Deaths in Custody as Systematic Practice: Command Responsibility and the Abu Asab Indictments
The occupation has killed 91 Palestinian prisoners inside its prisons since October 7, 2023. All of them have been identified. Riyad al-Ashqar, who heads the Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies, says the killings are organized crimes carried out under official cover that reaches the highest security and political levels of the occupation.
The occupation has now charged a number of jailers with killing the prisoner Thaer Abu Asab at Naqab prison in November 2023. Al-Ashqar says the indictments are an attempt to deceive the public, dressing the killing up as the work of rogue guards when Knesset members and officials in the occupation’s extremist government stand behind it.
The occupation government incites against prisoners openly and encourages every crime committed against them: torture, starvation, and rape. Humiliation runs through all of it. This is not about one incident. And the men who bear the greatest guilt cannot be absolved of it.
Occupation government ministers, chief among them the criminal Ben Gvir, give the green light to the officers and soldiers who deal with prisoners directly at arrest, in interrogation, and inside the prisons. Those men are free to torture prisoners and to strip them of what they need to live, and they have been promised absolute protection for whatever harm they do. The promise holds if the prisoner is killed or wounded. It holds if he comes out disabled or carrying a chronic illness.
The officers and soldiers charged over Abu Asab’s killing acted as they did because they knew in advance that they were protected, al-Ashqar says, and because their orders told them to harm prisoners over the smallest thing.
Abu Asab was killed for asking a guard whether there was a truce in the war on Gaza. Prisoners have no way to learn what is happening outside. The occupation closed the prisons and sealed them off completely.
Charging the soldiers does no more than push responsibility down to the lowest rungs of the security establishment and mislead the public into believing that crimes against prisoners are punished. The charges come after the international community has already recognized how criminal this fascist regime is, a regime built on blood, genocide, and destruction. They come after atrocity upon atrocity against civilians in the Gaza Strip.
Ben Gvir tours the prisons from time to time and posts video of prisoners, men and women, being humiliated. He uses the footage to drive home the harsh detention conditions he says prisoners must be held under for as long as the prisons answer to him. Al-Ashqar calls this open incitement to torture and starve prisoners, and an explicit call to kill them.
The killings have climbed sharply over the past three years. Al-Ashqar wants international human rights and humanitarian organizations to step in and send investigative committees into the prisons to examine them. He wants the men who carried out these crimes, and the men who gave the orders, brought before the International Criminal Court for war crimes against unarmed prisoners.
