AG tells Netanyahu: Ben Gvir blocking transfer of Palestinian terrorists from contentious detention facility

Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara tells Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the National Security Ministry, headed by far-right Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben Gvir is preventing the transfer of the remaining Palestinian terrorists held in the Sde Teiman detention facility to the Israel Prison Service.

Following a petition to the High Court of Justice by human rights groups demanding the closure of Sde Teiman following reports of severe abuse at the facility, the IDF pledged to the court to transfer all the detainees to the custody of the IPS which comes under the authority of the national security minister.

Ben Gvir has insisted that the IPS prisons are overcrowded and that there is no more room to accept the Hamas terrorists being held in Sde Teiman.

“In recent days, it has become clear the National Security Ministry has practically stopped the progression of efforts led by the National Security Council to implement necessary solutions,” Baharav-Miara told Netanyahu in a letter sent yesterday.

“If it will not be possible to inform the High Court in the immediate future that the [Sde Teiman] facility has been restored to its previous function as agreed by the National Security Council it will have very serious and broad consequences,” she warned, although did not specify what those might be.

The petitioning organizations have alleged that the physical abuse of terrorist detainees at Sde Teiman, officially labeled by Israel as unlawful combatants, and the poor conditions of their incarceration could constitute war crimes.

At the end of June, the High Court ordered the state to update it as to the current conditions under which the remaining detainees were being held, including their food, health care, and hygiene.

According to the Attorney General’s Office, 124 detainees remain in Sde Teiman out of some 1,400 unlawful combatants originally held there.