Pseudonymous former prisoner Jaber Abu Shehadeh in his house in Jerusalem, May 16th
Samar HazbounThe Torture Regime
How Israeli prisons went from centers of Palestinian resistance to machines of Palestinian death
On the first day of 2026, approximately 13 months after Usayd Al-Mahfouth was detained by Israeli forces in an early morning raid on his home in Nablus, I received a frantic phone call from his mother. “Did you hear the news?” she asked, panic rising in her voice. Hassan Issa Al-Qasha’leh, a young Palestinian man arrested around the same time as her son, had just died inside Be’er Sheva prison in southern Israel, six months before his scheduled release. “I am really very worried Usayd is not going to survive,” she told me.
When soldiers came for Usayd, arriving during dawn prayers on December 19th, 2024, he had just turned 17. Once a gregarious teen who loved cooking and riding his horse, Usayd had found his life upended when Israeli soldiers stormed Nablus’s Askar camp that August. He was in the street when soldiers shot him with high-velocity rounds that ignited his clothing and punctured a vein in his left leg, which doctors were forced to amputate the next day. For four days Usayd lay in a coma in the intensive care unit, undergoing multiple skin grafts on his burned hand and lower arm. By the time the soldiers came for him a few months later, his life was no longer in jeopardy, but Usayd was still receiving critical medical treatment. Nevertheless, the soldiers dragged him, hopping on one leg, from the house. He was loaded into a military jeep and taken away.
Neither Usayd’s family nor his lawyer knows what he is accused of, and because he was taken into administrative detention—imprisonment without charge or trial based on an unproven allegation of “dangerousness”—they are unlikely to ever find out. From the handful of prison visits afforded to his lawyer and the testimonies of released detainees, what they do know is this: On the day of his arrest, officers shoved Usayd into the side of a military jeep and beat him so badly that he has suffered from chronic back pain ever since. Then, they took him to Megiddo prison in northern Israel, one of several detention facilities holding Palestinian children designated as “security prisoners”—those accused of “nationalistic” offenses ranging from stone throwing to political violence. Inside, the abuse intensified. Usayd was repeatedly beaten, including on his amputated leg. In the overcrowded cells, he developed asthma and started needing a vaporizer to breathe. He was barely fed and lost a dangerous amount of weight; during visits, his lawyer saw him looking visibly emaciated. “Even someone who enters prison in perfect health suffers a lot,” Usayd’s mother told me, after describing what she had gleaned of Usayd’s plight. “I have nightmares that something happened to him.”
The realities of Israeli prisons are, indeed, increasingly the stuff of nightmares. In March 2025, 17-year-old Walid Khaled Ahmed from the West Bank town of Silwad collapsed while walking in the Megiddo prison yard, hit his head on a railing, and died—the first Palestinian teenager to die in an Israeli prison since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank. Fellow child prisoners pleaded for guards to intervene, but no one came. Only after the children carried Walid’s frail body—he had been suffering from scabies and amoebic dysentery—to the yard’s gate did the prison authorities wheel him away on a gurney. An Israeli court probe into his death later revealed that Walid was “likely starved.” The Israeli surgeon who attended the autopsy on behalf of Ahmed’s family, and who is accustomed to operating on late-stage cancer patients and treating extreme anorexia, struggled to reach for a comparison that conveyed the state of the body before him. “The only thing that comes close to that,” he recalled on an episode of This American Life, “in my opinion, is really those pictures of the Holocaust.” (A spokesperson for the Israel Prison Service, when presented with the allegations in this piece, described them as “entirely without factual basis” and claimed that all detainees “are held in accordance of the law, with full regard for their basic rights,” and that the agency “rejects attempts to portray systematic abuse or unlawful conduct by its personnel.”)
More than 100 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli prisons since October 7th—nearly half the total of the previous 56 years.
