The Deadliest Period in History for Palestinian Prisoners in Israeli Detention
After October 7, 2023, prisoners' conditions and abuse inside all Israeli detention centers have dramatically worsened, resulting in at least 70 deaths.
RAMALLAH, OCCUPIED WEST BANK—Early on the morning of May 6, Israeli forces raided the home of 49-year-old Wael Jaghoub in the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank and detained him. Two weeks later, he was sentenced to six months in administrative detention.
A prominent writer and advocate of Palestinian liberation, Jaghoub has already spent a total of 30 years in Israeli prisons. He was first arrested in 1992 and sentenced to six years behind bars for taking part in the First Intifada. He was arrested again in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Second Intifada as a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This past January—nearly 24 years later—he was released as part of a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.
Jaghoub is not the first prisoner to be rearrested after being released in recent exchange deals. At least 27 freed Palestinians have been detained again and thrown back into Israel’s prison labyrinth, with seven of them still held under administrative detention. Jaghoub is among the most prominent of them. During his decades in prison, he became a highly visible leader in the Palestinian prisoners movement, publishing several books and studies that chronicle the experience of life in Israeli detention.
While news reports and testimonies have emerged of the torture of Palestinian prisoners held in detention camps like Sde Teiman—where there are frequent beatings, starvation, forced stress positions, rape, and death—there has been less recognition that these conditions are prevalent across all Israeli prisons and detention centers. There are 19 carceral facilities in Israel, and Ofer Prison, which operates in the West Bank.
Following October 7, 2023, prisoners’ conditions inside Israeli detention centers have rapidly deteriorated. The last 19 months have seen a dramatic escalation in the number of Palestinians behind bars, alongside increasing prisoner abuse and mistreatment by Israeli authorities.
There are currently more than 10,100 Palestinians held in Israeli detention, according to the prisoner rights group Addameer. This is nearly double the number from before October 7. That figure does not include detainees from Gaza held in detention camps run by the Israeli military. Some 3,500 people are held in administrative detention, including 119 children.
A few weeks before his rearrest, Jahgoub spoke with Drop Site about the dire conditions inside Israeli prisons. “Before October 7, the conditions were already very difficult and any rights we received were a result of the detainee movement engaging in confrontations such as hunger strikes,” said Jaghoub, who had been subjected to solitary confinement and denied family visits during his years in detention. According to Jaghoub and other former detainees, Israeli prison authorities were already planning to enact harsher policies on Palestinian prisoners prior to October 7th.
“The ways in which Israeli prison services are treating detainees after October 2023 are worse than one can explain,” Habib Rahman Qatamani, 23, told Drop Site earlier this month. Imprisoned in December 2022 in Nafha detention camp for 22 months until his release this past October, Qatamani also described a dramatic intensification of abuse inside Israeli prisons.
“On April 1, 2024, during Ramadan, Israeli forces raided our cell and shot rubber bullets directly at us from just three meters away. This is in addition to us being starved and suffering from skin diseases, like scabies,” Qatamani said.
Qatamni said detainees are being intentionally weakened through the denial of food, water, and sunlight, making them more susceptible to disease, which has spread widely in the overcrowded detention camps, as well as organ failure and death. Qatamani was arrested again on May 19 after Israeli soldiers raided his home in Nablus.
Jaghoub echoed Qatamni’s account. “Israel is intentionally starving detainees, where, within months, detainees were losing 20 and 25 kilos of weight,” Jaghoub said.
A Prison Policy of Isolation, Torture, and Death
“They were already preparing a large-scale attack on detainees,” Jaghoub told Drop Site. “In October 2023, they merely began to enforce this attack through a set of new policies.”
“The first thing [the Israeli Prison Services] began to do was to fully isolate detainees,” Jaghoub said. After October 7th, isolation of detainees was not limited to solitary confinement, but included cutting prisoners off from any communication with family, lawyers, or the outside world, including stripping them of radio, television, and access to phone calls.
“One of the worst things of the isolation practices was even cutting us off from time. The confiscation of watches meant we are completely and fully cut off from the world entirely—that we were denied any piece of information, even knowing what time it,” Jaghoub told Drop Site.
