RAMALLAH, (PIC)
The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) said Israel’s mass arrest policy has long served as a central pillar of its settler-colonial project targeting Palestinians through a systematic structure of repression, isolation, torture and enforced disappearance, warning that these practices have escalated dramatically since the start of the war on Gaza Strip.
In a statement marking the 78th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the PPS said Israeli forces have detained around 23,000 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank since October 2023, including women, children, wounded individuals and former prisoners.
It noted that the figure excludes thousands of arrests carried out in Gaza, where Israel continues to forcibly conceal the fate and whereabouts of many detainees from the enclave.
The rights group said the war has not only expanded the scale of arrests, but also intensified abuses inside Israeli prisons and detention camps, which it described as “organized spaces of torture, starvation, humiliation and systematic medical deprivation” aimed at crushing prisoners both collectively and individually.
According to the PPS, the current phase represents the deadliest period in the history of the Palestinian prisoner movement since 1967, amid escalating cases of torture, sexual abuse, starvation and medical neglect.
It said 89 Palestinian prisoners whose identities have been confirmed have died in Israeli custody since the war began, including detainees who died as a result of torture, starvation or “deliberate medical crimes.”
The latest figures raise the number of known Palestinian prisoners who have died in Israeli custody since 1967 to 326, while Israel continues, according to the statement, to withhold information about dozens of detainees from Gaza who died in custody.
The group stressed that the current prison policies cannot be separated from the broader reality of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, noting that mass detention policies date back to before 1948 through the British mandate’s emergency laws and military court systems later expanded by Israel into one of its primary tools of control over Palestinians.
Over the decades, more than one million Palestinians have been detained, the organization said, as part of efforts to target Palestinian collective consciousness and dismantle social and political structures. Despite this, Palestinian prisoners transformed Israeli prisons into arenas of resistance, organization and national awareness.
The group also highlighted the role of hunger strikes as a key form of resistance inside Israeli prisons and a central tool in the struggle for dignity and basic rights.
The statement further accused Israel of attempting to dismantle the organizational structure of the Palestinian prisoner movement through what it called “systematic terror” against prisoners and detainees, insisting that such measures would fail to break their will or erase their national role in the Palestinian struggle.
According to the latest figures cited by the PPS, Israeli occupation authorities are currently holding more than 9,400 Palestinian prisoners, including 86 women, 3,376 administrative detainees and 1,283 Gaza detainees classified by Israel as “unlawful combatants” under exceptional legal measures that rights groups say facilitate arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance.