The deaths continued: In July 2025, 53-year-old Samir Al-Rifai, from the West Bank village of Rummaneh, died in Israeli custody a week after his arrest. Less than a month later, 21-year-old Ahmad Tazaz’a, from Jenin, went to the prison clinic complaining of weakness and a sore throat; he was pronounced dead shortly afterward. In January came the news of Hasan Al-Qasha’leh’s death. And these were just a small portion of recent fatalities. From 1967 to 2023, an estimated 237 Palestinian prisoners died in Israeli custody. But between October 2023 and June 2026, the number of Palestinian detainees who died in Israeli prisons reached 104—nearly half the total of the previous 56 years. That number does not include hundreds of Palestinians who were taken into custody from Gaza during the first nine months of Israel’s genocidal war and have never been located. “There are something like 300 to 400 Palestinians from Gaza who vanished” during this time, said Naji Abbas, director of the prisoners and detainees department for the NGO Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI). “These people are probably dead.”
Even those who survive recount dire conditions. In B’Tselem’s 2024 report “Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps,” A.H., a Palestinian detainee from Hebron, recalled being beaten, dragged, kicked in the head, and attacked with rifle butts by 14 Israeli prison guards, in addition to facing prolonged starvation. Right before his release, A.H. said, the guard conducting his final interrogation failed to recognize him from the photograph in his file because his facial features had changed drastically after he lost 120 pounds. Speaking to Euro-Med Monitor of his time in Sde Teiman camp, 35-year-old A.S. said that detainees were being held in metal cages where, “from time to time, the dogs would urinate on us”; on other occasions, the army would use the dogs to sexually assault them. Former detainees shared strikingly similar accounts of rape in custody with New York Times writer Nicolas Kristof; among them was a Gazan journalist who recounted being blindfolded and handcuffed before being penetrated by a dog. Revisiting the assault, he told Kristof, was so painful his “heart felt like it might stop.”
These harrowing accounts testify to the ways in which, in recent years, Israeli prisons have become institutions not primarily of incarceration but of torture and death. The use of torture against detainees is, of course, not new; according to legal scholar Neve Gordon, Israeli intelligence officers have long used torture to extract information in initial interrogations. But “today, it’s very different,” Gordon told me. “The torture has metastasized. It has spread to the prison officers that are in charge of taking care of the prisoners in their cells. It is carried out through the prison and all its regulations.” Since taking office in 2022, far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has particularly devoted himself to promoting this metastasis, ensuring that “the conditions of detention” become “part of the punishment for Palestinians,” in the words of PHRI’s Abbas. Before October 7th, this meant a rise in solitary confinement and daily beatings, the reduction of rations, and the denial of lifesaving healthcare. Afterward, these conditions worsened precipitously as Israel mobilized wartime emergency measures to swell its prison population while increasingly shielding itself from scrutiny for what happened behind bars. “The page turned in 2023,” the political theorist Shai Gortler told me. “The logic of the Israeli carceral system is now one of starvation, beatings, killings.”
For the more than 9,600 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza already in Israeli prisons, the roughly 600 others who stand to join them each month if arrest rates hold, and their family members, this shift holds terrifying implications. The reach of the Israeli prison system has long lent it the force of inevitability. During her fieldwork in Bethlehem’s Dheisheh refugee camp in the ’90s, the sociologist Maya Rosenfeld recorded a father of four sons, who had all passed through Israeli jails under administrative detention, telling her: “Just as it was clear to me that every living creature eventually dies, it became evident that every Palestinian man would eventually be taken to prison.” Now, the distance between prison and death seems to be collapsing.
ICRC delegates visiting detainees at Ayalon prison in Israel, October 2002
Prisons once held a very different place in the Palestinian imagination. For decades, incarcerated Palestinians—while suffering traumatic conditions—still retained a measure of physical and even political autonomy, and used it to resist Israel’s occupation from the inside.
Such was the case for Jaber Abu Shehadeh, a 56-year-old Palestinian man from East Jerusalem, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym for fear of being targeted by Israeli police. In 1988, a 17-year-old Abu Shehadeh—already enamored with Yasser Arafat and a member of Fatah—was arrested after he raised a Palestinian flag and threw stones at a passing public bus during a First Intifada protest. A week of near-continuous interrogation and torture inside Jerusalem’s Russian Compound followed. The ordeal involved being hung upside down by his feet, bound in metal rings fixed to the ceiling, whipped, beaten, denied water, and threatened with rape against him and his female family members. “It was the worst week of my life—they were waiting for me to die,” Abu Shehadeh recalled in our January 2026 interview at his house in Shu’afat. “I cried until my soul left my body.” After signing a forced confession, Abu Shehadeh was sentenced to nearly three years in prison. In a bosta—the prison transport bus known among Palestinian detainees as a “moving grave”—he was transferred inside the Green Line to what is now called the Hasharon prison, between Tulkarem and Netanya.
