If you want to understand a regime, look at its prisons. Inside are people who are fully at its mercy; the state is responsible for their housing, health care, and any basic living needs.
In a report my organization, B’Tselem, released last week titled “Welcome to Hell,” we shine a light on what has been going on inside Israeli detention facilities for Palestinians since the horrific Hamas attack on October 7. Our interviews with dozens of inmates, almost all of whom were released without charges, paint a picture of a new policy of routine abuse. Women and men, young and old, consistently described harsh violence, sexual assaults, intentional humiliation, starvation, unhygienic conditions, sleep deprivation, prohibition of religious practices, confiscation of belongings, and denial of medical care. This array of testimonies from different facilities indicates that Israel’s prison system operated as a network of torture camps for Palestinian detainees. Thousands were held for weeks or months in subhuman conditions, exposed to relentless violence and cut off from the world, often with no legal proceedings. In some cases, the torture ended in death. Since the Gaza war began, at least 60 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody.
Israel’s new incarceration policy continues a long history of dehumanizing Palestinians and denying their rights. For years, Israel has used imprisonment to suppress Palestinians. Since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip have been imprisoned. Sending a person to prison has major repercussions for his or her immediate and wider circles, and Israel’s broad use of this tool weakens and fragments Palestinian society.
While harsh treatment and denial of rights in Israeli prisons have been reported for years, the appointment of Itamar Ben-Gvir as minister responsible for the Israeli prison system marked a clear change in policy—one that intensified after October 7. In recent months, shocking reports of beating, starvation, and abuse in numerous Israeli military and civilian detention facilities have come to light. Reports by human rights organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights and Breaking the Silence reached a head with last week’s dramatic arrest of soldiers for suspected sexual assault against a detainee at the Sde Teiman military detention center.
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Our new report is based on the testimonies of 55 Palestinian and women from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as several with Israeli citizenship, who were held in 16 different facilities. It reveals a broad, systemic pattern of deliberate abuse applied throughout the entire prison system’s chain of command, regardless of why the person was arrested and often with no legal process. This pattern cannot be explained as mere isolated acts or random breaches of regulations.
Around 10,000 Palestinians are currently imprisoned inside Israel. B’Tselem and other human rights organizations, both Palestinian and international, have long argued that an Israeli apartheid regime exists across the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The detention of Palestinian Israeli citizens in the same subhuman conditions in prisons demonstrates how the Israeli regime treats Palestinians with Israeli citizenship with the same tools of oppression and control as Palestinian subjects in the area between the Jordan and the sea.
For years, opponents of the occupation have warned about the spillover of its brutality from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel. Skunk spray and water cannons used to quell protests in the West Bank cities of Nablus and Tulkarm, for example, are now being used against Jewish citizens in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. No doubt other aspects of state violence are likely to follow.
The norms taking root now will be hard to eradicate once the gatekeepers and judicial oversight bodies, who failed to protect Palestinian citizens of Israel in prison, are crushed. We must acknowledge the increasing apartheid, occupation, and Jewish supremacy in Israel’s regime, and struggle to change it into a just and democratic one.
Shai Parnes is a spokesperson for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
