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What we know about the torture, abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israel

The Palestinians’ bodies, which Israel released, have the highest number of unidentified remains.

Families of Palestinians who had gone missing had to search through pictures and videos of the bodies, hoping to find their loved ones, but they were sent back to Gaza with numbers instead of their names.

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These bodies, and some of them still have blindfolds and handcuffs, all have the following evidence: they had been tortured before they died, possibly executed.

Palestinian detainees who were alive by Israel as part of the Gaza ceasefire agreement, which also saw the release of Israeli prisoners from Gaza, confirmed the torture.

Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, reports that Israel tortures Palestinian prisoners have grown in frequency. Some Israeli politicians even support the practice.

Since October 7, 2023, at least 75 Palestinian detainees have passed away in Israeli prisons, according to the UN.

A Palestinian prisoner was gang raped by guards last year at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in Israel, a particularly noteworthy documented instance of abuse. According to Israeli media reports, a video shows Israeli prison guards raping the victim who was unable to walk while using their shields to conceal themselves from the camera.

Abuse can be found on bodies of death.

The bodies that Israel shipped to Gaza are horrifying in what condition.

According to medical sources, the bodies showed signs of physical abuse, according to the forensic teams that examined them.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza on Wednesday, some of the bodies appeared to have been burned, while others appeared to have been.

The bodies of Gaza’s prisoners were returned with their bodies bound like animals and showing signs of severe torture and burning, according to Dr. Munir al-Bursh, director-general of the Health Ministry, on social media.

They were restrained, which is a war crime that calls for an urgent international investigation and prosecution of the killers.

Experts claim that the bodies showed signs of abuse, which is consistent with what al-Bursh claimed in their images.

One of the bodies even had a rope around his neck, according to Sameh Hamad, a member of the commission that received the bodies at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital.

Raed Mohammad Amer, a member of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, claimed his organization discovered that Israel had executed numerous Palestinians in an interview with Al Jazeera. In some cases, Israel has promised to look into some cases, but many are still unsolved.

Physicians for Human Rights Israel’s director of the prisoners and detainees department, Naji Abbas, claimed that his organization was “not surprised” by the bodies’ condition.

According to Abbas, “we have documented hundreds of instances of torture and deaths in the Israeli prison system, as well as dozens of Palestinians who have been killed, beaten, or who have died after receiving treatment for months.”

Eight months after the person’s death, according to him, one autopsy that the organization examined revealed signs of violence on the body.

These detainees’ bodies have clear indications of torture and have been brutally restrained before being executed, according to Abbas, who denies that it is on any television or print media.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which coordinates the release of Palestinian and Israeli prisoners, is available for comment.

The ICRC did not make any comments about the bodies’ condition, but it stated that its staff’s priority was “the dignified transfer of remains of the deceased.”

A request for comment was not received by the Israeli military and prison service.

Detainees claim they were subjected to abuse and torture.

As part of the ceasefire agreement, Israel released nearly 2, 000 Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank this week.

Many of them had been seized by Israel in significant roundups, leaving behind families unsure whether their loved one had been murdered or vanished.

The family members were shocked by their appearances and the stories they told despite not knowing whether their loved ones had been missing since their disappearance.

Some people were taken straight from the bus to a hospital for medical care because they were so severely injured and frail.

Mahmoud Abu Foul, a released detainee, claimed that Israeli torture had caused him to lose vision. Abu Foul claimed that after receiving multiple beatings, he lost vision and was paralyzed for hours.

Many detainees emerged bruised or emaciated.

Kamal Abu Shanab, a detainee who was released, reported a weight loss of 127 kilograms. His niece Farah, who was present when she saw him, sobbed as she broke down in disbelief.

Salem Eid, a different freed detainee, claimed he can’t lie on his back because of the beatings and sleeps while sitting.

Israeli prisons have long been the subject of abuse reports.

In a report released last August, the Israeli prison system was described as a “network of torture camps” by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, who stated that there were “frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence, sexual assault, humiliation and degradation, deliberate starvation, forced unhygienic conditions, sleep deprivation, prohibition on, and punitive measures for, religious worship, confiscation of all communal and personal belongings, and denial of adequate medical treatment.

The psychological torture follows. One man who was released this week claimed that Israeli soldiers had informed him that his family was dead, only to discover that Israel had also killed his wife and other children. Another man, who had made a bracelet for his two-year-old daughter, later claimed that she had been discovered by Israel.

aiming at Barghouti

About 9, 000 Palestinian detainees are still being held in Israeli custody, including one of the most prominent Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, whom Israel has refused to release.

Israel in 2004 found Barghouti guilty of attacking Israelis, and he is currently serving a number of life sentences.

He supports nonviolent resistance as well as a two-state solution and rejects the Israeli court system’s jurisdiction.

Barghouti has frequently been compared to the anti-apartheid leader and former South African President Nelson Mandela in polls as the most popular leader in the country.

Arab, Barghouti’s son, claimed this week that Israel had targeted his father for a severe beating that left him unconscious in September.

Mohammad al-Ardah, a released prisoner, claimed that Barghouti had been ribbed three times by Israeli forces.