But once there, things changed. Abu Shehadeh was still subjected to periodic beatings, but there were opportunities to fight back. “The prison authorities used to care about appearances, about the Red Cross, UNRWA,” Abu Shehadeh said; this gave the prisoners, many of whom were members of banned Palestinian political parties, some leverage. They began to organize on the inside. Elections were held to choose who would negotiate with the warden and the Red Cross over prison conditions—Abu Shehadeh was elected—and after negotiations failed, the prisoners launched a collective hunger strike until authorities delivered what they wanted: notebooks, pens, pencils, and blankets. With the supplies, the prisoners began writing personal letters and political missives, which they smuggled out with those about to be released by rolling them thin like cigarettes and sealing them in nylon with a lighter. When he turned 18, Abu Shehadeh was transferred to Shatta prison, near Afula, where he became the youngest Fatah-affiliated prisoner. Much the same pattern continued there: “We would wake up in the mornings and sit for lessons,” Abu Shehadeh told me. They studied Fatah’s history, the turn to armed struggle, and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s gradual embrace of diplomacy and the two-state solution. In prison, Abu Shehadeh recalled, he “lived a second life.”
Abu Shehadeh looks at a photo from his youth, left, and holds a drawing gifted to him in prison.
“Resistance transformed prison from a site of punishment to one of development and autonomy.”
Abu Shehadeh’s story was one of thousands. Palestinian prisoners had been organizing in one form or another since the early days of Israel’s occupation, and by the ’80s, the movement had cohered into an organized and self-conscious force. Following a pattern seen across contexts ranging from Ireland to South Africa, collective organizing helped establish the Palestinian prisoner as a political subject, someone capable of asserting agency. As attorney and scholar Alyssa Bernstein writes in Palestinian Political Organizations in Israeli Prisons, “Resistance transform[ed] prison from a site of punishment to one of development and autonomy.” The movement’s high point arrived in July 1980, when a 32-day hunger strike in the Negev’s Nafha facility ended with the shocking death of two prisoners after Israeli authorities, while attempting a force feeding, stuck the tubes in the prisoners’ lungs instead of their stomachs. The outrage that followed “changed the pitch of organizing,” Gortler said: Now, hunger strikes inside prisons were often accompanied by demonstrations at Red Cross offices and city centers, where Palestinians clashed with Israeli forces in increasingly disruptive protests. By the mid-’80s, the sociologist Rosenfeld notes, these developments had led to the prisoners’ movement gaining “a prominent position within . . . the Palestinian national movement and in the public at large.”
The movement’s importance grew after the 1985 Jibril Agreement, which saw the release of 1,100 Palestinian prisoners (including Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) in exchange for three captured Israeli soldiers. Many of those released had come of political age behind bars, and they eventually formed the First Intifada’s organizational core. The Israeli journalist Ehud Ya’ari reported that these leaders had likely been formed by a prison experience that included daily discussions of the news, Hebrew lessons to “know the enemy,” and study circles devoted to Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon. “Young men who entered the security blocks as illiterates emerged with a broad education,” Ya’ari observed in a 1989 article in The Atlantic, arguing—not without the apprehensions of a committed Zionist—that Palestinians were leaving prison “more self-assured and committed to their cause than they had been when they arrived.” “Had it not been for Israel’s prison ‘academies,’” Ya’ari went so far as to suggest, “the intifada might have come and gone in a matter of weeks.”