The isolation of detainees cut the world off from detainees, rendering them invisible and allowing Israel to continue its practices against them without challenge. Only when prisoners were released could they fully reveal the degree of abuse inside, though some did manage to communicate from their prison cells.
On April 10, Khairi Salameh was able to send a letter from Gilboa prison, Israel’s high-security detention camp located in the north, near the Sea of Galilee. Salameh was detained in 2003 and sentenced to life in prison. Out of his 22 years in prison, the past several months have been the most trying. “I am only surviving by the mercy and grace of God, glory be to Him. I don’t know what remains of energy in this scrawny body to meet my beloved son,” the 45-year-old wrote. He explained that he was being beaten by Israeli prison guards on a daily basis and was nearing death.
“The responsibility of my brothers and sisters in detention falls on my shoulders as they have dubbed me the standing mountain that is not shaken by the winds,” Salameh wrote. “Now that I have reached this day, after 18 months, I place my life before you, and I may part from it at any moment. I raise my case to God, first, and to you, second, and I entrust you all with it. I have appealed repeatedly that I am being intentionally targeted by one of the prison guards, including assassination attempts, and constant daily beatings. There is not a single part in my body that cannot stand as witness to what is happening to me.”
Mohammad Ibdah, a 32-year-old from Askar refugee camp near Nablus, likewise testified to the policy of constant beatings and abuse in detention. Ibdah has been detained multiple times, spending a total of six years in prison before October 2023. He was detained again in November 2023 and spent a year in the Megiddo and Negev detention camps before his release in November 2024.
“It’s hard to fully explain the torture, but it was exhaustive,” Ibdah told Drop Site. “They used all methods that wouldn’t even cross your human mind. This includes humiliation and beatings, and the beating was excessive.” He added, “I cannot explain or count the different things we experience as detainees. Whether it’s the beatings or the diseases that are spreading and the intentional denial of medical care, I cannot sufficiently tell you about it all.”
Ibdah recalled one indelible episode he experienced in prison. “I will never forget February 26, 2024, in Megiddo prison. In section 8 and cell number 2, we faced a ferocious attack from Israeli units at around 10:00 pm, where we were assaulted in a monstrous way with unprecedented beatings. There were almost 120 detainees in our section and all of them heard our screams. The beatings were unreal and after the beatings we—all seven of us—were taken to what is known as ‘Tora Bora’ in Megiddo prison.”
Tora Bora is the name Palestinian prisoners have given to a series of secret isolation cells that were designed during the British occupation in Mandatory Palestine. The Israeli Prison Services deny the existence of these cells. According to Palestinian detainees, however, they are still used by Israel’s internal intelligence agency Shin Bet—also known as “Shabak”—to torture and abuse Palestinian prisoners, sometimes killing them.
According to Ibdah, the cell in Tora Bora was barely large enough to hold one person, yet he was crammed in there with six other prisoners. The cell had no light, no bathroom, and its walls were sprayed with pepper spray. Beaten and wounded, the men were denied medical assistance and food until the next day.
“One of the guys with me almost died,” Ibdah said. “He lost consciousness and we banged on the doors of the cell, but no one answered us. All we wanted was some water for the man who was suffocating from the pepper spray. The fact that he lived is a miracle.” The seven men were transferred from Tora Bora the next day, but only after a second round of beatings by Israeli prison guards.
“In detention, we cannot say anything, and we cannot call the guards for food, water, or emergency medical support,” Ibdah said. “The only time we’re allowed to yell is when someone is dead, and that’s the only time they listen: when it’s time to remove a body in a body bag.”
While Ibdah and his fellow detainees survived the ordeal, dozens of Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli custody over the past 19 months. Arafat Hamdanwas was declared dead in the Ofer prison complex on October 24, 2023. The 25-year-old had been arrested just two days earlier in Ramallah. That same week, 58-year-old Omar Daraghmeh died in Megiddo prison shortly after his court hearing. Arrested on October 9, Daraghmeh was being held in administrative detention, a mechanism used by Israeli authorities to detain Palestinians for months or years without charge, a trial, or the possibility of appeal.
Even children and minors have not been spared. On March 22, 17-year-old Walid Ahmad became the first Palestinian minor to ever be killed in Israeli detention. According to his autopsy report, Ahmad’s died from a combination of starvation, dehydration from diarrhea, and the denial of medical care.