Israel has not supported its claim with evidence, but it has disputed Barghouti and other Palestinian prisoners’ unfair treatment.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister of national security, threatened Barghouti in an August video. He is the one in charge of Israel’s prison system, according to Wikipedia.

Ben-Gvir showed his father an electric chair, according to Arab Barghouti, and he informed him of this fate.

China expels top military commanders in latest anticorruption purge

According to the Chinese Defense Ministry, two of the country’s highest-ranking officers and seven other senior military personnel have been fired from the country’s ruling Communist Party and military on suspicion of grave misconduct related to corruption.

The latest senior military officials to be targeted in a corruption campaign in the People’s Liberation Army are He Weidong, the country’s second-highest-ranking general, and navy admiral Miao Hua, the former leader of the Chinese military.

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Since the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, General He has been removed as the Central Military Commission’s sitting commander.

Since March, he hasn’t been seen in public, and Chinese authorities haven’t previously made any public inquiries into his activities.

General He, Admiral Miao, and the other seven senior military officers were charged with “seriously violating Party discipline and are suspected of serious duty-related crimes involving an extremely large amount of money” in the announcement of their expulsion on Friday.

Zhang Xiaogang, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, stated in a statement that the alleged crimes were “of a grave nature, with extremely harmful consequences” and praised the purge as a “significant achievement in the Party and military’s anticorruption campaign.

He, 68, was removed from the military because he was also a member of the Politburo, the second-highest echelon of the ruling Communist Party, which was made up of members of the group.

He was the third-powerful commander in the People’s Liberation Army and was regarded as a close friend of Xi Jinping, the army’s commander-in-chief. He was one of only two vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission.

Admiral Miao was previously fired from the commission in June after being the subject of a “grave violation of discipline” investigation.

The Communist Party’s Central Committee, an elite body of 200 or more senior officials, is scheduled to hold its Fourth Plenum in Beijing just days before the announcement of the expulsions.

The meeting, which will begin on Monday, is anticipated to formalize more personnel decisions, including those regarding the expulsion and replacement of Central Committee members.

He Hongjun, a former senior official at the PLA Political Work Department, Wang Xiubin of the Central Military Commission’s Joint Operations Command Centre, former Eastern Theatre Command commander Lin Xiangyang, and two former PLA Army and Navy political commissars, are the other military personnel named with He and Miao.

Several of these officials have been hidden from the public eye for several months, according to observers.

Wang Chunning, a former leader of the People’s Armed Police, was removed from the country’s legislature last month along with three other PLA generals.

This “type of shake-up” in the Chinese military leadership has now happened so frequently, according to Ja Ian Chong, associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

According to Chong, “it seems to be a part of the Xi Jinping’s rule’s progression,”

Does each boat strike off the coast of Venezuela save 25,000 US lives?

According to Donald Trump, president of the United States, recent military strikes on five Venezuelan boats have saved “at least 100, 000 lives” due to their deterrent to drug smuggling.

At a press conference held on October 15th, President Donald Trump stated that “every boat that we knock out saves 25, 000 American lives, so every time you see a boat and you feel bad, you say, “Oh, that’s rough,” but it’s also rough if you lose three people and save 25, 000 people.

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The administration did not provide documentation that the boats had drugs in them. Venezuela’s role in the US drug trade is understated, according to drug experts, according to PolitiFact. The strike’s legality is also a mystery. Some legal experts told PolitiFact that the military action was against international maritime law or human rights laws and that it amounted to a direct assault on US forces after the first attack in early September.

Trump has repeatedly used the figure, and he also asserts that similar land-based strikes are possible.

In a speech to US Navy sailors on October 5, Trump said, “Everyone of those boats is responsible for the deaths of 25, 000 American people and the destruction of families.” What we’re doing is actually an act of kindness, according to the article.

Trump stated on October 7 that “we’ve taken a very hard stand on drugs,” saying that “the water drugs – the drugs that enter through water – are not coming,” that “there are no boats any longer, to be honest, there are no fishing boats, there’s no boats out there, period.” By removing those boats, we have probably saved at least 100,000 lives, including those in the United States and Canada.

Trump’s statement is inconsistent in many ways.

Drug experts have told PolitiFact that there is no way to find out how many lives have been saved as a result of drug interception efforts.

Additionally, if Trump’s claim had been accurate, the deaths of five boats in less than two months would have saved nearly twice as many lives as drug overdose deaths annually.

No evidence has been presented by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration hasn’t specified what kind of drug or quantity was on the ships that were struck. Therefore, it is impossible to calculate how many deadly doses could have been eliminated.

Trump claimed that fentanyl was being transported aboard the boats at the media conference on October 15.

Trump said, “And you can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean.” It’s similar to carrying bags. It can be found everywhere.

No bags of drugs are visible in the videos, which he shared, shared, and shared with others about some of the boat strikes on Truth Social.

Additionally, Mexico, not Venezuela, is the source of the majority of fentanyl in the US. According to the US Sentencing Commission, it enters the country primarily through the southern border at authorized ports of entry, and it is mostly smuggled in by Americans.

Trump’s statement is mathematically dubious, even if there was fentanyl aboard.