Israeli authorities shared Ya’ari’s assessment that their prisons were providing the Palestinian resistance with its leaders and martyrs. As a general rule, “the very entrance into prison makes [the Palestinian prisoner] a hero,” Arie Bibi, commissioner of the Israel Prison Service (IPS) from 1992 to 1996, remarked in an interview with Gortler, conducted as part of the latter’s dissertation research on carceral subjectivity in Israel/Palestine. And as released prisoner leaders began to stoke a broader rebellion, Gortler told me, “the question for Israeli authorities became how to influence the Palestinian prisoners in ways that would serve Israeli interests.” For Israel’s traditionally center-left establishment, one answer was the calculated easing of conditions. If repression had intensified solidarity and resistance among prisoners, the thinking went, then rolling it back might do the opposite—sapping prisoners’ impetus for collective action and diffusing discontent into something more manageable. Amos Azani, IPS commissioner from 1997 to 2000, named this logic explicitly in a 2011 interview with Gortler: “I demand good imprisonment conditions,” he said. “Good imprisonment conditions make you moderate.”
In the decade after the First Intifada, Israeli prison authorities set to work on this moderating mandate. They eased crowding in prisons; increased material comforts, adding canteens, bakeries, and individual televisions for prisoners; allowed families to bring food and clothing; and granted limited access to education. Broader political currents also aided these developments: A 1992 hunger strike across multiple Israeli prisons, joined by at least 7,000 prisoners, forced additional concessions in healthcare, recreation, education, and family visits, while the mass prisoner releases accompanying the Oslo process further eased overcrowding. By the mid-’90s, the improvement of conditions in exchange for compliance had become a powerful organizing principle within the Israeli prison system, and with the exception of a brief but consequential dip in conditions during the Second Intifada, it would remain so for at least two decades.
Detainees in their cells at Hasharon prison in Israel, December 10th, 2007
Interviewed by Gortler in 2012, one former prisoner, Ihab, described such attempts to mold Palestinian subjectivity as “the alaf system,” referring to the Arabic word for animal fodder—which also evokes the feed bag one puts on a horse’s mouth to keep it pacified. During the Oslo years in particular, Ihab recalled (in the unpublished interview notes Gortler shared with me), prison authorities permitted an unprecedented influx of goods: “watermelon, mangoes, everything. Things were entering the prison that had never been allowed before.” The implicit bargain, as he understood it, was obvious: “‘We’ll feed you, just keep quiet. Don’t cause problems, don’t be disruptive.’”
One former prisoner, Ihab, described such attempts to mold Palestinian subjectivity as “the alaf system,” referring to the Arabic word for animal fodder—which also evokes the feed bag one puts on a horse’s mouth to keep it pacified.
Writing from prison in 2011, Walid Daqqa—one of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners, who would die in Israeli custody in 2024 after being denied treatment for bone marrow cancer—reflected on the effects of this devil’s bargain on incarcerated Palestinians. “The material reality in which the prisoners live produces in them a state of social and mental disorder,” Daqqa wrote in the smuggled text, “for several prisoners live in much better material conditions than their families in the [occupied territories], and certainly than that of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip under the siege.” In this situation, it became unclear where “freedom” lay: “outside, where the cantons and the enclaves are—or here, in the Israeli detention centers.” Ultimately, Daqqa observed, the prison’s “material abundance” turned “into a trap for us, the Palestinian prisoners,” functioning “to empty the prisoners of vital content and to individualize them, shattering anything that might make them a collective.”
The consensus on “good imprisonment conditions” may have succeeded in defanging the prisoners’ movement, but by the mid-2000s, it began to break down. As arrests surged during the Second Intifada, Israel transferred increasing numbers of prisoners from facilities in the occupied territories into prisons within the Green Line. By 2006, all but Ofer Prison had been relocated, and the responsibility for the prison system was consequently transferred from the Israeli military to the IPS. The effect, legal scholar and human rights lawyer Smadar Ben-Natan said, was to draw the question of Palestinian incarceration into domestic Israeli politics, where it started to acquire a growing electoral salience as the country increasingly tilted to the right. “When it’s the military managing prisons, it’s not the bread and butter of politicians,” Ben-Natan said. But once figures like Marwan Barghouti were held inside Israel, visible and proximate, their treatment could be mobilized politically—as proof, or lack thereof, of being “tough on crime, of being tough on Palestinian prisoners.”
