Mondoweiss
Israeli forces have continued their rampage across the Gaza Strip for the 76th consecutive day. Emerging reports indicate that the Israeli army is not only taking Palestinians hostage and reportedly torturing them, but is conducting extrajudicial executions.
UNOCHA–United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs–has received ‘disturbing information’ indicating that Israeli forces have murdered at least 11 unarmed Palestinian men in front of their family members in Gaza’s Remal neighborhood.
The Israeli army ‘separated the men from the women and children, and then shot and killed at least 11 of the men, mostly aged in their late 20s and early 30s, in front of their family members’, the statement said.
‘This raises alarm about the possible commission of war crimes,’ the human rights organization continued, calling for an independent investigation.
Meanwhile, Palestinians who are not killed by the Israeli army are being abducted.
Citing testimonies from freed prisoners, Mustafa Barghouti, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative party, says the Israeli army is brutally torturing–sometimes to their deaths–Palestinian prisoners from Gaza.
‘More than a thousand detainees, including the director of al-Shifa Hospital, are being subjected to brutal torture and severe beatings,’ Barghouti said in a statement.
‘The Israeli interrogators use torture with electricity, waterboarding, hanging stress positions, and psychological pressure,’ he continued, noting prisoners said they were held in a makeshift detention camp in Beersheba, also known as Bir as-Sab, and that several elderly and sick prisoners were killed as a result of the torture.
‘The detainees are held in barracks that are unfit for life, exposed to the cold, and are given scarce food,’ Barghouti said. ‘No one, including the Red Cross, is allowed to contact them or know anything about them.’