The Queen of Evidence: Israel’s Torture and its Genocide in Gaza

28 November 2025

"יש לנו  (לכם – מ.ד.) חרא של מדינה...טופסולוגיה"

קפטן איוב, פאודה סדרת טלוויזיה, 2015 – 2022.

"[להרהר אחר] כל מה שאנחנו עשינו..."

עמי איילון, ראש השב"כ ויו"ר הוועד המנהל של אוניברסיטת חיפה לשעבר, כאן חינוכית, דצמבר 2014.

“Today, with the passing of Shimon Peres, the Shin Bet salutes one of the most important leaders of the founding generation, a builder of Israel who shaped its culture and with his bare hands laid the groundwork on which the security establishment was built,” Shin Bet chief Nadav Argaman says in a statement. “Today, we bid farewell to the man of action, the acclaimed statesman, and the close friend of the Shin Bet.”

Head of Shin Bet Nadav Argaman, Times of Israel, 28 September 2016.

Torture is an epistemological methodology that the Israeli Security Agency, known as the Shin Bet, has utilized against Palestinians for decades. An underdeveloped country in the fields of constitutionalism, civil rights, and human rights, in the best traditions of Israel’s founders of Mapai, Israeli authorities employed the coerced confession as the main tool to realize legal triumph, political superiority, and inflict lasting psychological damage with little to no moral remorse. Self-proclaimed colonial and apartheid state internally, Israel required an abundance of propaganda abroad with the help of influential academic,[1] cultural,[2] and diplomatic[3] lobbying, particularly in the United States and Britain. Torture galvanized the imagination of Israeli culture and politics, ultimately inspiring the American security performance since post-2001 [4] and long outperforming the British one in Northern Ireland.[5]

As early as 1970, Amnesty International published a report about Israel’s torture of Palestinians, albeit apologetically, containing an absolute misunderstanding of Israel’s governing nature supported by traditionally tilting representation in the New York Times.[6] Militarized settler colonial country and society, Israel has been practicing constant military and security control over Palestinians who were not ethnically cleansed in 1948 Palestine and in the 1967 occupied territories (East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza). Israel’s closed and security-oriented society produced torture as a mechanism of government.

Ordinary lies have characterized the Shin Bet long before it upgraded its behavior to accusatorial terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s. Engaged in brutal techniques of torture and political assassinations, this organization failed to convince its recent legal adviser, who wrote in 2013 that it holds less than minimal commitment to the rule of law. The issue of torture first came to the Israeli public's attention in the second half of the 1980s after revelations about the torture of Israeli IDF officer Izzat Nafsu. He served in Israel’s occupation of Lebanese territories and was falsely accused of providing information to hostile forces, leading to his illegal imprisonment for more than seven years. Decades after this episode, it was revealed that Israeli psychologists participated in the torturous interrogation, providing a convenient expert opinion that facilitated the wrongful conviction.

Nafsu’s affair triggered a commission of inquiry headed by Israeli Supreme Court Judge Moshe Landau, mandated to inquire about the Shin Bet’s interrogation practices, which was also extended to the treatment of Palestinian detainees in the aftermath of publicizing the Shin Bet's killing of Palestinians in custody. The Landau commission concluded that the Shin Bet routinely lied in testimonies before internal investigative mechanisms, the commission of inquiry itself, and Israeli military courts in the 1967-occupied territories. Nevertheless, the Landau commission permitted the use of ‘moderate physical pressure’ by the Shin Bet in what is known as a legal permission to use torture in the organization’s dungeons.

In the wake of the Palestinian unarmed uprising of 1987 – 1992, during which Israeli Minister of Defense Rabin gave an explicit order to break the bones of protesters, and throughout the 1990s, Israel’s torture of Palestinian detainees arrested in mass and arbitrarily reached industrial levels.[7] Israel’s military courts in the 1967-occupied Palestinian territories represent the actual epistemological Israeli legal thinking, where Palestinians have only the right to be convicted without the ability to know or challenge the evidence against them, often relying on their own involuntary confession.[8] Collective and arbitrary arrests, including the common use of administrative detention, have characterized Israel as a colonial, apartheid, and occupying entity.[9] It is estimated that since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza have been imprisoned by Israel’s brutally malicious security services and legal system.