What ensued was the rise of what Ben-Natan calls “carceral populism”: a proliferation of legislative and administrative measures aimed at restricting prisoners’ rights, from limits on educational access to the legalization of force feeding. In 2011, calls to worsen prison conditions mounted as Israeli leaders sought leverage over Hamas in negotiations to secure the release of the captured soldier Gilad Shalit. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by announcing that the “party is over” for security prisoners and instituting a formal ban—upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court—on their ability to pursue university degrees in prison. “We’ll have no more masters and doctors of terror,” he declared. Still, even as figures like Netanyahu and his public security minister Gilad Erdan “made a lot of noise,” Ben-Natan said, conditions in prison did not significantly change, in part because IPS administrators continued to prioritize stability and pacification. As the prison scholar Bernstein told me, “It’s cheaper and easier to manage people who are not starving and desperate. You don’t need so many guards and armed squads to go in and do searches to prevent organizing.” The persistence of baseline livable conditions also depended, according to anthropologist Basil Farraj, on the Palestinian prisoners’ movement remaining leverage. Though far weaker than in previous decades, the movement was still able to show some “strength and unity and negotiate with the prison administration,” he said, at times forcing authorities to “back down on certain restrictions on rights” to avoid further unrest.
It ultimately took the rise of Itamar Ben-Gvir to disrupt the IPS’s technocratic equilibrium. Where earlier politicians only spoke of overhauling the prison system, the far-right national security minister has sought to do so in practice, prioritizing punishment over all other security and fiscal considerations. As early as 2021, he was laying the groundwork for this shift by complaining in a Channel 14 interview that Palestinian security prisoners were “the bosses in prison” and “inmates deluxe,” and that the guards “are afraid of them.” After ascending to a cabinet position in the 2022 election, Ben-Gvir turned grievance into policy. “He put his money where his mouth is,” Ben-Natan said. “He cares that the prisoners actually suffer.” Within months, Ben-Gvir had reduced family visits across all prisons, increased the use of solitary confinement, and pushed for preliminary Knesset approval for a bill stripping Palestinian security prisoners of their right to medical treatment—all in an effort to make good on his campaign promise to end the “summer-camp conditions of murderous terrorists.”
Itamar Ben-Gvir in Jerusalem, January 16th, 2025
“Ben-Gvir put his money where his mouth is. He cares that the prisoners actually suffer.”
In a particularly telling episode that occurred ten months before October 7th, Ben-Gvir, to the delight of his base, ordered the immediate closure of two bakeries inside Ramon and Ktziot security prisons. “What is this, the Hatikvah neighborhood in prison?” he fumed, invoking the bustling food markets of south Tel Aviv. “How can it be that murderers with blood on their hands get a pita every day? What is this absurdity?” Flustered by the minister’s outrage, IPS officials explained that the bakeries saved Israel an estimated 1.5 million shekels a year while also reducing the risk of contraband being smuggled in with pastries delivered from outside. The pita ovens were purely a cost-cutting measure, the head of the IPS office responsible for security prisoners assured the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon, insisting that they were “not meant to benefit the prisoners in any way.” Ben-Gvir was not convinced, though later developments proved the accuracy of the IPS’s cold calculus: In April 2024, Israel Hayom reported that closing the bakeries had indeed inflated prison service spending on security prisoners’ food by 250%. “Even if it were another 700,000 shekels a month,” Ben-Gvir’s office immediately clapped back, the minister “would have done the same thing.”
The settler right celebrated this expensive deterioration of prison conditions all through the first half of 2023; meanwhile, Israel’s security establishment was issuing dire warnings about greater costs to come. Writing in February of that year, Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel warned that Ben-Gvir’s campaign of humiliations risked dragging Israel into another Gaza war. Unlike Ben-Gvir, Harel noted, veteran security officials were “well aware of the great Palestinian sensitivity to the prisoner issue. It is one of the few issues on which Hamas, Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other organizations can agree.” As with prior generations of Israeli liberals, what worried Harel here was not the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners per se, but the price Israel might have to pay if it continued. In this warning, he proved prescient. A January 2024 Hamas document meant to lay out the motivations for the October 7th attacks zeroed in on the prisoner issue explicitly. “Thousands of Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails . . . are experiencing deprivation of their basic rights, as well as assaults and humiliations under direct supervision of the Israeli fascist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” the missive stated. “What did the world expect . . . the Palestinian people to do in response?”
