Transparency & Accountability
Israel indicts twelve Ketziot guards over Thaer Abu Asab's death
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Israel's southern district prosecutors filed an indictment on Tuesday against twelve members of the Israel Prison Service over the death of a Palestinian prisoner beaten in his cell at Ketziot, in the Naqab, almost three years ago.
The charge sheet, lodged at the Beersheba District Court by the prosecutor Tal Cohen Adir, names Thaer Abu Asab of Qalqilya, who was 38 when he died on 18 November 2023.
All twelve are charged with causing death by recklessness, aggravated grievous bodily harm and several counts of aggravated assault. Two of them, the shift commander and a sergeant, also face obstruction of justice.
What the indictment says happened#
Abu Asab asked the shift sergeant that afternoon whether there was a hudna — a truce — in a war then six weeks old.
The wing commander briefed his officers and ordered them into the cell during the count, to show the prisoners there was no ceasefire, according to the indictment as reported by Ynet. He told the force he would bear responsibility for what followed, and told the women on the shift to stay outside.
Eleven officers went in. The indictment says they beat the nine men in the cell with fists, kicks and batons, some of them as they lay on the floor. After a few minutes the commander ordered it stopped, and the officers left without reporting anything.
Abu Asab collapsed and lost consciousness. He was taken to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba and died there.
The autopsy found tears in the wall of his heart, on the left ventricle and in the right atrium, and several broken ribs. The cause of death was recorded as cardiac and respiratory failure.
Eight other prisoners were hurt in the same cell. The indictment further charges that the sergeant instructed a guard to lie about the batons, and that the commander used a second guard to align his account with a female officer's.
Held since 2005#
Abu Asab had been in Israeli custody since 27 May 2005 and was serving a twenty-five-year sentence, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported at the time of his death.
Israeli police questioned nineteen prison staff over the case before prosecutors charged twelve. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, whose ministry runs the prison service, publicly backed the guards while they were under investigation.
The number the case sits inside#
Physicians for Human Rights Israel has documented 105 deaths of Palestinians held in Israeli prison service and army facilities since 7 October 2023.
The Palestinian Center for Prisoner Studies counts ninety prisoners of known identity who died in Israeli custody between that date and the end of June 2026, fifty-two of them from Gaza, and says Israeli institutions have themselves disclosed at least 115.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel called Tuesday's indictment a drop in the ocean.
That is the proportion to hold on to. One prosecution has reached a court in a period in which Israeli and Palestinian monitors, counting separately and by different methods, both record deaths in the hundreds — and it reached one only because a body was opened and a heart was found torn.
