“Until the war started in Gaza, the conditions in prison were reasonable in terms of food, drink, yard time and showers. But after the war broke out, things changed. We weren’t allowed to go out to the yard. They took away the kettle, TV and radios we had in the cell. They also confiscated cigarettes and personal items like clothes. The prison authorities started doing daily searches in the cells. They also cut back on the amount of food, so what we got didn’t match the number of detainees, and the quality was poor.
It stayed like that until I was transferred to the Negev Prison (Ketziot) on 3 November 2023. During the transfer, Nachshon unit people beat me and kicked me. When we got there, after hours of driving, Nachshon people beat me again, and also strip-searched me and took photos of me naked. I was very scared, because I heard the screams of other detainees being beaten.
The guards turned very violent after the war broke out. One day, I heard shouts from the inmates in the next cell. Later, I found out that one of them asked a guard if there was a ceasefire or any sort of solution because we weren’t getting any news from the outside, and in response to that question, they beat him to death. The guards simply left him there for half an hour after the assault. His name was Thaer Abu ‘Asab. He was from Qalqiliyah, and he was in prison from 2005.
The rules for roll call also changed completely. Each inmate had to stand, put both hands on his head and bend his neck. One of the guards read out the names over loudspeaker, and each inmate had to answer he was present. Once, after roll call, a week before my release, a guard asked if we were Hamas guys and we told him we were prisoners. The guard told his friends to attack us. They kicked us and hit us with metal batons. Every time I tried to cover my head with my hands, they hit me on the hands as well as the rest of my body. It hurt a lot. The assault went on for a long time. When the guards left our cell, cell 10, we were all sitting on the floor beaten and bruised, and some of us wounded.
The night after the assault, when I went to the toilet, I passed out and fell on the floor. Other inmates pulled me back to bed. The next day, a female medic or doctor came and checked me, especially my upper body – my back and shoulders and hands. She disinfected my wounds and put iodine on them. She also bandaged my hands and came back every 48 hours to change the bandages. I felt that she was sad about what happened to me. She seemed sad and upset by what the guards did.”