One still constantly sees people defending Israel and saying this isn’t a genocide and that Israel isn’t committing crimes against humanity.

I’d like to see one defend this.

Practices recorded by UNRWA include the use of a nail gun on prisoners’ knees, sexual abuse against both men and women and the insertion of what appears to be an electrified metal stick into prisoners’ rectums.

“They were beating me with an extendable metal bar. There was blood on my trousers and when they saw it, they beat me there. They used a nail gun on my knee. These nails were kept in my knee for about 24 hours until I was transported to Naqab prison,” one 26-year-old male told UNRWA of his 56 days in Israeli custody

He recounts being held in a group of more than 100 men who all endured days of “beatings, hunger and cold”, adding that they were kept blindfolded, not allowed to sleep and were forced to spend most of the day kneeling.

“If someone lifted the blindfold off their eyes,” he said, “he would be called over by the soldiers and beaten then strung up on the barbed wire fence.”

Another detained man told UNRWA: “They made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire – I have burns [in the anus]. The soldiers hit me with their shoes on my chest and used something like a metal stick that had a small nail on the side,” he said.

They asked us to drink from the toilet and made the dogs attack us,” he recalled, before describing how he had seen the bodies of “maybe nine” people who had been detained and killed, including one who had died after they had “put the electric stick up his [anus]. He got so sick, we saw worms coming out of his body and then he died,” he said

Khaled el-Nabreis from the Khan Younis refugee camp told Al Jazeera that he and several other men spent three days with no food or water, “only beatings, and when we slept they would cover us with wet blankets in the bitter cold” after they were detained by Israeli forces, taken to a location he did not recognise.

(three days is the upper end of the average of how long healthy humans can go without water, btw)

#Stacking the deck

In January, Israel accused several UNRWA employees of participating in the attacks of October 7

In a reported attempt to coerce confessions to support the accusations, Israeli interrogators tortured UNRWA staff they detained in Gaza, some of whom they took as they were carrying out their duties as staff of the international relief agency.

In detention, the UNRWA staff endured “severe physical beatings; waterboarding; exposure to dogs; threats of violence … rape, and electrocution; verbal and psychological abuse; threats of murder, injury or other harm to their family members; humiliating and degrading treatment; being forced to strip naked and subjected to photographs,” according to the report.

Israel has long begrudged the presence of UNRWA within Gaza. It has blamed the agency’s reports of its forces targeting civilian infrastructure, including its schools and first responder stations for the criticism during the International Court of Justice’s preliminary judgement on 26 January, when South Africa charged Israel with committing genocide during its war on Gaza. This prospect grows more likely as aid is blocked and the besieged population is tilted ever further towards famine.

As hunger worsens, with 15 children reported to have starved to death in recent days, UNRWA’s role in helping prevent what agencies are warning of a “humanitarian crisis” grows increasingly vital.