If the boats each had 25 000 lethal doses, that doesn’t mean that the strikes prevented the deaths of 125, 000 drug overdose victims.

The supply chain partially replaces lost drugs when drugs are seized, according to John Caulkins, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who works on drug policy, PolitiFact.

According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overdose drug deaths have been declining for the past few years. Before there have been any strikes on boats off Venezuelan waters, these figures are outdated.

More than 73, 000 deaths occurred between May 2024 and April 2025, according to the CDC. For Trump to be accurate, 125 000 deaths from overdoses on five boats would have been caused by the drugs, nearly twice as many as in a year.

How many overdose deaths were prevented, according to data from drug intercept, but that is unknown.

Trump is not the first to attribute the saving of lives to drug enforcement. We’ve fact-checked, spoken with, and influenced politicians over the years when they claimed a certain number of seizures at the US border would kill a certain number of people or that those seizures would save a certain number of lives.

The politicians we fact-checked frequently referenced fentanyl seizures. The majority of US overdose deaths are caused by synthetic opioids. The lethal dose of fentanyl, two milligrams, is used to support politicians’ claims about saved lives. For instance, if authorities seize 10 milligrams of fentanyl, according to politicians, that would save five lives.

Because a person’s height, weight, and tolerance from previous exposures can affect a dose’s lethality, according to drug experts, there are some caveats in this calculation. And how many drugs enter the country don’t get taken into account according to statistics about how many were prevented from entering the country.

Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, a Johns Hopkins University health policy expert, told PolitiFact in May, “We don’t have any method I’m aware of for translating drug seizure data into any measure of overdose deaths averted.”

Our decision

Trump remarked that “every boat that we knock out saves 25, 000 American lives” in relation to the boat strikes off Venezuela’s coast.

Trump claimed that drugs were being transported to the US from the five boats that the US military attacked off Venezuelan coast. However, Venezuelan experts told PolitiFact that the nation only participates in the US drug trafficking.

No documentation is available from the administration regarding the quantity or type of drugs claimed to be present on the ships. Due to the lack of information, how many lethal doses of the drug could have been eliminated.

Even though the boats each had 25 000 lethal drug doses, 125 000 lives were saved by destroying them. There were 73, 000 US drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. That would have resulted in 125 000 deaths, nearly twice as many as US overdose deaths in a year, from the drugs used on the five boats.

How many lives have been saved, according to the number of drugs that have been stopped from entering the US.

South Koreans freed from Cambodian scam centres return home under arrest

According to South Korean authorities, dozens of South Korean nationals who had been detained in Cambodia were taken into custody and detained for allegedly engaging in cyberscam activities have been taken back home.

A South Korean police official told the AFP news agency that officers had detained the passengers on a chartered flight that was being driven from Cambodia.

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The official stated on Saturday that “64 people had just flown on a chartered flight to the Incheon international airport,” adding that all of the passengers had been detained as criminal suspects.

Earlier this week, South Korea dispatched a team to Cambodia to look into the kidnapped members of the Southeast Asian nation’s online scam trade.

According to Wi Sung-lac, the South Korean national security adviser, the detained people were both “voluntary and involuntary participants” in scam operations.

The repatriation agreement with South Korea represented the “result of good cooperation in the suppression of scams between the two countries,” according to Cambodian Ministry of Interior spokesman Touch Sokhak on Friday.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many Chinese-owned casinos and hotels turned to illegal activities in Cambodia, online scams have increased.

Tens of thousands of workers operate industrial-scale scam centers, which frequently target people in the West in a highly lucrative sector that is responsible for the annual theft of tens of billions of dollars.

Pig-butchering, an apex for fattening up a victim before they are slaughtered, frequently involves shady cryptocurrency investment schemes that build trust over time before the money is stolen.

In Laos, the Philippines, and Myanmar, where abuse and imprisonment are the most frequented, parallel industries have flourished.

Diffusion of large-scale scam operations in Cambodia employs an estimated 200 000 people, many of whom are wealthy and politically connected, and are employed by scam companies in many of the country’s wealthy and politically connected areas. According to estimates, around 1, 000 South Korean nationals make up that number.

A Cambodia-based multinational crime network, known as the Prince Group, was put on full sanctions by the United States and the United Kingdom on Tuesday for operating a number of “scam centers” throughout the area.

The Prince Group, which promotes itself as a legitimate real estate, financial services, and consumer businesses company, was linked to 19 London properties worth more than 100 million pounds ($134 million).

According to the prosecution, Chen Zhi, the head of Prince Group’s Chinese-Cambodian tycoon, boasted that his fraudulent activities were making $30 million a day at one point.

According to the UK and US, Chen is wanted on suspicion of wire fraud and money laundering. He has advised Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and his father, long-ruling former prime minister Hun Sen.

If found guilty, he could spend up to 40 years in prison.

The UK and US’s action against the Prince Group came as South Korea announced a ban on certain travel destinations in Cambodia on Wednesday amid growing concerns about its citizens’ entry into the scam industry.

A student from a college in Cambodia who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured by a crime ring will also be the subject of a joint investigation led by South Korean police, according to a statement released today.