Major Nisim Finish, who was the former intelligence officer of Gilboa prison, was interrogated with a warning last Thursday at the national prison interrogation unit of Lahav 433, Kan 11 News reported late Sunday night. Finish served as the prison’s intelligence officer during the period when the reported rape of a female guard by an Arab security prisoner took place in Gilboa prison.
The guard, pseudonym Yael, wrote (Gilboa Prison Guard: Terrorist Prisoner Raped Me): “Unfortunately for me, of all the prisons, I was placed in Gilboa prison. I discovered to my astonishment that there was one ‘commander,’ a Palestinian terrorist with blood on his hands, who controlled all the officers and staff who obeyed him and carried out his ‘orders’ without any argument. He walked freely around the prison when he was not handcuffed, and sent his dirty hands and touched the bodies of female soldiers without anyone’s intervention. Everyone knew. Everyone was silent. Everyone was afraid. Everyone ‘worked’ for him.”
According to Kan 11, at least one of the female prison guards told police that she had reported to Finish about the security prisoner’s actions. Finish was investigated in the past on these charges and the case against him was closed due to “lack of guilt.” After the investigation was reopened about six months ago, he was summoned last week for questioning with a warning.
Finish’s attorney Shani Iluz told Kan 11: “My client’s heart goes out to the victims of the crime. He expresses great sorrow for their pain and would never have ignored or given a hand to the harassment of women.”
While the initial complaining female guard (there were four, according to recent reports) was carrying out tasks in the prisoner’s wing, she was sexually harassed by him. Despite this, her shift commander asked her to move to work permanently in the security wing where this prisoner lived. She vehemently refused, told her shift commander about the sexual harassment she experienced in that wing, and filled out a Prison Service memorandum in order to file an official complaint, which was directed to the prison’s intelligence officer.
According to her, on the same day, her shift commander showed her a text message he received from the intelligence officer, in which he wanted to know, since she was refusing to work in the security wing, what other female guards he could schedule to work there.
Israel Prison Service Commissioner Katy Perry on Friday published a letter she sent the service’s staff addressing the rape accusations, saying: “Over the past day, news has been published indicating a serious and difficult event that presents us with a challenge, both at the organizational level and the personal level as commanders, parents, and family members. As a strong organization that knows how to stand firmly on its path, we will once again know how to investigate, draw conclusions, and deal with full responsibility and severity wherever necessary.”
Preferably in less than one decade. Or, as the accusing guard’s attorney Keren Barak put it: “My client read the words of Commissioner Perry, who promised that the incident would be investigated and conclusions drawn, and said she didn’t have an iota of faith in the system, which since 2018 has not reached a single conclusion, and certainly has not investigated in depth the years in which she (the complaining guard) served in Gilboa prison.”
Barak reiterated her client’s assertion that only an outside committee of inquiry would throw light on the system that turned IDF recruits serving in a security prison into sex workers.
