Across occupied Palestine the Zionist state has resorted to mass incarceration and unleashing a reign of terror against Palestinian prisoners in a desperate attempt to put down the resistance. Before 7 October, 40% of Palestinian men in the West Bank and Gaza had been arrested at some point in their lives. As of July 2024, there are reportedly 21,000 Palestinians incarcerated in the Zionist prison system out of a population of around 7 million across historic Palestine. Minister of National Security Ben Gvir started his crusade against Palestinian prisoners long before 7 October but the current crisis has given the Zionist state the pretext to accelerate the deterioration of prison conditions.
Concessions previously won through resistance by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons have been systematically stripped away, including radios, televisions, visits, access to the yard, food and showers. Palestinians kidnapped from Gaza and kept in the barbaric Sde Teiman detention camp are held in even worse conditions. In both Zionist prisons and military detention centres, torture, inhumane treatment, and sexual violence are systematic and rampant. This oppression has failed to defeat the Palestinian resistance and has intensified divisions within Israel’s ruling class and Israeli society as a whole.
Assassinations
Since 7 October, at least 60 Palestinians have been murdered in Israeli custody according to a report from Israeli rights group B’Tselem entitled Welcome to Hell. Causes of death include torture, medical neglect, and outright murder by prison guards. Testimony from Palestinians released from detention also reveals the targeting of resistance fighters and leaders.
This is illustrated by the murder of 23-year-old Abdul-Rahman Baseem. A member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, he was arrested during a Zionist military incursion into Nablus and taken to Megiddo prison where three prisoners are known to have been murdered since 7 October. He was handcuffed and beaten to the point he had broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. He was denied medical treatment and died three weeks later from his injuries.
Leading Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine activist Walid Daqqa is an example of the Israeli prison regime deliberately killing a resistance leader through medical neglect. A Palestinian citizen of Israel, he had been incarcerated for 38 years and continued to lead resistance from inside prison. He died of cancer on 7 April 2024 after being denied life-saving medical treatment.
Families of resistance leaders are also targeted. Wafa Jarrar, the wife of imprisoned Hamas leader Abdel-Jabbar, was brutally arrested in Jenin on 21 May. Due to the wounds she sustained both her legs had to be amputated. She was released on 30 May and died of her injuries on 5 August.
Systematic torture
Torture and degrading treatment have always been a feature of the Israeli prison system but this has escalated during the genocidal war on Gaza. Prisons have become so overcrowded that cells intended to hold six now hold 12-14 people, with some forced to sleep on the floor with no mattress. Prisoners are locked in cells for 23 hours a day, only being allowed out for showers which rarely occur. One prisoner testified that he did not see sunlight for 191 days.
Brutality from guards in regular prisons and Sde Teiman has included:
- Beatings with rifle butts, batons and brass knuckles, and kicks and punches.
- Prisoners being pepper sprayed.
- Stun grenades thrown into cells.
- Sleep deprivation and starvation.
- Prisoners having bones broken and then denied treatment.
- Israeli citizens being brought to prisons to verbally abuse prisoners.
- Attacks and sexual assaults with dogs.
Divisions within the ruling class
In July, Ronen Bar, head of Zionist intelligence agency Shin Bet sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ben Gvir, criticising the prison conditions and Ben Gvir specifically, warning of an ‘incarceration crisis’ and that the situation was a ‘ticking time bomb’. This was no humanitarian appeal but a warning that the prison situation posed a strategic danger to Israel’s interests and its ability to win the war.
Bar revealed that there are 21,000 Palestinians in Zionist prisons which only have a capacity of 14,500. This hampers Shin Bet’s ability to investigate prisoners linked to the resistance movement in order to gather intelligence, and has forced them to cancel arrests of people who are wanted. He criticised the decision to block Red Cross visits, calling this a ‘strategic error’. He also attacked the use of torture, warning that it exposed high-ranking Israeli officials to arrests and international tribunals. He also revealed that he had reliable intelligence that prisoners were planning retaliation, going as far as finding out where prison guards lived so that they could be assassinated; in July a prison guard was found stabbed to death in his West Bank home. Bar also pointed out that with Israel’s prisons making international news, it risked the ‘security trade’ with Western powers, harming Israel’s international standing and its legitimacy to continue the war.
Ultimately, the letter was merely a call for the reform of the occupation prison system. Bar advocated for ‘deterrence’ through things such as removing privileges, but called for torture to stop because little was being gained from it. Ben Gvir dismissed the concerns and called for ‘terrorists’ to be executed to ‘solve’ the overcrowding issue.
Zionism’s ‘heroes’
These divisions among the Zionists were further exposed on 29 July when military police entered Sde Teiman and detained 10 occupation troops. The personnel had brutally raped a Palestinian detainee, leading him to be hospitalised with severe internal injuries. Footage of the assault was later released for the world to see. State-sanctioned sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners has been constant throughout Israel’s history and there have been numerous testimonies of rape as a weapon of torture at Sde Teiman with some detainees even dying as a result. It is clear that the arrests only happened so that, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, the Zionist state could be seen to be disciplining its foot soldiers, in order to protect officials from prosecution and salvage Israel’s legitimacy.
Israeli society was outraged at the arrests. Far-right mobs, led by Knesset members, stormed Sde Teiman and the Beit Lid military facility where the personnel were held. Protests have continued in Israel demanding the torturers are released and the charges dropped. A poll by the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies found that 65% of Jewish Israelis opposed any criminal action against the torturers. Ben Gvir released a statement on X/Twitter condemning the arrests, calling the perpetrators ‘heroes’.
While united in its goal to colonise Palestine, the more pragmatic sections of the Israeli ruling class, represented by so-called ‘liberal Zionists’, want Israel’s existence to be normalised. and to present an appearance of legitimacy, which the open murder, torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees erodes. Additionally, there is still a fear of what Palestinians might do from behind bars and that excess brutality could provoke an uncontrollable reaction. The moving of imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti to solitary confinement was justified by his supposed plans for a third intifada.
The Zionist regime continues to act with complete impunity and use outright brutality in its attempts to crush Palestinian resistance and restore the appearance of invincibility Israel lost on 7 October 2023. However, the majority of Palestinians still support armed struggle and continue to support their prisoners – as shown by the demonstrations across the West Bank on Palestinian Prisoners Day in April this year. Despite the Zionist regime of terror in the West Bank and the imprisonment of countless Palestinian leaders, Palestinians remained undeterred and have taken to the streets in their thousands to protest in solidarity with their prisoners. No amount of brutality can crush such determination.
Free all Palestinian prisoners!
Kotsai Sigauke
*See FRFI 299: Free the Palestinian hostages!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 302 October/November 2024