After having legitimized torture constantly in the 1990s,[10] the Israeli Supreme Court reached a judgment in 1999 regarding Shin Bet’s torture methods that barred a few practices but maintained the permission to torture set by the Landau commission and elaborated on the justification defense for Shin Bet’s officials retroactively. The panel of judges, led by contract and commercial law expert turned ‘constitutional revolutionary’ Chief Justice Aharon Barak, accepted the Shin Bet’s accusatorial terrorism of that period as the natural order of things.[11] 

Torture did not fade, nor was it even limited following Barak’s legal acrobatics and diplomatic aspirations. On the contrary, Israel’s identity crisis managed by its security services, notably the Shin Bet domestically, led to maintaining torture as a central feature of the country’s understanding of itself and its existential dilemma, the Palestinians.[12]

Israel’s medical profession has long been either actively collaborating with the Shin Bet’s torture and other coercive maneuvers, notably seeking information and humiliation in exchange for a permit to access unavailable medical treatment, or simply turning a blind eye to basic human rights violations and ethical obligations stemming from the curative vocation.[13] Israeli doctors have been quick to respond to allegations raised by their international colleagues in settings such as The Lancet, often reiterating the official and debunked version of Israel’s security establishment, comprised of the military and the Shin Bet, regarding the events of 7 October 2023.[14]

Israel’s security organs occupy a central location in the culture of the country’s militarized society. Suffering from a shortage of basic rights awareness, key cultural figures would make a comedy section of torturing Palestinians approvingly. Israeli cultural icons Dan Ben–Amotz and Shaike Ophir would perform in the mid-1980s a violent interrogation scene where the interrogator dehumanizes the body of the detained Palestinian person, his dignity, memory, history, and identity.

Fawda (chaos in Arabic), an Israeli action television series aired from 2015 – 2022, revealed all the pitfalls and plain illegalities of Israel’s security services domestically and abroad perpetrated by the Shin Bet and the Mossad. Seeking ratings among Israeli Jewish audiences mainly, the series captures all the unlawfulness that international law prohibits. It attributes constant success to Israel’s lethality and coerciveness, which places its adversaries either among the dead or transforms them into collaborators. Given the ample documentation and the typical Israeli psyche, the scenes of Shin Bet’s torture are difficult to dispute, as is the boasting about it. Admission of intentional targeting of civilians in Gaza by air strikes is among the provided habits.[15]

But Fawda is not necessarily made only in the genre of 1980s Chuck Norris films of shoot to kill and rarely get harmed, abandoned by contemporary indoctrinating creativity illustrated by the American television series Homeland. Fawda, surprisingly enough, indeed has social value in two important aspects. The first is its emphasis that the social divide between the disoriented and distorted Mizrahi Jews and the appalling Mapai Jews remains within a unified Israeli Zionist tribe that cherishes security values over any other and by any means necessary. The second, which is no less important, is that one of the co-authors of Fawda’s script is former Haaretz newspaper reporter Avi Issacharoff, who covered Israel in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories. The significance of this fact is that the presumably ‘liberal’ newspaper has been aware of Israel’s tactical and strategic security maneuvers against Palestinians, also by virtue of Issacharoff’s reporting, and not only because of its location deep at the heart of Mapai’s unhinged security club.[16]

Israel’s genocide in Gaza witnessed traditional mass capricious incarceration and torture of Palestinians, constituting a separate international crime in the form of a crime against humanity.[17] By December 2023, more than 8,000 Palestinians were detained by patrolling Israeli forces, pleased by the devastation being caused by their air force.[18] The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza and abroad captured Israel’s incompetent vindictiveness aimed at breaking the spirit of the population to realize purported military goals.[19]

Among the tortured was Dr. Khaled Alser,[20]whose writing in The Lancet about the trauma caused by Israel’s illegal war may have led to his illegal arrest and abuse. Less significant but noteworthy is the reply by Israeli doctors to his article, wishing to reinstate the deconstructed official Israeli version of 7 October 2023 in the best tradition of Israel’s ideological and human rights-free medical craft.[21]

