GazaHerald – Inside Israeli prisons, Palestinians are facing what rights groups describe as systematic torture and deliberate neglect, targeted violence that leaves inmates not only brutalized but also abandoned by a silent international community.
In a recent briefing detailing the situation of Palestinian detainees during the first half of July, the Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) revealed harrowing testimonies collected through legal prison visits.
The accounts portray a consistent and organized pattern of abuse across detention centers, targeting over 10,800 Palestinian prisoners, including women and children.
Detainees described being shot in the limbs with rubber bullets, their ribs broken under beatings, and cigarettes extinguished on their skin. Some reported electric shocks, prolonged starvation, and unchecked outbreaks of scabies due to medical neglect.
Others were left to suffer untreated injuries, malnourishment, and isolation, with no access to basic care.
“These are not isolated cases,” a PPS statement noted. “They are systematic crimes carried out under the authority of the Israeli prison administration, putting thousands of lives at increasing risk.”
The organization called on the international human rights system to break its silence and take meaningful action. It demanded immediate steps to hold Israeli leaders accountable and to end the impunity that, in its words, has “paralyzed the international legal framework.”
A Campaign of Genocide Extending Behind Bars
The abuse in Israeli prisons, according to PPS, cannot be separated from the broader Israeli campaign of violence and starvation underway since October 2023. With full backing from the United States, Israel has carried out a war in the Gaza Strip that has killed, starved, displaced, and terrorized the Palestinian people on a mass scale.
To date, more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded, the majority of them children and women. At least 11,000 remain missing under the rubble. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee their homes. A deliberate blockade on food and aid has triggered a famine that has taken countless lives, including children too weak to cry.
Despite international rulings, including from the International Court of Justice, calling for an end to the violence, the campaign has only intensified, with the horrors extending beyond Gaza’s destroyed neighborhoods and into the concrete walls of prison cells.
The PPS emphasized that prisoners are now paying the price not only for their resistance or political beliefs but also for the international community’s failure to act.
“Removing Israel from the circle of international immunity is no longer a moral obligation, it is a legal and humanitarian necessity,” the statement said.
