On Monday, the nonprofit organization, Physicians for Human Rights in Israel (PHRI), published a report that said that around 98 Palestinian detainees had died in Israeli custody.
Israel does not dispute these numbers, but it does dispute the PHRI’s characterization of the detainees dying due to illegal beatings and other alleged actions by Israeli prison guards.
NGO Monitor depicts Physicians for Human Rights–Israel as a heavily foreign-funded, politicized NGO that, under a medical-rights guise, advances anti-Israel lawfare and apartheid narratives while issuing what critics call biased and methodologically flawed reports.
The Jerusalem Post has been able to verify multiple elements of these details independently.
Over 50 of the Palestinian detainees died in IDF custody, while over 40 of them died in Israel Prison Service custody.
Around 60 people died in the first six or so months between October 2023 and April-May 2024. Then, in Spring 2024, the Military Advocate General’s Corps and the Supreme Court became more involved in the issue. After their involvement, around 30 people died over the next 15 plus months, a significant drop in deaths, though far from an end to the problem.
While close to 70 of the detainees were Gazans, over 25 were West Bank Palestinians, not explicitly linked to the war with Hamas; the PHRI estimates only one-third of the total were connected to the terrorist organization.
However, the IDF would note that many Gazans who were not affiliated with Hamas fought the IDF regardless.
If it wants to rebut the PHRI’s and others’ allegations of widespread prisoner abuse, part of addressing this issue of cause-of-death requires more of the IDF’s side of the story.
IDF has indicted one soldier in February for repeatedly beating Palestinians
To date, the military’s legal establishment has indicted and convicted one soldier in February for repeatedly beating Palestinians in a “small Sde Teiman" case, but not for any killings. It also indicted five other soldiers in the more well-known “large Sde Teiman case” for both allegedly beating and sexually assaulting a detainee, though that detainee survived.
The Jerusalem Post has learned that at least one other case was thoroughly investigated and closed rather than resulting in an indictment. However, no details regarding that case have been made public.
Why hasn’t the IDF published its findings regarding the other detainees?
The Post can now reveal that in July 2024, top IDF legal officials informed it that there was an extreme delay in being able to decide on the Sde Teiman and other Palestinian detainee death probes because the L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir was overwhelmed with work related to October 7. It was preoccupied with cases related to the victims of the massacre, post-October deaths related to IDF soldiers, and Palestinians from the battlefield.
Further, those same officials told the Post at the time that most of the Palestinian detainees who died were either fatally wounded on the battlefield and brought back to military installations partially to see if they could be saved, or had preexisting medical conditions that Israeli doctors were unaware of, leading to unintentional deaths.
Those officials said back then that they hoped they could progress faster in cases of detainees who came to Sde Teiman fully healthy, and only later were wounded or died.
However, even with these cases, the IDF’s legal division said it was facing a massive delay in receiving professional medical opinions regarding injuries or the cause of death.
For example, was death caused by strangulation, a series of blows to the body, or a heart attack?
The state medical forensics institute has been overwhelmed in trying to address all of these questions since October 7, and the depressing, unprecedented volume of work has decimated staff just as the Military Advocate General’s Corps was growing to try to keep up with the war.
As an example of delay, regarding one soldier who committed suicide, it took around seven to eight months to get a medical opinion.
But the hopes of the IDF’s legal officials that the autopsy process would speed up after July 2024 never materialized. The army has not even put out information on 10 prisoners who were healthy and only later died (the “easy” cases), let alone on a majority of the detainees.
While this might have been explainable in terms of being flooded with cases in July 2024, when the IDF also had not yet put out its probes of October 7, by February of this year, the military had put tens of thousands of hours of hundreds of officers’ time into probing October 7 and publicizing the results.
Why could it not do the same regarding Palestinian detainees, if for no other reason, to provide a counter-narrative to critics who say all of the cases were due to abuse or medical negligence?
Fascinatingly, the PHRI report clarifies that the forensics institute has already performed all or the vast majority of the autopsies, but, for the most part, it has not delivered a post-autopsy report regarding the cause of death.
According to the PHRI, there have been cases where the initial physical findings left little doubt that physical beatings were the cause of death, but a conclusion report was still never issued.
The official IDF response to these allegations dovetails with what the Post was told in July 2024, though it is even less specific, not addressing questions about the autopsies and cause of death process at all.
So, the PHRI and other critics are saying that the IDF and the IPS covered up almost 100 killings of detainees, while Israel denies the charges, but then fails to provide a specific counter-narrative for the various detainees, resting only on a generic counter-narrative, even two years after some of the cases.
There are multiple answers to the IDF delay question.
One is unique to Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who was the IDF’s chief lawyer from October 2021 until October 31 of this year, so the attorney throughout the Israel-Hamas War.
Her actions in trying to defend the legitimacy of the large Sde Teiman probe and indictment by illegally releasing video footage of the five soldiers allegedly abusing the detainee, her covering up of that leak, and her attempt to commit suicide either once or twice in recent weeks, show she was terrified of the backlash by the country’s political Right.
Seeing as over 100 Jewish right-wing extremists stormed an IDF base in July 2024 to try to spring the arrested IDF soldiers accused of abusing a Palestinian detainee, and given the vehement criticism from top government officials, her concerns for her safety and for whether her Sde Teiman cases would be allowed to go forward were not theoretical.
That does not justify her breaking the rules, but it does show her state of mind.
So, Tomer-Yerushalmi may have been deterred from publicizing more details of more cases after seeing the backlash she got on the two Palestinian detainee beating cases she did move forward on.
Another possibility could be related to the ongoing International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice cases against Israel and Israelis.
The Post understands that some Israeli officials fear that any specific details they publicize will be used as “Exhibit A” against Israeli officials, no matter what balanced conclusions Israel might draw in its decision.
Absent the ICC and ICJ proceedings, Israel might have followed its protocol for earlier wars, such as the five highly detailed updates it produced regarding the dozens of its probes into the 2014 Gaza conflict.
But if Israeli officials regard the ICC and ICJ threat as larger than the potential gain of public transparency, and if they believe much of the world is already (wrongly) set in viewing Israel as having committed genocide, then they may see little benefit to greater transparency until the ICC and ICJ proceedings have concluded.
Still, the IDF could publicize how many cases have been closed and a paraphrase of why: How many because the detainee was fatally wounded before coming into custody, how many due to unknown preexisting illnesses (which the PHRI indicates accounted for at least around a dozen if not more), and how many remain open, with a predicted date for reaching a decision.
This would avoid giving the ICC and the ICJ any specific grounds with which to prosecute Israelis, but would also show some basic transparency in cases of deaths of detainees, something which is usually treated as a grave event that requires a reckoning.
And the truth is that the ICC and the ICJ concerns may be poor reasons not to provide the full details.
Likely the most crucial battle over these issues for the next decade is the new battle for hearts and minds within both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US, and among fair-minded Western Europeans.
True, winning them over will require a lot more than just dry data on controversial cases, but at a minimum, it will require a transparent reckoning so that such persons at least can feel they have a complete Israeli narrative to rest their support on.
As long as Israeli officials are so afraid of either domestic or international criticism that they do not even “show up on the field” with a fully detailed narrative, they leave setting the narrative to critics.
And if there were other cases where Israel or individual Israeli soldiers broke the rules, a reckoning will help ensure that such actions are avoided in the future.
The fact that the IDF’s legal division and the Supreme Court dived into the issue in July 2024, which seemed to reduce the number of deaths, shows the positive impact. The fact that dozens more deaths did occur even after that point – equal to the number of detainee deaths for the previous 10 years – shows there is more work to be done.
Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this analysis.