I heard him the facility commander explaining: ‘The top brass is saying that Sde Teiman is being called a cemetery.’ Still, the Israeli media and the public are deliberately ignoring the sickening big picture that is the detention center
My nerves were raw as I waited for the investigative report on the events in the Sde Teiman detention facility amid the Israel-Gaza war, where I served as a reservist, to air on Israel’s public broadcaster this week. It wasn’t an easy decision for me to participate when the producers of the prominent Israeli investigative docuseries asked to interview me.
The Israeli media rarely shows the public what’s being done in its name, and the public, for its part, prefers to keep its eyes tightly shut. And once again, my interview didn’t make the final cut of the report, and neither did anything else about the systematic abuse and death of detainees, about which many of the senior Israeli officials know.
The show, “Zman Emet,” which literally translates to “Truth Time,” did not deliver the truth to the public. A filtered truth, perhaps, even worse than a lie. The report focused mainly on a single, infamous Israeli army investigation of abuse in Sde Teiman: A documented case of alleged sexual assault with a foreign object committed by soldiers from the secretive IDF unit known as “Force 100.”
“Zman Emet” focused on this incident and how its subsequent investigation, with the help of cynical politicians, was spun into a near-mutiny against the rule of law. The incident culminated in an angry mob, one which included multiple Israeli government officials breaking into Sde Teiman and another nearby army base in support of the alleged offenders. By zeroing in on this one case, the show deliberately ignored the broader context, the sickening big picture that is Sde Teiman.
As anyone who has been there knows, Sde Teiman is a sadistic torture camp. Since late 2023, dozens of detainees have entered alive and left in body bags. There are testimonies from guards, doctors and detainees, all recounting similar events. None of this was mentioned in the investigation. As if the hell on earth we created there boils down to a single event that can be explained away with an abstract discussion on the legitimacy of different types of corporal punishment. But I saw that hell.
I saw a detainee die before my eyes. He was sitting with other prisoners, blindfolded, and at some point, we just realized he was gone. I watched the facility commander gather everyone to try to temper the daily routine of abuse, the unhinged use of force, the inhumane conditions in which prisoners were held. I heard him explaining: “The top brass is saying that Sde Teiman is being called a cemetery,” and that “we have to stop that.”
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I saw people arrive at the facility from the Gaza Strip wounded, then be starved for weeks without medical care. I saw them urinate and defecate on themselves because they weren’t allowed to use the bathroom. I can still smell it. Many of them weren’t even members of the Nukhba (the Hamas commando force that led the October 7 attack), just regular Palestinian civilians from Gaza detained for investigation and, after enduring brutal abuse, released when it turned out they were innocent. It’s no wonder people died there. The wonder is that anyone survived.
The “Zman Emet” researchers were shocked when I told them all this, but none of it made it into the report. What made it into the final cut? The head of the military police investigation department feigning ignorance: “Until that moment,” meaning, until they received a report about one wounded, bleeding detainee, “we had no warning signs.”
Really? By that point, former detainees, as well as soldiers and medical staff who served in Sde Teiman had published testimonies of extreme abuse, inhumane conditions and a lack of basic medical care. All they had to do was listen, or even just count the number of detainees entering and compare it with the number of those who didn’t make it out. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes.
Everyone who served at Sde Teiman knows. They know about the torture, the surgeries done without anesthesia and the appalling sanitary conditions. But none of this was aired. As if a military torture camp, operating with the full knowledge of senior commanders, is less interesting or important than a single, isolated abuse case that can be denied or confirmed – an entire program about Sde Teiman, without actually talking about Sde Teiman.
What happened at Sde Teiman is not a secret, yet most Israelis know nothing about it, even now, because the Israeli media has almost entirely ignored it. That’s also why I agreed to the interview. Because Palestinians continue to leave our detention facilities in body bags, and most of the people around me have never even heard about it.
But more than revealing the truth about Sde Teiman, the program laid bare how such a reality can persist. The reason is that Israeli journalists, who are fully aware of the facts choose to conceal them, so they can instead sell a narrow, localized story about a few “bad apples.” Sde Teiman is not an isolated incident. It is, distinctly, a story about policy – a policy implemented and sustained with active complicity from the Israeli media.
This article was contributed by an anonymous reservist in the IDF.