[News] USAID officials take 'daily meetings' at Israel's Sde Teiman torture camp

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 USAID officials take 'daily meetings' at Israel's Sde Teiman torture camp

US aid agency is led by Samantha Powers, a scholar of genocide who has
refused to step down amid US support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians
in Gaza

News Desk <https://thecradle.co/authors/news-desk-9>

OCT 15, 2024 -
https://thecradle.co/articles/usaid-officials-take-daily-meetings-at-israels-sde-teiman-torture-camp
(Photo credit: Chaim Goldberg/ Flash90)

Officials from the US’s main humanitarian agency attend daily meetings on
an Israeli military base that also hosts the notorious Sde Teiman torture
camp for Palestinian detainees from Gaza, *The Guardian* reported
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/14/usaid-gasa-aid-meetings-sde-teiman>
on 15 October.

United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is tasked with
working with Israeli officials, the UN, and international NGOs to bring
humanitarian assistance into Gaza as part of the Joint Coordination Board
(JCB).

According to three officials with the agency, USAID officials have been
attending meetings as part of the JCB at the Sde Teiman base in southern
Israel since 29 July.

Sde Teiman was set up as a temporary holding facility for detainees from
Gaza after the start of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in
October 2023. Since that time, Israeli and western media, the UN, and
rights groups have documented the horrific torture and rape of Palestinian
detainees at the camp.

*The* *Guardian* viewed an internal USAID document that referred to “the
present JCB location on Sde Teiman IDF base,” located outside the city of
Be’er Sheva.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told *The* *Guardian *that
two USAID officials travel to Sde Teiman daily for JCB meetings with
Israeli and UN officials.

Israeli soldiers working as guards in the facility torture Palestinian
detainees through the use of rape, beatings, electrocutions, and forced
feedings.

An Israeli doctor who worked at the camp reported
<https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/06/middleeast/doctor-israel-hospital-conditions-intl/index.html>
that doctors in the camp are “routinely” forced to amputate prisoners’
limbs as a result of prolonged handcuffing by the guards.

“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu
Ghraib and Guantánamo,” Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer who visited Sde Teiman,
told
<https://www.972mag.com/sde-teiman-prisoners-lawyer-mahajneh/?utm_source=972+Magazine+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e6b556b6af-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_12_2022_11_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f1fe821d25-e6b556b6af-320830489>
*+972
Magazine*.

The *Guardian* added that the “officials who spoke with the Guardian said
that the Israeli military has undermined coordination with the UN and
humanitarian organizations over the past year, and the relocation of the
JCB to Sde Teiman reflected that.”

 “It seems like trolling,” one of them told *The* *Guardian*.

Last week, the UN Commission of Inquiry for the occupied Palestinian
territories issued a report
<https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/262/79/pdf/n2426279.pdf>
stating it “received credible information concerning rape and sexual
assault, including the use of an electrical probe to cause burns to the
anus and the insertion of objects, such as sticks, broomsticks, and
vegetables, into the anus. Some of those acts were reportedly filmed by
soldiers.”

The report also found that as of 15 July, at least 53 Palestinian detainees
had died in Israeli detention facilities since 7 October 2023, presumably
due to torture.

One prisoner, Thaer Abu Assab from Qalqilya in the occupied West Bank, was
beaten to death by prison guards on 18 November. He had been imprisoned
since 2005.

Dr Iyad Rantisi, the director of a women’s hospital in Beit Lahia, was
detained on 11 November and taken to Shikma Prison. He died six days later
after being tortured to death by Israel’s Security Agency, the Shin Bet.

Samantha Power, the current head of USAID, was criticized
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/31/samantha-power-usaid-confronted-gaza/>
by current and former USAID employees during a public event in January for
her complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

“You wrote a book on genocide, and you’re still working for the
administration: You should resign and speak out,” said Agnieszka Sykes, a
global health specialist who left her job at USAID in protest.

Before joining the Obama White House, Power had become famous as an
academic after she wrote a book, “The Problem from Hell,” criticizing US
failures to prevent genocide in past conflicts.
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