Among those dying in custody are prisoners arrested years before October 7. Thaer Abu Asab died in the Negev detention camp on November 18, 2023. The 38-year-old was arrested in 2005 and had spent 20 years in prison. He was scheduled to be released later this year. According to Israeli reports, 19 Israeli prison guards were arrested for fatally beating Abu Asab, yet they were later released on probation.
Amr Hatem Odeh, a father of three, was abducted from Gaza on December 7, 2023, and declared dead less than a week later on December 13, 2023. The Palestinian Prisoner Society did not receive a response from the Israeli army confirming the death of 33-year-old Odeh until May 22, 2025.
The Deadliest Period for Palestinian Prisoners
At least 70 Palestinian detainees have been confirmed killed in Israeli detention between October 2023 and May 2025 as a result of torture by Israeli interrogators or prison units, systemic starvation, or medical negligence through the deliberate denial of medical care.
According to prisoner rights groups, dozens more have been killed in detention, particularly those arrested from Gaza, yet remain unidentified. Israel refuses to provide a comprehensive list of all detained Palestinians, with significant numbers forcibly disappeared and their whereabouts or condition unknown. Nearly all Palestinians released from Israeli prisons and detention camps, regardless of age, often emerge with ashen faces, shaved heads, scrawny bodies, and extensive bruising.
In recent months, prison conditions and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees appear to be deteriorating even further. On May 21, Addameer, the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs, and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, released a joint statement saying, “The continued escalation by the brutal prison system against detainees in various prisons and military camps has entered a more dangerous phase than in previous months.”
The statement highlighted an incident that occurred near the end of March, when Israeli authorities transferred a group of “well-known imprisoned political leaders from solitary confinement in Ramon prison to solitary in Megiddo prison. During the transfer, the detainees were severely physically assaulted, beaten, and abused.”
The group of high-profile prisoners included Ahmed Saadat, Hassan Salameh, Muammar Shahrour, Rizq Rajoub, Mahmoud Atallah, Qasa Marei, Mohannad Shreem, and Monadhel Nefeaat, Addameer told Drop Site.
The prisoners were beaten with batons and boots, attacked by dogs, and verbally threatened that they would be executed and not allowed to leave captivity alive, according to the statement. As a result, the prominent political leaders are suffering from wounds, chronic health problems, along with weakened immunity and severe weight loss. “Many have reported being in such intense pain that they are unable to sleep,” the statement said. The groups characterized it as “unprecedented systematic attempts and threats by the Israeli occupation’s prison authorities to kill several incarcerated Palestinian political leaders.”
According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, the current period is the deadliest for Palestinian detainees in Israeli detention in history.
“The inhumane conditions in which Palestinian political prisoners are being held represent another facet of the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip,” the joint statement said. “Time has now become a critical factor in determining the fate of thousands of prisoners and detainees held by the Israeli occupation, amid a period in which Israel continues to carry out acts of genocide with complete impunity.”
* Dina Jaradat contributed to this article
 | A guest post by
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What’s terrifying is the idea that this kind of depravity is being hard-wired into Israeli society and is normalized through the manufacturing of consent for dehumanization and torture in Israel and in the popular imagination of various complicit states. I’m not sure how anyone survives this without a certain level of madness.
As difficult as this was to read, the USA is a coconspiritor in punishment systems, for transferring migrants detained to both foreign jails, ICE holding areas or for profit USA-based detention facilities. The conditions and treatment described in all these situations is similar though " film" and reporting of these acts and conditions of USA actions is sporatic and almost nonexistant in USA mainstream media. Some reports of conditions in places like Morocco Migrant centers sometimes are seen, because they take place in Africa and they report about people trying to get to EU nations. What happens at home to incarcerrated people and those held without immigration trial and sometimes charged with crimnal offense, like "resisting arrest" in ICE prisons, are along the same continum of brutality and human rights violations, whether on USA soil or sent elsewhere to hide it. Close these facilities and do not detain and do not require bail for release of all those holding valid USA immigration documents or those with appointments for hearings for immigration matters or who may be charged with misdemeanor crimes and are awaiting trial or hearings, in nonimmigration issues. Close ICE facilities and let local jails and courts determine the ability to be released related to community safety.