An investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has laid bare a routine of torture, beatings, and killing inflicted by Israeli prison guards on Palestinian prisoners, exposed through the guards' own WhatsApp messages in which they celebrated the death of a prisoner they had beaten and boasted of the violence as a matter of routine.
According to the Haaretz report, the Palestinian prisoner Thaer Abu Asab was beaten to death in Cell 6 of Wing 24 at Ketziot Prison in November 2023. His offense, the investigation found, was daring to ask a guard whether there was a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians. The guard relayed the question to his commander, who decided to answer it with a fatal beating, sending in guards and members of the Prison Service's "Keter" tactical unit, who beat the prisoners in the cell while shouting "No ceasefire" and mocking them, "A hudna, you're asking for a hudna," a truce. Abu Asab was beaten the hardest. Cellmates described his face turning blue, his hands covered in blood, and his body lying unconscious on the floor. He was pronounced dead that night, having suffered an injury to his heart from the severity of the beating.
As Haaretz reported, the horror was captured in the guards' own messages, exchanged as the events unfolded and later seized by investigators. One female guard texted her partner as the prisoner lay dying: "They're doing CPR in the clinic right now, baby! God willing, that son of a thousand whores will die." Another wrote: "Holy shit, what a count. We fucked them up so bad." A third messaged a friend: "OMG, they're doing CPR on a prisoner because we beat him. He's dead," adding, "Boom, count. Boom, dead prisoner." One guard texted simply: "So much blood in the wings."
The messages, as documented by Haaretz, reveal that the killing was no aberration but part of an entrenched culture of abuse. The guards described the violence against Palestinian prisoners as their normal practice. "It's routine," one guard, Oshrit Eliga, wrote to a friend, boasting: "Whatever batch comes in, if he doesn't end bnup with a busted kidney, I'm not letting him into the wing." Describing the arrival of prisoners detained after October 7, she wrote: "Obviously, everyone got their own personal welcome," and recounted that the guards "got so tired of beating them" that the commander "took off his belt and beat the shit out of them," describing the prisoners screaming "like little girls, like they were punching bags." Eliga, Haaretz noted, had appeared two years earlier in a Prison Service recruitment ad praising the job's "adrenaline" and "action."
The Haaretz investigation also documented how the abuse was sanctioned and shielded from the top. According to the guards' testimony cited in the report, the commander told them before the count that he had approval from the shift commander and the prison commander, and that "everyone knew what was going to happen." He was quoted saying: "If there's one thing I was taught at home, it's violence toward this scum. Those are the values I was raised with." Guards testified that senior officials treated the storming and beating of cells as accepted policy, with one saying it was "kind of routine, so we didn't report the incident," because "as far as the senior commanders were concerned, it was fine. That was the policy."
The report further exposed how the system was engineered to escape accountability. The Keter unit's black helmets, Haaretz noted, make its members difficult to identify in security footage, and the main defendant alleged that the prison commander himself would change into Keter gear that concealed his face, enter cells, and that cameras were switched off before operations, describing the practice inside the prison as "harbu darbu," all-out mayhem. More than 20 guards were questioned, and none had reported anything unusual at the time, despite an investigation file filled with photographs of severely beaten and bruised prisoners.
Nearly three years after Abu Asab was killed, Haaretz reported, Israeli prosecutors filed an indictment against 12 prison guards, but only on the relatively lenient charge of reckless homicide, because it proved impossible to determine which guards had struck the fatal blows. The beating, the indictment said, was carried out in retaliation for a rumor that Druze soldiers had been killed in Gaza, a report that turned out to be false.
The case, as Haaretz itself acknowledged, is only a rare glimpse into a system that is otherwise sealed by the guards' code of silence and their willingness to cover for one another. Since October 2023, the Israeli Prison Service has faced repeated, well-documented allegations of systematic violence, starvation, medical neglect, and sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners, with rights groups and released detainees describing conditions of torture across Israeli prisons and camps such as Sde Teiman. Dozens of Palestinians have died in Israeli custody during this period. What makes the Ketziot case exceptional is not the cruelty it reveals, which Palestinian prisoners have described for years, but that this time the perpetrators documented it themselves, in their own words, boasting of a Palestinian's death as they beat him into the floor of his cell.
