More than 9,000 Palestinians jailed under Israel’s military and national security laws are being held in Israeli detention facilities, the highest number in more than a decade, according to rights groups, which say many of the detainees are being held without charge. and have been abused while in custody.
The number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons has increased since the October 7 attack by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. In Gaza, Israeli troops have arrested hundreds of people while searching for militants, the Israeli military says, while security forces in the occupied West Bank have carried out a massive crackdown they say is aimed at rooting out militants.
But rights groups say the arrests of Palestinians are often arbitrary, that the conditions in which they are held can be inhumane and that the rise in the number of reported deaths is alarming. Israel says the imprisoned Palestinians, who include sworn senior fighters convicted of brutal attacks, are being treated according to international standards.
The prisoners are at the center of one of the war’s most popular issues: the Gaza ceasefire negotiations. Hamas has made the release of thousands of prisoners, many of them convicted of terrorism-related charges, conditional on a ceasefire and the exchange of remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Who are the prisoners?
According to HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organization, more than 9,000 Palestinians are currently in Israeli prisons. Many were arrested in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military says, where Israeli forces have carried out major raids since October 7. An unknown number of Gazans are being held in military facilities.
More than 3,500 Palestinian prisoners are being held without formal charges, according to HaMoked. This practice, known as administrative detention, existed before the war, but Israel has increased its use. Before October 7, about 1,300 Palestinian administrative prisoners were being held in Israel, according to figures provided by Israel’s prison service to HaMoked.
Activists say the practice effectively nullifies due process, while Israel calls it a necessary tool to detain those it says pose a direct threat to national security. The Israeli military said it was operating “several detention facilities” for people arrested during the October 7 attacks and the ground invasion. It said that after questioning, detainees “found to be unrelated to terrorist activity” would be returned to Gaza.
Israel says its arrest campaign has captured senior members of organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But Israeli forces have also arrested children and women whose families deny their involvement in armed groups.
As of this month, an estimated 200 minors and 68 women accused of militancy are in Israeli prisons, according to Qadura Fares, a Palestinian official who heads the Ramallah-based Committee for Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs.
Where are they kept?
Palestinian prisoners are generally divided into two groups. Palestinians from the West Bank are funneled into Israel’s civilian prison system, which is overseen by an appointee of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right Minister of National Security.
Several hundred Gazans have been sent to at least three detention facilities run by the Israeli military, according to Israeli officials. These detainees include hundreds taken during the October 7 Hamas-led offensive, as well as many others captured in Gaza during the war. Images of these battlefield arrests, in which the men are often seen blindfolded and bound at the wrists, have sparked international outrage.
The Sde Teiman military base is the closest known military detention site to Gaza, about 18 miles from the border. Information about the base is scant: Detainees are kept incommunicado, cut off from the outside world, said Tal Steiner, who heads the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, a rights group.
After the war began, the Israeli government extended the time during which some detainees could be held without access to a lawyer and brought before a judge.
What are the allegations of abuse?
Rights groups, the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees and outside experts appointed by the U.N., known as special rapporteurs, are looking into all allegations of abuse inside Israeli facilities.
An unpublished investigation by the United Nations’ main agency for Palestinian refugees accuses Israel of abusing hundreds of Gazans captured during the war with Hamas, according to a copy of the report reviewed by The New York Times.
UNRWA researchers collected testimonies from released detainees who said they had been beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused and denied access to lawyers and doctors. This treatment, the report concluded, “was used to extract information or confessions, to intimidate and humiliate, and to punish.”
The report was compiled by UNRWA, the United Nations agency at the center of an investigation following allegations that at least 30 of its 13,000 staff in Gaza were involved in the October 7 attack.
The Times could not confirm all of the allegations in the report, but parts of it match the accounts of former Gaza detainees interviewed by The Times. Palestinian prisoners from Gaza were stripped, beaten, interrogated and held incommunicado for several weeks, according to accounts from nearly a dozen of the detainees or their relatives interviewed by The Times.
UNRWA confirmed the existence of the report but said its wording had not been finalized for publication.
Israel’s top military lawyer, Lt. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, also wrote in a letter circulated among commanders in late February that her office had faced cases of “the use of operationally unjustified force, including against detainees.” He said military justice officials would review each case and decide whether to press charges.
Have any prisoners died in custody?
Dozens of Palestinians are believed to have died in Israeli custody since October 7, according to the Israeli military and rights groups, although the circumstances of their deaths are murky and many of their identities unknown.
The Israeli military said it was aware of the deaths of 27 Palestinians in custody. And at least 10 Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have died in Israel’s political prison system since Oct. 7, according to the official Palestinian Prisoners’ Committee and Israeli rights groups, including Doctors for Human Rights-Israel, whose doctors watched some autopsies.
“Since the beginning of the war, a number of prisoners held at the detention facilities have died, including prisoners who arrived at the facility with injuries or who suffered from a complex medical condition,” the Israeli military said in a statement, adding that military justice officials were investigating the deaths.
Israeli doctors who attended preliminary autopsies on two Palestinian prisoners from the occupied West Bank found signs of physical trauma, including multiple rib fractures, on their bodies, according to postmortem reports released to their families and reviewed by The Times. In both cases, doctors could not definitively determine whether an attack had caused the deaths of the prisoners.
Are there sexual abuse charges?
Former detainees reported incidents of sexual abuse or harassment, according to UNRWA’s unpublished report.
Some male inmates said they had been beaten on their genitals, the report said. Some women said they experienced “inappropriate touching during searches and as a form of harassment while blindfolded,” according to the document. He added that some detainees reported having to strip in front of male soldiers during searches and being prevented from covering up.
Separately, UN-appointed rapporteurs said last month they had received information that two Palestinian women had been raped in Israeli custody. Others were threatened with sexual harassment and subjected to humiliating searches by male soldiers, they said. The rapporteurs, who are not UN staff, have not made public their detailed accounts, figures or sources. The Times was unable to verify these allegations, and the Israeli government accused the experts of bias.
“Israel strongly rejects the vile and baseless allegations” made by the rapporteurs, according to a statement from the country’s UN delegation in Geneva. He added that one of the experts had recently “legitimized the October 7 massacre in which more than 1,200 people were murdered, executed and raped, and another who publicly disputed the testimonies of Israeli victims of gender and sexual violence.”
Mr. Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Committee, said his organization had not confirmed these reports of rape and that the rapporteurs had not shared their details. However, he said accounts of the humiliation of female prisoners were common even before October 7.
