Two years into the genocide in Gaza and the expansion of the Israel occupation’s military operations across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, prisoner’s rights organisations say the occupation’s prisons have become central to a system of organised violence.
A shocking report on Israel
A new report, titled Prisons as a Frontline of Genocide: Two Years of War Crimes Against Palestinian Political Detainees, by the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs, and Addameer, details widespread abuses against Palestinian political detainees, and describes this past two years as:
one of the most brutal periods in the history of the Palestinian prisoner movement, which has long resisted a prison system designed to physically and psychologically destroy detainees.
The total number of Palestinian political prisoners Israel has killed while in detention, since 1967, is estimated at 314 people. According to the report, 77 have been killed, and their identities confirmed, since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. This is a record number, with the deaths attributed to beatings, medical neglect, starvation, and torture.
The findings of the report draw on hundreds of testimonies, legal documents, and official statements, including public threats from Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, and the occupation’s far-right government.
Israel’s occupation authorities are accused of committing large-scale war crimes and crimes against humanity- torture, sexual assault, deliberate starvation, denial of medical care, and enforced disappearances- under the watch of a judicial system that offers ‘legal cover’ to these acts.
Around 20,000 arrests in the West Bank, Including Jerusalem, since start of the ‘War of Extermination’
Since October 2023, the scale of arrests and violence by Israel has intensified dramatically.
In the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, approximately 20,000 Palestinians have been detained – among them 1,600 children and nearly 600 women. The mass arrests have come alongside collective punishment measures such as beatings, home demolitions, the use of detainees as human shields, and the destruction of neighbourhood infrastructure in Tulkarem and Jenin.
Violations also included the demolition of prisoners’ family homes, use of family members as hostages, use of detainees as human shields, and field executions. According to the report, the arrests have also provided cover for expanding illegal settlements.
Among those detained are 202 journalists, most held under administrative detention – with no charge or trial, or accused of ‘incitement’, a charge frequently applied to restrict free expression. Two Gaza reporters, Nidal Al-Wahidi and Haitham Abdel Wahid, have vanished in Israeli custody. The report also confirms that 360 medical professionals have been detained, three who died from torture while in detention. These were Lyad Al-Rantisi, Adnan Al-Barsh, and Ziad Al-Dalu.
New depths of abuse
These is a regime of repression and deprivation inside the Israeli occupation prisons, where prisoners have reported being tortured with stun grenades and electroshock weapons, subjected to strip searches and sexual assault, and kept in solitary confinement.
Food is being deliberately limited, contributing to the spread of disease, including outbreaks of scabies. Those classified as ‘unlawful combatants’, most of whom are from Gaza, are held without trial or charge for indefinite periods.
The testimonies of Gaza detainees have revealed new depths of abuse. Some described being tortured from the moment of arrest through interrogation and imprisonment. Human rights monitors have documented 46 confirmed deaths among Gaza detainees, out of the total 77 prisoners killed since the war began.
Others remain unaccounted for. Camps such as Sde Teiman have reportedly become central sites of torture and killing, while the underground Rakevet section of Ramla Prison is known to be a place of enforced disappearance.
As of October 2025, more than 11,100 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons. This is more than double the number before the genocide began, and the highest total since the Second Intifada.
Of those detained, 350 are facing or serving life sentences, and 17 of these have been imprisoned since before the Oslo Accords, four of them since 1986. The report records 53 female prisoners, and over 400 children detained. The many Palestinians imprisoned in secret military camps are not included in official figures.
Israel is being given permission for this
Before the genocide began, the total prison population stood at around 5,250, including 40 women and 180 children.
The surge since 2023 has coincided with bans on family visits, the exclusion of the International Committee of the Red Cross from inspection visits, and the criminalisation of human rights groups- Addameer, along with Al-Haq, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and Al-Mezan have been targeted by US sanctions and declared ‘terrorist’ entities, a move which aims to dismantle any remaining form of accountability.
The report describes these combined measures as a ‘policy of extermination’- a campaign to destroy the physical and psychological resilience of an entire population through incarceration, torture, and isolation.
They demand that the international community moves beyond its statements of concern and bring about binding resolutions supporting the Palestinian right to freedom and self-determination. It argues that what is unfolding inside the prison walls reflects the wider devastation across Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The silence of the international community, it warns, risks normalising a system of disappearance and death- a system that has ’turned the prison into a weapon of genocide’.
Featured image via the Canary
By Charlie Jaay
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