Nothing can undo the staggering loss of life and the bloodshed of the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the relentless bombardment and starvation of Gazans and the increasing violence directed against West Bank communities.
But amid the prospects of a lasting cease-fire and Palestinian self-determination, there must also be pressure to end the unsparing detention of the thousands of Palestinians who continue to be held in Israel’s prisons, many under conditions that defy international laws mandating humane treatment of detainees.
Under the hostage-prisoner exchange agreement of the cease-fire plan, Israel released about 2,000 prisoners and detainees this week. They represent only a small fraction of the total number of Palestinians held in Israeli facilities. The vast majority are being left to rot.
In the West Bank and Jerusalem, far from Hamas-controlled Gaza, more than 19,000 Palestinians were swept up since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society. Some were released, but as of early October, more than 11,000 Palestinians were still locked up in Israeli prisons, almost a third of them under “administrative detention,” without charges or a trial.
Some people were arrested for nothing more than messages they posted on social media. Thousands of Gazans were also held in Israeli military detention, many as “unlawful combatants,” without any legal process. Their numbers are difficult to verify, though a recent investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call found that as few as one in four of them had been classified as fighters even in Israel’s own military databases.
The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, echoing reports by Amnesty International and B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, documented testimony by Palestinians who said that while incarcerated they have been subject to beatings, torture, rape and extreme deprivation. Men and women spoke about loud music played for hours on end, attacks by dogs, waterboarding, suspension from ceilings and severe sexual and gender-based violence. Some of the prisoners released this week confirmed that they, too, had been exposed to brutal conditions and abuse. (The Israeli Army has previously said it “rejects outright allegations of systematic abuse of detainees.”)
Legal experts and scholars will decide whether the alleged torture, denial of adequate food and death in these prisons meet the criteria to be termed genocide according to international law. There can be no doubt, however, that Israel’s war on prisoners was the third front in its assault on Gaza and the West Bank, and it involves possible crimes under the Geneva Conventions that have gone largely unseen by anyone but the victims. These prisoners, too, are hostages to the conflict, and they, too, deserve justice.
This past summer, as part of a New York University research project, I conducted in-depth interviews with more than a dozen Palestinians who had recently been released. Working through local contacts, I spoke with some people remotely and others in person in the West Bank. Among them were longtime detainees who had contributed to the longtime Palestinian prisoners’ movement, which started in the late 1960s.
Since then, incarcerated Palestinians organized themselves into an effective pressure group, struggling to attain rights and privileges consistent with international law. Through hunger strikes and hard sacrifices, they gained access to, among other things, books, medication and visits by family members and lawyers — although they are held in Israeli locations largely inaccessible to Palestinians, a violation of international law.
They have not been successful in their bid for recognition as political prisoners or even prisoners of war, categories that should entail special protections. Nor have they been able to win repeal of the practice of administrative detention, introduced by British authorities in the 1940s as an emergency regulation to punish Palestinian resistance fighters and Jewish paramilitary organizations. This regulation was adopted by the Israeli state in 1948 and has been renewed every year since.
The rights that the movement won melted away after Oct. 7. Israel’s extremist security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, began to transform prisons into what many detainees have described as lawless places of torment where inmates are subject to a condition of bare life. “Everything was taken away,” said one middle-aged man I met who was held for more than 25 years for political activism. (I am withholding his name because he, like all the other people I interviewed, fears rearrest.) Mr. Ben-Gvir’s orders “destroyed the movement in one day,” the man said without visible emotion. “Food was reduced to a survival diet, we had no hot water, yard time or hygiene items, no contact with the outside world, and were crammed into three-by-four-meter cells that used to hold half as many.”
Another man in his 20s, whom I spoke to in one of the West Bank’s refugee camps, told me he had been rounded up after Oct. 7 and incarcerated for 18 months, during which time he said he had not seen any family members or lawyers. He trembled as he recounted that he and his 10 cellmates were tear-gassed and shot at with rubber bullets in that confined space. “I have been to prison before,” he told me, “and this was no longer a prison; it was Dante’s Inferno.”
Several female detainees independently described their transitional stay in Hasharon prison, a facility largely for men, in a cell overrun by rodents and furnished with only a urine-soaked mattress. Some of the men said they lost up to 50 pounds and bore serious physical and mental health problems from the denial of medical care. Even Israel’s Supreme Court recently ruled that the government was not providing subsistence levels of food.
In more than a decade of conducting interviews in the West Bank for various research projects, I have heard many stories about the suffering imposed by the Israeli occupation. No trauma was more brutal than that left by the prisoners’ ordeal. I will never forget the anguish of one soft-spoken, middle-aged man I interviewed in his village near Bethlehem a few months after his release.
He told me he wakes up in terror multiple times every night for fear of being seized again and beaten, as had happened almost every day while he was behind bars. According to Addameer, a Palestinian human rights group that monitors prisoners, at least 77 detainees have died in custody over the past two years, including Walid Daqqa, the best-known prison intellectual, whose writings are widely circulated and who was an educational mentor to so many over the years. Very few bodies were returned to their families. The cease-fire agreement calls for Israel to release 15 bodies for every deceased Israeli hostage whose remains are returned by Hamas. The first 90 have arrived in Gaza.
Only three weeks after the aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip began, Hamas proposed an “everyone for everyone” exchange: the 240 or so Israeli hostages for all the Palestinian prisoners (up to 10,000 at that time), which would have been consistent with asymmetric prisoner exchange ratios in the past. Representatives of the families of Israeli hostages urged their government to accept. The blunt rejection of that proposal was the first public signal that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition would pursue a different goal: the destruction of Gaza and the displacement of its entire population.
Cruel carceral practices haven’t made Israel any safer. Since 1967, an estimated one million Palestinians have been arrested and locked up. That would be one-fifth of the current population in the West Bank and Gaza. Surely every household has felt the impact.
These policies, and these numbers, bear comparison with the mass incarceration of Black South Africans during apartheid or African Americans during the first decade and a half of this century. International condemnation of those practices helped to generate change: Apartheid is officially gone, and the rate of African American imprisonment decreased by nearly 50 percent between 2000 and 2021.
The treatment of Palestinians in Israel’s carceral system has rightly come under harsh scrutiny from human rights organizations for decades, but it has yet to draw that kind of international outrage, let alone diplomatic censure. It’s not too late to hold Israel accountable and to end its arbitrary detention and systematic abuse of civilians for what is clearly collective punishment.
Andrew Ross’s most recent book is “The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates.”
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