A former jailer at the Gilboa prison has come forward to say she too was sexually assaulted by a Palestinian terrorist, during her military service there.
On Thursday, a woman who identified herself by the alias Hila claimed that she had been repeatedly raped during her military service at the high-security Prison.
She accused Mahmoud Atallah — a Palestinian terrorist convicted for the murder of Israelis — of raping her and said he had enjoyed special privileges from prison authorities, who allowed him to roam around freely inside the facility and were quick to fill any of his requests and demands.
Now Ella, who also served in the prison, recounted how the events of 2014 had changed her life
She claimed a different convicted terrorist assaulted her leaving her unable to move on from the trauma.
In an exclusive interview on Ynet and its sister publication Yedioth Ahronoth, Ella said she was assigned to watch 120 security prisoners on her own, one night, and although behind bars, one of the men dropped his pants and proceeded touch himself. "I was in shock," she said. "I went to my commanding officer and complained, and their job was to refer the information to the warden and to others," Ella said.
"As a soldier who had just been assigned to the prison, I was not able to lodge my complaint up the chain of command, so I spoke to my immediate commander," she said.
"I was told that the prison intelligence officer wants me to speak to another prisoner who had a leadership role among inmates and close the matter with him. This man said he would make sure nothing else would be done to me," she said.
In fact, prison authorities, instead of dealing with the matter themselves, had sent the young soldier to solve the problem herself, in discussions with another prisoner.
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Former jailer and her mother after lodging complaint of sexual assault by Gilboa prisoners
(Photo: Sharon Tzur)
"I cried and called a prison guard whom I trusted and told him what had happened," she said. "I needed someone who would listen to me, after the officers refused to deal with the event. I felt that each time I would step into the ward, the prisoner whom I encountered would touch himself. Those prisoners ran the jail. Nothing was done to the prisoner in question, he was not even sent to solitary confinement," Ella said.
Ela who served in ward 5, where Mahmoud Atallah was incarcerated, waid working there was hard. "I feld like a piece of meat, as if I was undressed by the inmates," she said.
"The staff would joke about Atallah being horny and a sexual deviant. It was common knowledge and the staff would laugh about it. The female jailors, under those circumstances, could not complain. He ran the place," she said adding that although she herself was not physically abused by him, she knew of other jailers who had been.
I have no faith in the prosecution," she said. "Maybe if one of the prosecutors had spend one night in the ward, she would have felt what we were subjected to," she said.
Ella lodged a complaint with the police in recent months and is attempting to rebuild her life.
"I still suffer from panic attacks," she said.