Palestinians who were among the hundreds arrested by the IDF in northern Gaza in scenes that went viral earlier this month said they grossly mistreated by the soldiers.
Palestinians detained in the shattered town of Beit Lahiya, the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya and neighborhoods of Gaza City said they were bound, blindfolded and bundled into the backs of trucks. Some said they were taken to the camp at an undisclosed location, nearly naked and with little water.
“We were treated like cattle, they even wrote numbers on our hands,” said Ibrahim Lubbad, a 30-year-old computer engineer arrested in Beit Lahiya on December 7 with a dozen other family members and held overnight. “We could feel their hatred.”
“My only crime is not having enough money to flee to the south,” said Abu Adnan al-Kahlout, an unemployed 45-year-old with diabetes and high blood pressure in Beit Lahiya. He was detained on December 8 and released after several hours when soldiers saw he was too faint and nauseated to be interrogated.
“Do you think Hamas are the ones waiting in their homes for the Israelis to come find them now?” he asked. “We stayed because we have nothing to do with Hamas.”
“There are corpses all over the place, left out for three, four weeks because no one can reach them to bury them before the dogs eat them,” said Raji Sourani, a lawyer with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza. He added that he saw dozens of dead bodies as he made his way from Gaza City to the southern border with Egypt last week.
Israeli forces are holding one of his colleagues, human rights researcher Ayman Lubbad, in custody.
Returning home brought its own hardship. Israeli soldiers dropped detainees off after midnight without their clothes, phones or IDs near what appeared to be Gaza’s northern border with Israel, those released said.
They added that they were ordered to walk through a landscape of destruction, tanks stationed along the road and snipers perched on roofs.
In response to questions about alleged mistreatment, the Israeli military says that detainees were “treated according to protocol” and were given enough food and water.
The army spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said that arrests took place in two Hamas strongholds in northern Gaza and that detainees were told to strip to make sure they didn’t conceal explosives.
Hagari said the men are questioned and then told to dress, and that in cases where this didn’t happen, the military would ensure it doesn’t occur again.
Following the initial questioning, those believed to have ties to Hamas are taken away for further interrogation, and dozens of Hamas members have been arrested so far, he said.
The others are released and told to head south, where Israel has told people to seek refuge, Hagari says.
The IDF says those arrested included Hamas terrorists and that all detained were stopped for a reason.
Earlier this month, the IDF distributed photos of detained suspects in Gaza stripped down to their underwear, sparking concerns about arrest procedures and rights violations.
Both Hagari and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi criticized the publication of the photographs and vowed to ensure that they wouldn’t be circulated in the future.
Photographs published since have only depicted the suspects fully clothed.
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza was launched following the October 7 onslaught in southern Israel in which thousands of Hamas-led terrorists poured into Israel from the land, air and sea, rampaging through communities and killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking around 240 hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry has said that since the start of the war, more than 19,600 people have been killed, most of them civilians, although this number cannot be independently verified. The IDF has said that troops have killed some 7,000 Hamas or Hamas-affiliated terrorists.