MOST PALESTINIANS are ignorant of the fact that there is an interrogation center in the Erez Israeli industrial zone, built on land from northern Gaza.

Issam Mohammed Abu Omrah, 28, from Rafah City, who was recently released, spent 16 days in the interrogation center. He says the conditions are extremely cruel. There are around 50 detainees at present in the center, says Abu Omrah, living in inhumane conditions and subjected to humiliation and oppression around the clock. The center is built in seven caravans that have been divided into 14 rooms into which prisoners are cramped at night. They spend the bulk of the day in interrogation.

Although the exact date when the detention center was opened is not known, Abu Omrah says it has been in use since 1995 after the Kitsofim detention center in the Negev Desert was closed down. Kitsofim was reopened after the start of the Aqsa Intifada.

The number of detainees has risen gradually with the number of incursions, house raids and arrests in Gaza throughout the Intifada.

The center is mainly for Palestinians arrested at the crossings, those who try to enter Israel without a permit and those arrested during house raids.

Abu Omrah was arrested at the Rafah crossing after returning from a visit to Lebanon, where he participated in a student conference. "The situation inside the prison is terrible," he says. "Especially when it comes to food, medicine and the way they treat us."

He said that when a prisoner demands his rights, he is punished by solitary confinement and deprived of food and water. Occasionally, prisoners get physically beaten.

The food prisoners eat is often spoilt, and Abu Omrah says they were once offered rotten eggs. When the prisoners protested, they were beaten by guards.

The ex-prisoner also says the prison physician only makes his rounds once every two days and that most of the time he offers water as medicine for sick patients, no matter what the ailment. Prisoners range in age from children as young as 14 to a 65-year-old man with multiple illnesses, according to Abu Omrah.

Although the center is supposed to be a temporary holding station from where prisoners who confess to allegations are sent to other prisons, some detainees have spent months there without being brought to trial.

Among the prisoners being held there are Dr. Fadl Abu Hein and Marwan Nabahin, who were both arrested during Israeli incursions in Gaza and have not yet been tried or released.

Abu Omrah was arrested along with four other students from a Palestinian delegation of 55 students and journalists who had participated in the conference in Lebanon. He was arrested at the Rafah crossing and taken to the Rafih Yam settlement where soldiers, most of whom were formerly of the South Lebanese Army began torturing him. He says they put out cigarettes on his body and set the plastic cuffs around his hands on fire.

He was subjected to harsh interrogation while at the Erez interrogation center and was released after the interrogators failed to extract a confession from him. But before they let him go, they confiscated his personal belongings and his ID card.