Then came Israel’s response. In November 2023, the anonymous Palestinian prisoner Abu Hanin wrote that even though October 7th had demonstrated that Ben-Gvir’s campaign of prison terror would have costs, the Israeli right was not deterred. “They are no longer afraid of the situation erupting as a result of the prisoners’ issue,” Hanin wrote, because “it has already become explosive.” Instead, “the Zionist security services considered the launch of the assault on our people in the Gaza Strip [as] an opportunity” to declare a simultaneous war on Palestinian prisoners. PHRI’s Abbas agreed: The groundwork had been laid beforehand, he said, and now, Ben-Gvir and his ilk “found open doors to change every aspect of detention for Palestinians.”
The crackdown began on October 8th and initially focused on prison policy restrictions: the closure of canteens for security prisoners, bans on inmates cooking in their wards, and the elimination of meat from prisoners’ diets. In the final months of 2023, daily food rations inside prisons dropped to starvation levels, around 800 calories per person. Emergency legislation reduced living-space requirements to subhuman levels, eventually leaving 90% of security prisoners in cells smaller than three square meters. This structural overcrowding accelerated the spread of disease. Basic necessities like mattresses, pillows, and toiletries were reclassified as “luxuries” and confiscated. Daily yard time was suspended, reinstated, and then suspended again. “The desire to victimize prisoners as a symbolic group completely overrode any interest in managing prisons easily,” Bernstein told me. “Now it didn’t matter how expensive it was, how many guards or how much violence was needed—it could be done.”
Downgrading the conditions for current prisoners was only the start; Israel also used the war on Gaza to dramatically expand the reach and impunity of its carceral system. The shift came in the form of a little-recognized Israeli legal tool known as the Unlawful Combatants Law. “Unlawful combatant” was a quasi-legal category first popularized by the United States during the War on Terror, when it was used to detain enemy captives suspected of belonging to armed groups the US did not recognize as “lawful combatants.” Unlike civilians, who must be granted trials, and armed combatants, who are owed the rights of prisoners of war, the US contended that “unlawful combatants” could be held indefinitely without trial and based only on “secret evidence.” In truth, “there is no such definition or category [as ‘unlawful combatant’] in international law,” Palestinian lawyer and activist Janan Abdu told me; its invention thus functioned to strip detainees of the basic protections afforded to both civilians and prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
An image released in response to a Freedom of Information request shows the US’s detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
First popularized by the United States during the War on Terror, the “unlawful combatant” category strips detainees of the basic protections owed to both civilians and prisoners of war.
Ever seeking new ways around international law, Israel was quick to follow the US’s lead in adopting the category, and the country’s version of the “unlawful combatants” legislation was first codified in 2002. It was initially designed to allow Israel to detain a small number of Lebanese captives as bargaining chips but assumed new significance after Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza. That withdrawal dismantled the legal framework that had previously governed detention in the enclave, removing Israel’s ability to use existing tools like administrative detention to hold Palestinians from Gaza. “There was no legislation authorizing Israeli detention without trial for folks from Gaza,” Sari Bashi, director of Israeli NGO Public Committee Against Torture, told me, “so the government brought them into the Unlawful Combatants Law.” According to Ben-Natan, this meant that Israel could detain Palestinians in Gaza—now cast as “enemy aliens”—with a lower bar for proof than even administrative detention, which still requires some purported evidence (even if secret) that each detainee specifically posed a security threat. With an “unlawful combatant,” she noted, no semblance of individual evidence was needed; “it was enough to say that someone belongs to an organization that is conducting hostilities against the State of Israel.”
Palestinians and their advocates tried to challenge this sweeping new law, but to no avail: In 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the appeal of two incarcerated Palestinians from Gaza who had argued that the law was in violation of a host of Israeli and international legal standards. The law’s “substantial infringement of the right to personal freedom,” wrote Judge Dorit Beinisch in the verdict, could be justified given that it was “enacted against the backdrop of a severe security situation.”
