A well-known Israeli journalist and former soldier has offered the first apparent acknowledgement of wide-scale torture by his country's military, describing "masses" of Palestinians who were left "lying... in handcuffs" while subjected to never-ending Israeli music at the Hakirya military compound. He referred to the facility as "some kind of house of horrors, with screams coming from all directions."
The admission came during a Hebrew-language podcast appearance by Amichai Attali, who works as the Knesset correspondent for Israeli outlet Ynet, and moonlit as a reserve intelligence officer in the Israeli army. The journalist's confession adds a layer of irony to the Israeli army's allegation that an entire crew of Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera in the besieged northern Gaza Strip are, in fact, secret militants with roles in the armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Attali said that he spent 227 days at Hakirya, where he claimed to have performed interrogations on Palestinians who were swept up in the subsequent Israeli dragnet. After being pressed by podcast host Yair Sharkey to recount his "encounter with the face of evil," Attali responds: "I still haven't really fully processed it."
As the increasingly dissociating intelligence officer recalled "scenes" in which "a lot of people are concentrated," it became apparent that the faces of evil were worn by Israeli jailers themselves.
Though Attali claims he only interacted with detained Palestinians in supposedly "sterile" interrogations, he made clear he had no outlet from the horrors being unleashed at Hakirya, where soldiers blasted Israeli music for hours at a time in order to induce psychological breakdowns among their victims.
Referring to an infamous Israeli children's track which went viral on Israeli social media after soldiers recorded themselves subjecting blindfolded Palestinians to endless repetitions of it, Attali asks: "All those videos of 'Meni Mamtera' - you're familiar with those?"
"Well, I saw it with my own eyes - they repeatedly played Shuli Rand's 'Ayeka,'" he laughs, concluding: "You know, it's a song I like but they managed to make me tired of it."After describing the sonic torture inflicted on the jailed Palestinians, Attali suddenly grew introspective.
"Like, you say to yourself, 'What is this place I'm in?"" He added: "To tell you the truth, even later, during the interrogation phase... it's like a feeling of some kind of house of horrors, with screams coming from all directions."
"Because even during the so-called 'sterile investigation,' your goal is to extract intelligence."
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