In the latest revelations about Israel’s brutal torture of Palestinian prisoners, which include rape and sexual violence, the world got yet another glimpse of the horrific reality of Palestinian life under unending Israeli settler colonial occupation. Any person with an ounce of basic human decency feels horrified, enraged and appalled at the accounts that have been revealed. The majority of people around the world cannot even fathom seeing, let alone committing, the sickening and gruesome acts of torture that are recounted in the testimonies of Palestinian victims.

The harsh reality is that this is not the first time we have heard of sexual violence, rape, and other terrifying forms of psychological and physical torture in Israeli prisons. Scholars and civil society organisations have been documenting such atrocities for decades. Prior to October 2023, scholars had already documented how conditions inside Israeli prisons had worsened for Palestinians since the 2010s. Over the past two and a half years, these already horrific conditions have deteriorated substantially.

Over this period, we have also witnessed the emergence of another disturbing feature of Israeli violence, not just inside the torture chamber but beyond: the glee with which violence is being carried out.

When reading the testimonies of Palestinian detainees and prisoners, it becomes clear that not only are Israeli guards committing torture on a regular basis, but one of the most important descriptors of this torture is that Israeli guards are committing such horrors while laughing. In testimony after testimony, victims recount the laughter of the guards. This raises an often-ignored question: who finds such acts of torture a source of pleasure and joy? Under what conditions does laughter come to be seen as an appropriate reaction and accompaniment to torture? The gravity of these questions becomes even more terrifying and daunting when we consider that this phenomenon of laughing while inflicting uninhibited and gratuitous violence is not unique to these latest revelations.

Over the last two and a half years of an ongoing genocide, we have witnessed dozens of Israeli soldiers not only recording themselves while committing genocidal acts, such as........

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