Under pressure from Israel’s top court to improve conditions at a facility notorious for mistreating Palestinians seized in Gaza, the military transferred hundreds of detainees to newly opened camps.

But abuses at these camps were just as bad, according to Israeli human rights organisations that interviewed dozens of current and former detainees and are now asking the same court to force the military to fix the problem once and for all.

What the detainees’ testimonies show, rights groups say, is that instead of correcting abuses against Palestinians held without charge or trial—including beatings, excessive handcuffing, and poor diet and health care—Israel’s military just shifted where they take place.

“What we’ve seen is the erosion of the basic standards for humane detention,” said Jessica Montell, the director of Hamoked, one of the rights groups petitioning the Israeli government.

The sprawling Ofer Camp and the smaller Anatot Camp, built in the occupied West Bank, were supposed to resolve problems rights groups documented at a detention centre in the Negev desert called Sde Teiman.

That site was intended to temporarily hold and treat Palestinians held after October 7, 2023. But it morphed into a long-term detention centre infamous for brutalising Palestinians rounded up in Gaza, often without being charged.

Detainees transferred to Ofer and Anatot say conditions there were no better, according to more than 30 lawyers interviewed for Hamoked and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

“They would punish you for anything,” said Khaled Alserr, 32, a surgeon from Gaza who spent months at Ofer Camp and agreed to speak about his experiences. He was released after six months without charge.

Alserr said he lost count of the beatings he endured from soldiers after being rounded up in March of last year during a raid at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

“You’d be punished for making eye contact, for asking for medicine, for looking up towards the sky,” said Alserr.

The Supreme Court has given the military until the end of March to respond to the abuses at Ofer.

Leaving Sde Teiman

After Israel's Supreme Court ordered better treatment at Sde Teiman, the military said in June it was transferring hundreds of detainees, including 500 sent to Ofer.

Ofer was built on an empty lot next to a civilian prison of the same name.

Satellite photos from January show a paved, walled compound with 24 mobile homes that serve as cells.

Anatot, built on a military base in a Jewish settlement, has two barracks, each with room for about 50 people, according to Hamoked.

Under wartime Israeli law, the military can hold Palestinians from Gaza for 45 days without access to the outside world. In practice, many go far longer.

Whenever detainees met with Hamoked lawyers, they were “dragged violently” into a cell—sometimes barefoot and often blindfolded, and their hands and feet remained shackled throughout the meetings, the rights group said in a letter to the military’s advocate general.

“I don’t know where I am,” one detainee told a lawyer.

Detainees from Ofer and Anatot said they were regularly beaten with fists and batons. Some said they were kept in handcuffs for months, including while they slept and ate—and unshackled only when allowed to shower once a week.

Three prisoners held in Anatot told the lawyers that they were blindfolded constantly.

One Anatot detainee said that soldiers woke them every hour during the night and made them stand for a half hour.

The worst thing about Ofer was the medical care.

A prisoner said guards refused to give him antacids for a chronic ulcer. After 40 days, he felt a rupture. In the truck heading to the hospital, soldiers tied a bag around his head.

“They beat me to the hospital," he said.

"At the hospital, they refused to remove the bag, even when they were treating me.”