The legal basis for indiscriminate detention now firmly in place, Israel could turn to it whenever it needed—which is what happened after October 7th. Between 2005 and 2023, an estimated 60 Palestinians from Gaza were held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, according to Ben-Natan, but since the onset of the Gaza genocide, that number swelled into the thousands as the Israeli military began mass detentions under the pretext that Gazans were unlawful Hamas combatants. According to detention figures cited by the state in response to high court petitions, a total of 6,000 Palestinians from Gaza subsequently ended up in Israeli prisons in the first 19 months of the onslaught. In attempting to respond, the human rights community has found itself hamstrung: “Because the court had already accepted the law’s premise—indefinite detention without charge—all we can do is contest new draconian amendments,” said Bashi.
Those amendments—passed in rapid succession after October 2023, and many still in force despite the current ceasefire—have produced what Ben-Natan describes as a condition of “complete abandonment,” placing detainees from Gaza “outside any type of protection or overview.” Under one of these provisions, those arrested between October 7th and 10th, 2023, as well as those detained during Gaza operations more broadly, can be denied access to legal counsel for up to 180 days. Additionally, a December 2023 amendment extends the period before an “unlawful combatant” must be brought before a judge from 14 to 75 days, though subsequent litigation reduced it to 40 (for administrative detainees, comparatively, this number is 8 days).
The changes to the Unlawful Combatants Law have been accompanied by a slew of prison policy amendments that apply to broad swaths of Palestinian detainees, including those from the West Bank. Perhaps most chilling are the provisions to seal off Israeli prisons from external scrutiny. Judicial reviews can now be held over videoconferencing, meaning that judges will no longer notice the physical evidence of torture. “Even the tiny modicum of protection that judicial review could have offered is being emptied of content,” said Bashi. At the same time, Israel has—in violation of international law—prevented International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representatives from visiting thousands of Palestinian detainees, particularly those deemed “unlawful combatants.” “The ICRC had access to Abu Ghraib,” PHRI’s Abbas told me, but in Israel it has been barred for two years.
The comparison to offshore US torture sites came up more than once in my interviews as experts sought to describe the system Israel has created in the past three years—and how the scale of its violence has outpaced even the expected results of using problematic legal categories. “In 20 years of Guantanamo, nine prisoners died,” Gordon said. “In Israel, within two and a half years, we have 104 prisoners dead. The level of killing gives you an indication about how widespread and persistent the torture is.”
Munther Amira at the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, May 22nd
“I consider the place that I was in as a cemetery,” the Palestinian social worker Munther Amira told me in an interview for The +972 Podcast in November 2025, describing the three months he spent in administrative detention at Ofer Prison in early 2024—around the very time Israel’s detainee laws were being aggressively amended to facilitate rampant torture. Originally from Aida refugee camp, outside Bethlehem, Amira has spent years of his life in Israeli prisons. He was arrested as a minor during the First Intifada for throwing stones, again in the early 2000s while protesting the construction of Israel’s illegal separation barrier, and then again in 2017 during demonstrations surrounding the arrest of activist Ahed Tamimi and the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem. His most recent detention happened in December 2023, over a Facebook post quoting lines from Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani’s ode to Gaza.
This time, Amira said, the violence began the moment he was taken. As he was dragged toward the military vehicle, he called to his screaming daughter: “I love you too, don’t worry.” For that, he was beaten until he reached the Etzion interrogation center. Upon his arrival, the officers removed his underwear. They searched between his legs with a magnetometer and mocked him with arbitrary physical commands. The humiliation was so traumatic that he began to pray to be taken to his cell. But that, too, was unrecognizable. When he had most recently been held there in 2017, five people shared the cell; now there were 13. From the other side of the wall, he heard the screams and cries of detainees from Gaza being forced to sing “Am Yisrael Chai.”
