Above photo: Chaim Goldberg/ Flash90.
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
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 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 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 +972 Magazine.
Following the rape riots, a news segment for the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, called- I kid you not- ‘This is Sodom’, featured both Sde Teiman star doctors: Dr. Weeping Torture Launderer, Yoel Donchin, and Mr. Eichmann, Yechiel Barilan. I bring you the highlights👇🧵 pic.twitter.com/XdA3WEbYTV
— Bedazzling Bearer of Bad News (@PixieOfDeath) August 4, 2024
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 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 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.
Watch Samantha Power, a “notable” scholar on genocide word salad herself out when confronted with a Q on US hypocrisy over the genocide in Gaza..
Keep embarrassing those biiiichs pic.twitter.com/GE6bXqImyg
— Abier (@abierkhatib) February 23, 2024