Israel’s torture was comprehensive and directionless, covering many other Palestinian doctors captured arbitrarily.[22]Beatings, threats, ill-treatment, and deprivation of sleep by loud music were a few of Israel’s torturous processes.[23]Israel returned the bodies of detained Palestinians who showed clear signs of torture, mutilation, and execution, 135 in total.[24]Its torture was phenomenally widespread that even Aryeh Neier formerly of Soros’s Open Society Foundations, could not help but write about the subject in another New York traditionally Israel-leaning periodical, the New York Review of Books.[25]

Israel’s genocide, collective erratic arrests, and torture have been well documented but rarely discussed in the relevant and influential academic circles. The country’s political and military leaders have routinely evaded accountability abroad. They prosper from absolute immunity bestowed by their own dysfunctional and cooperating legal system. Whether there are signs that this spectacle may have slightly diminished or not, the flare of combating Israel’s criminality, enshrined in the country’s founding ideology Zionism, and its conjectural and financial supporters, should persist in escalating.

Captain Ayub, Fawda TV Series, 2015 – 2022

Shaike Ophir and Dan Ben – Amotz, Abu Zaki Sketch Comedy, 1986

Images of Heads of the Shin Bet, 1980 – 2011.

Shimon Peres. Source: Ynet, 28 September 2016.

[1] See, for example, Amanda Hopkins, “The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and her Path to Power – A pioneering woman leader but was she feminist?”, Jewish Chronicle, 17 November 2022; Colin Shindler, “’The Only Woman in the Room’: A feminist biography of Golda Meir – review”, Jerusalem Post, 16 December 2023. In the United States it is possible to note Michael Walzer as probably the most influential intellectual figure in American academia who upheld the ideals of providing Israel with an unpersuasive shield of cerebral excuses. The Israeli Van Leer Institute has organized a conference to honor Walzer’s legacy, gathering Israeli academics renowned for their enthusiastic defense of variants of Mapai’s ideology. Another person is Harvard’s Martha Minow, who enjoys the status of a progressive Supreme Court judge. She has rarely been discussed in an Israeli context, a connection that we shall attempt to shed light on in the near future.  

[2] See Harriet Sherwood, “Arnon Milchan reveals past as Israeli spy”, The Guardian, 26 November 2013.

[3] See Laurence Shoup, “The Council on Foreign Relations, the Israel Lobby, and the War on Gaza”, 76(1) Monthly Review (May 2024).  

[4] See Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, (St. Martin’s Press, 2006); Bill Chappell, “Psychologists behind CIA ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Settle Detainees’ Lawsuit”, NPR, 17 August 2017; Lisa Hajjar, Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge, 2013); Lisa Hajjar, War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022). See also Lauren Morehouse, “Confess or Die: Why Threatening a Suspect with the Death Penalty Should Render Confessions Involuntary”, 56(2) American Criminal Law Review, pp.531 – 545 (2019).   

[5] Aoife Duffy, Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland (Routledge, 2019); Susan McKay, “The torture center: Northern Ireland’s ‘hooded men’”, Irish Times, 25 July 2015; Anne Cadwallader, “Waterboarded by the British Army”, Declassified UK, 29 March 2023.

[6] “Torture Inquiry in Israel Sought”, New York Times, 2 April 1970. See also “Israeli Torture of Arab Prisoners Reported by London Sunday Times”, New York Times, 20 June 1977; Roy Reed, “Israelis Deny a London Paper’s Charge of Torture”, New York Times, 3 July 1977; “Israel and Torture”, 6(4) Journal of Palestine Studies. pp.191 – 219 (1977); Monroe Freedman & Alan Dershowitz, “Israeli Torture, They Said”, New York Times, 2 June 1978; Ghassan Bishara, “The Human Rights Case Against Israel: The Policy of Torture”, 8(4) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.3-30 (1979); Paul Hoffman, “Israeli Parliament in Torture Denial”, New York Times, 15 February 1979; Amnesty International, Israel / South Lebanon – The Khiam detainees: torture and ill-treatment, May 1992.   

[7] See, Amnesty International Annual Report January 1989 – December 1989, pp.129-132 (1990); Amnesty International, Israel and the OPT: Torture and ill-treatment of political detainees, April 1994; Human Rights Watch, Torture and Ill-Treatment: Israel’s Interrogation of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, 1994; Al-Haq, Torture for Security: the systematic torture and ill-treatment of Palestinians in Israel, 1995.