“It’s not like before,” his cellmates told him. It wasn’t. From his first arrest, Amira had understood that the aim was to break them, but in earlier periods of incarceration there had been limits. “At the end of the day, we used to have something to eat, we used to have a television, papers, pens,” he said. “But after October 7th, everything changed.” He now had only a mattress and blanket. The cold was unbearable. Electricity was cut during the day and switched on at night, scrambling any perception of time. His prostate medication was withheld until he was bleeding on the day of his release. There was no water. Many meals consisted of just two spoonfuls of rice: “We had to go like cats to the corner to eat. I lost, in three months, 33 kilos [72 pounds].” Amira told me that, at one point, he tried to reassure himself he was still alive by improvising a game of backgammon with his cellmates. With a scrap of a cardboard food tray for the board, crushed pills mixed with water to sketch its lines, and bits of bread shaped into playing pieces, they played for three days, until guards confiscated the makeshift set. That night, they stormed the cell with two dogs, cuffed Amira and the rest of his section, and beat them as they were forced to lie on top of each other. “I wanted the land to open up and swallow me,” he said. “I wanted to vanish.” Others felt this way too: In his short months there, Amira witnessed two attempts by inmates to end their lives.
When I visited attorney Lea Tsemel at her office in East Jerusalem, she described a similar campaign of humiliation against detainees held as “unlawful combatants,” some of whom she has visited at Ofer and Sde Teiman prisons. “They were being held in what the IPS calls safe-deposit boxes,” said the 81-year-old, who has been defending Palestinians in Israeli courts since shortly after the onset of Israel’s occupation in 1967. When they are brought to trial, such prisoners “are not allowed to just walk into the room. In order to show that they are humiliated, they are not allowed to raise their bodies or faces or to look or say anything until they are brought into the court.” Tsemel rose from her chair to demonstrate the acceptable posture: body bent forward at a right angle, hands behind one’s back, head lowered. These expectations are drilled into detainees so successfully that when Tsemel went to interview two clients from Gaza—a nurse and a doctor—incarcerated in Ofer, they stood up and assumed the position “immediately,” without being told, the moment they heard the guards open the door to enter the room, she said. “It shows you that if they don’t do it, they are going to be badly hurt.”
Experts told me that these indignities are being inflicted in order to erode Palestinian collectivity. “The large number of detainees, and the arrests of children and young people under such harsh conditions: All of it is intended to break people’s spirit and morale,” said Sahar Francis, general director of the Palestinian prisoners’ rights organization Addameer. Farraj, whose own father is among the thousands disappeared into Israeli prisons, concurred. The objective, he said, is to “destroy Palestinian society”—and with it, to “destroy the political subject” whose revolutionary potential once haunted Israeli prisons.
With ethnic cleansing accelerating in Gaza and the West Bank, and a rogue Israel increasingly indifferent to international scrutiny, it is not clear what could stop such atrocities. For Palestinian prisoners and their families, this means that vanishingly few tools now remain with which to exercise any political agency, or even fight for livable conditions. “The point of a hunger strike,” Bernstein added, “is that you may die. But if no one cares, what else can you do? The tool of last resort is gone.” Indeed, the most recent publicly known hunger strike in Israeli prisons—a solitary one, by the activist Khader Adnan—ended more than three years ago, and despite a sustained campaign by his wife for his release, it ended not in concessions but in death. Other forms of prisoner organizing seem just as impossible. “Today, every Palestinian is struggling for his own life,” Abbas said. “The individual who needs medical treatment and demands it loudly will be the cause of dozens of others getting beaten. This makes it harder to think as a group.” The one modicum of effective collective leverage has come in the form of the hostage exchanges, which have seen nearly 2,000 Palestinians released, but in the absence of further negotiations over a political settlement, it is difficult to imagine what, if anything, might help free the thousands still being tortured inside prison walls.
The grim horizon facing the prisoners may ultimately speak to the broader hopelessness of the Palestinian political landscape. If organizing inside prison once moved in lockstep with Intifadas across Palestine, now Israeli prisons echo the outright genocidal conditions of the outside. Toward the end of our conversation, Farraj told me he has been thinking a lot about this process of refraction. “The prisons have become spaces that mirror the tactics used inside the Gaza Strip: the isolation, the confinement, the denial of food, the disappeared people,” he said. What we are witnessing, he suggested, is the dissolution of distinction between the prison and its outsides, a situation in which “the entire geography of Palestine has become a carceral one.”