an engineering blog series called Trunk & Tidbits. We both strongly believe that explaining what we are working on is an important element in building greater engagement and community around the project. I chose the title for the series as (what I thought was) a clever play on words, but maybe you need to be old enough to remember when source control systems like CVS used “trunk” as in tree trunk as terminology, that we now tend to call “main” in the world of Git! The name is supposed to point to the blog series content being about what we have worked on and merged into the trunk of the code, and some “tidbits” or bits and pieces of other news from around the developer community – plus, of course, our mascot The Mastodon has a trunk of its own… 🦣 😄

Here are links to the April, May, and June posts, if you are interested. We post retrospectively, looking back at progress each month.

One thing to note from these past editions is that I also posted a completely rewritten and overhauled Contributing guide in the past couple of months (mentioned in Trunk & Tidbits); this lives at the organisation-level in our GitHub setup, and is intended as the main starting point if you want to contribute to the code.

Today, we published the July edition of Trunk & Tidbits. tl;dr we’re a bit behind where we had hoped to be towards releasing the next version of Mastodon, v4.3 – but we are really close to getting the beta out, and the “delay”2 is because of some feedback and performance improvements identified in early testing on our own instances, so we’re hoping that when the beta is released, things should be in quite good shape.

I’m hoping that with more regular communications via the blog; interactions with the community via the Fediverse itself and at events (I’ll once again be at Fediforum in September, for example); one-to-one conversations; and a willingness to engage in more conversations where time and resources allow – we can help folks to feel more informed about what we’re working on. It is still a small core team, and it is a busy time as the Fediverse grows… we need to keep things running, stable, and reliable… and there are always going to be features and changes that we cannot get to, or requests we cannot support at short notice… but I can assure you that it is a team effort, we discuss what’s possible, and that, I believe, we’re moving things forward3.

That’s all a personal perspective on what I’ve found, in working with the Mastodon project and team. Let me know if you have feedback on the Trunk & Tidbits series, as I’d love to keep improving these posts, and learning from the folks that read them.

1. I am also pretty happy with the fact that the project has made a conscious decision to not go down a road of accepting capital investment, and remains a not-for-profit funded by donations. YMMV, this is a personal opinion. ↩︎
2. Note “delay” against an undated release schedule; the release will ship when it is ready to ship. ↩︎
3. A footnoted mea culpa / things I personally wish were better if I had more time on the project / there was more scope for them more quickly! I’d prefer it if there was a machine-parseable API specification, and that more Fediverse formats / standards / protocols might be supported in future, and that the developer documentation was even more complete and nicer and better etc etc.. Hopefully, we’ll get nearer to some of those in the future, as time and resources allow. ↩︎

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#Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #activitypub #Coding #community #developerRelations #developers #devrel #fediform #fediverse #mastodon #openSource #oss #projectManagement #trunkTidbits

Andy Piper

2023-12-27 14:58:44

I was… Continue reading Six (and a bit) months on Team Mastodon →

andypiper.co.uk/2023/12/27/six…

Episode 249 of The Linux Lugcast Podcast is out – Olympic Lugcast

This episode we talk about the movie Sci-Fighter, real time audio effects for Linux, Cynthia Rothrock, Star Labs, Linux Hardware, shitty movies, reverse proxies, nginx proxy manager, and much more.

Podcast

YouTube

PeerTube

Clips of the show:

Youtube

Peertube

tech.minnix.dev/episode-249-of…

#bmovies #hardware #linux #linuxpodcast #nginx #nginxproxymanager #podcast #starlabs

minnix

2024-08-05 23:24:47

The Olympic Lugcast - The Linux Lugcast Ep 249 for 8.2.24

Welcome to Episode 249 the LinuxLUGcast

We are an open podcast/LUG that meets at 9 PM EST every first and third friday of the month using mumble.
We encourage anyone listening to join us and participate on the podcast. Check out linuxlugcast.com/ for the server details.

If you have any questions, comments, or topic you would like us to discus and are unable to join us during the live show you can
send us email at feedback@linuxlugcast.com

Lemmy community at lemux.minnix.dev/c/linux_lugca…
Join in the conversation at matrix.to/#/#lugcast:minnix.de…
Join the Jitsi meeting at jitsi.minnix.dev/lugcast
Youtube Channel
youtube.com/@thelinuxlugcast
Peertube Channel
nightshift.minnix.dev/c/linux_…

Previous movie:: Sci-fighter 2004
imdb.com/title/tt0117566/

Next Movie: Virtual Death Match 2020
imdb.com/title/tt8444510/

Minnix: EasyEffects
github.com/wwmm/easyeffects
reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comment…

Joe
aliexpress.us/item/32568060450…

amazon.com/802040-Battery-Rech…

Mordancy
Feedback from Star Labs
Vim talk

Cynthia Rocthrock

Honkey
blog.lopp.net/death-of-decentr…

lsix
linuxlinks.com/lsix-ls-images/

Linux is free
howtogeek.com/linux-is-free-bu…

Apache Foundation Says ‘Goodbye’ to Iconic Feather Logo
fossforce.com/2024/07/apache-f…

minnix
top 5 olympic list

Our next recording date will be Aug 16, 2024
Our music is "Downright" provided by Klaatu and Broam
and we would like to thank Minnix for the mumble server

For Good Reason, Apache Foundation Says ‘Goodbye’ to Iconic Feather Logo - FOSS Force

The Apache Software Foundation attempts to right a wrong it unintentionally created when it adopted its name 25-years ago.

^{Christine Hall (FOSS Force)}