[8] See Lisa Hajjar, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005); Bar Human Rights Committee of England & Wales, The Israeli Military Courts in the West Bank of the Occupied Territories, 2024.

[9] See Amnesty International, Administrative Detention During the Palestinian Intifada, June 1989; Amnesty International, Administrative detention: despair, uncertainty, and lack of due process, April 1997;  Amnesty International, Starved to Justice: Palestinians detained without trial by Israel, June 2012; Addameer, Administrative Detention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: A Legal Analysis Report, 2016; Harriet Sherwood, ‘Administrative detention’ the key to Palestinian hunger strikes”, The Guardian, 13 May 2012; Raja Abdulrahim, “‘Preparing to Die’: Palestinian Detainees Turn Hunger Into Weapon”, New York Times, 11 August 2022.

[10] Amnesty International, Israel: Torture / judicial authorization of torture, November 1996.  

[11] See, for example, Serge Schmemann, “Suicide Bomber Kills 5 in a Bus Attack Near Tel-Aviv”, New York Times, 25 July 1995.

[12] See Amnesty International, Shielded from Scrutiny: IDF violations in Jenin and Nablus, November 2002; Addameer, Torture of Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israeli Jails, October 2003; Amnesty International, Briefing to the Committee Against Torture, September 2008; Defense for Children International – Palestine Section, Palestinian Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalized ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children, June 2009;  Addameer, Torture Positions in Israeli Occupation Prisons, 2020.

[13] Amnesty International, “Under constant medical supervision”: Torture, ill-treatment, and the health professionals in Israel and the Occupied Territories, August 1996. 

[14] See Eitan Israeli et al, “The Lancet Against Israel”, 2013. See also, Paola Manduca et al, “An open letter for the people in Gaza”, The Lancet, July 2014; Eitan Israeli et al, The Lancet against Israel - Again”, July 2014.

[15] The television series also demonstrates the security methods applied to distract and divert the Palestinians in Israel from discovering a reasonable political path, mainly through crime and domination. The irony is that the series’ producers recruited many Palestinian actors residing in Israel who consistently suffer from a bleak job market that blinds and silences them from being outspoken about the nature of their employer. On television, they eventually were either killed or became collaborators.   

[16] All the media in Israel complied with the strict instructions of military and government censorship that prohibited reporting about the fact that most Israeli civilians who were killed on 7 October 2023 died as a result of Israeli shooting in accordance with military procedure. Minor exceptions implied the inability to report on the actual occurrences, while everyone failed to even indicate the existence of censorship.

[17] Amnesty International, Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests, 8 November 2023.  

[18] Jason Burke et al, “More than 8,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails, rights groups say”, The Guardian, 21 December 2023; Michael Levitt et al, “Thousands of Palestinians are held without charge under Israeli detention policy”, NPR, 1 December 2023.

[19] Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Torture and Genocide: The Shattered Futures of former Palestinian Detainees in Gaza, October 2023 – October 2024.

[20] Ryan Grim, “Renowned Surgeon and Lead Author of New Lancet Study Tortured by Israeli Military”, Drop Site, 1 September 2024.

[21] Daniel A. King & Danny Epstein, “A case series on trauma care in Gaza”, The Lancet, January 2025.

[22] Annie Kelly et al, “’No Rules’: Gaza’s doctors say they were tortured, beaten and humiliated in Israeli detention”, The Guardian, 25 February 2025.

[23] Seham Tantesh et al, “’Crulest forms of torture’: freed Palestinians describe horrors of Israeli jail”, The Guardian, 14 October 2025.

[24] Julian Borger, “Palestinian bodies returned by Israel show signs of torture and execution, say doctors”, The Guardian, 15 October 2025; Lorenzo Tondo, “At least 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians had been held at notorious Israeli jails, say Gaza officials”, The Guardian, 20 October 2025. See also, Emma Graham – Harrison, “Israel’s underground jail, where Palestinians are held without charge and never see daylight”, The Guardian, 8 November 2025.

[25] Aryeh Neier, “Torture in Israel’s Prisons”, New York Review of Books, 17 October 2024.