Israeli prisons are operating as a system of torture camps. Palestinians detained by Israel since October 7 have made such claims for months, their words backed up by extreme weight loss after being released from Israeli custody. Now, a haunting and exhaustive report by Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem released this week backs those claims up with evidence from fifty-five Palestinian detainees following their release from Israeli prisons. The majority of those interviewed were never tried for any crimes.

The report’s title, “Welcome to Hell,” is a quote from an Israeli soldier. Fouad Hassan, a forty-five-year-old Palestinian from Qusrah, told investigators that this was the greeting he and his fellow detainees received upon disembarking from a bus at Megiddo Prison.

“Hell” is no exaggeration. As the report details, Palestinians who have been held in Israeli prisons and detention centers since the beginning of the war on Gaza are subject to torture, sexual abuse, violence, humiliation, starvation, sleep deprivation, and denial of adequate medical treatment. The report lists sixty cases of Palestinian prisoners dying since the start of the war, including forty-eight Gazan prisoners who died at army detention facilities and twelve who died in Prison Service custody; many of the report’s testimonies refer to the Prison Service’s Keter unit, which operates as a specialized force for controlling riots.

“Their testimonies reveal the outcomes of 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,” B’Tselem notes in introducing the report. “Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.”

The testimonies are worth reading in full, but they include: an inmate beaten to death by guards for asking if there was a cease-fire, as inmates didn’t receive news inside the prison; an account of guards putting cigarettes out “in my mouth and on my body . . . they put clamps on my testicles that were attached to something heavy”; the use of “loud disco music” playing at volumes that make inmates’ ears bleed; an account of sexual assault and sodomy during which other guards filmed the act on their phones; story after story of deliberate starvation of inmates.

In recent days, Israeli society has been riven by a court’s allegation that members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) gang-raped a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military base. The allegation resulted in an uprising in defense of the soldiers in question, encouraged by members of the IDF and elected leaders of Israeli political parties alike. As the pro-rape mob stormed the military base, the IDF was forced to redeploy units from the West Bank to the base to try to quell the violence and retain control.

As B’Tselem’s reports makes clear, and in line with additional findings by the United Nations, the soldiers accused of rape at Sde Teiman are hardly outliers. The Israeli army is carrying out a systemic policy of torturing the roughly ten thousand Palestinians currently held in Israeli custody.

“Given the severity of the acts, the extent to which the provisions of international law are being violated, and the fact that these violations are directed at the entire population of Palestinian prisoners daily and over time — the only possible conclusion is that in carrying out these acts, Israel is committing torture that amounts to a war crime and even a crime against humanity,” the report concludes.

There have long been credible allegations that the IDF uses sexual violence against Palestinian detainees. That Israeli society has now been forced to acknowledge it by a court is itself a result of a growing consensus from the international legal community that Israel cannot investigate itself for its myriad alleged war crimes and thus must be prosecuted by the likes of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Israeli public’s support for the alleged rapists in the IDF, and its remarkably muted response to the testimonies contained in B’Tselem’s report, is further evidence of that.

As Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy noted regarding the lack of outrage among Israelis to the revelations contained in the report, “The indifference to all these things defines Israel.” In the United States’ Guantanamo Bay detention camp, nine prisoners were killed in twenty years; in Israel, it’s sixty detainees in ten months.