faraamaa i/ By Attorney Nadia Daqqa

I have always believed that Israeli legal mechanisms, particularly in the field of human rights, are a double-edged sword. Anyone who has utilized these tools has likely experienced this reality. For instance, in attempts to extract rights, the law's slow pace can feel torturous. This is under normal circumstances; since the outbreak of the current devastating war on Gaza, however, this sword has become one-edged, and its impact is clear.

In many fields, the war and its ramifications have stripped away layers of facade, revealing hidden truths, particularly in the legal realm. It does not take extensive experience representing Palestinian detainees and prisoners to recognize the catastrophe unfolding in this domain. The shift is stark and undeniable. While describing this shift as dramatic does not negate the daily routine violations in Israeli prisons, it underscores the catastrophic dimensions of the parallel war declared on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention centers.

During wartime—especially in a conflict of this scale—the dominant imagery on our screens is of "traditional" warfare: killings, destruction, displacement, and hunger. Yet, what is occurring in Israeli prisons mirrors many aspects of Gaza’s plight, even if public coverage and reaction fail to rise to the level of a declared war.

This is not surprising. Over the years, Israel has succeeded in marginalizing the plight of Palestinian prisoners through policies of isolation from the outside world and the erosion of collective solidarity in favor of individual struggles. Since the Second Intifada, Israel has severely restricted prisoners' ability to communicate with the outside world, limiting contact to immediate family members only.

These measures have dulled public engagement with prisoner issues. Over time, this distancing succeeded, reducing public solidarity to a point where activities supporting hunger strikes often involved only the prisoners’ families and close circles. A heartbreaking example of this is the image of the wife of martyr Khader Adnan protesting alone in Ramallah in support of her husband’s hunger strike. Additionally, the rise of individual hunger strikes among administrative detainees has further diminished public mobilization, making the once-common collective hunger strikes a rarity.

This context helps illustrate Israel's restrictive policies against Palestinian prisoners and the escalation of these policies amid the war on Gaza. Following the war’s outbreak, the Israeli prison administration declared a state of emergency that continues as of this writing. According to the emergency orders, prisoners’ daily movements are restricted to the bare minimum permitted by law. This was echoed in a statement by the Israeli prison administration to the High Court in response to a petition filed by Israeli human rights organizations regarding unprecedented violations of Palestinian prisoners' conditions.

In reality, conditions in prisons fall far below the minimum rights guaranteed under Israeli law, which is already hostile to Palestinian prisoners. With the declaration of war, prisons have transformed into camps housing thousands of detainees, whose numbers rose from 5,192 in early October to 9,077 by early March. Prisoners have been completely isolated from the outside world: family visits have been entirely suspended, and even lawyer visits have been obstructed by illegal restrictions. This has led to a blackout on the conditions and testimonies inside prisons, especially during the first month of the war. Additionally, for the first time, visits by International Red Cross representatives were barred, escalating the isolation to unprecedented levels and obscuring the details of detention conditions.

Reports soon emerged of widespread physical assaults on prisoners, including brutal beatings, often leading to martyrdom. Some prisoners succumbed to injuries from these attacks, while others died due to deliberate medical neglect. Over six months, ten prisoners died within Israeli-run prisons, in addition to 27 detainees from Gaza who were reportedly killed in military detention camps.

The conditions described by prisoners amount to deliberate slow killing, forming a systematic policy of continuous torture. According to prisoners’ accounts, Israeli jailers have adopted starvation as a policy. For instance, during the war, a single plate of rice shared among ten prisoners often constitutes the main meal. In some cases, this is accompanied by one bowl of soup for the same group. Hunger has become the norm, with no prisoner having felt full for months.

Another parallel to Gaza’s suffering is the scarcity of water. Prisoners report severe restrictions on bathing and a lack of soap and cleaning supplies. Some prisoners, especially in Negev Prison, have not bathed for weeks or even months. Water supply to restrooms is limited to one hour a day, creating severe health risks in overcrowded conditions.

Adding to these hardships, prisoners were stripped of all personal belongings and left with only the clothes they wore at the start of the war. Most have worn the same clothes for months, with no means to wash them, and are enduring the winter cold without proper attire.

Even access to medical care has been weaponized. Prisoners report that requests for medical attention are ignored unless the situation is deemed "life-threatening." For example, a prisoner in Negev Prison recounted that his hand was broken during a violent assault and left untreated, forcing it to heal improperly without painkillers or medical care.

Thus, prisoners face ongoing assaults, the threat of death, starvation, water deprivation, cold, and medical neglect. These conditions mirror much of what is happening in Gaza but receive little attention or coverage. While prisoners are far fewer in number than Gaza's population, the isolation policies have succeeded once again in muting public engagement with their plight.

Beyond these general punitive measures, there has been a deliberate escalation in eroding collective solidarity among prisoners. While the collective punishment targets all Palestinian prisoners, legal challenges to these policies have been largely ineffective. The Israeli High Court has rejected petitions against collective measures, insisting that any violations must be addressed through individual petitions by affected prisoners.

This focus on individual legal challenges pits a single prisoner against the entire prison administration, making the process inherently biased and ineffective. With the burden of proof falling on the prisoner, their emaciated body often becomes the only evidence of their suffering.

The deliberate shift from collective to individual struggles has proven effective, with the Israeli High Court—symbolizing Israel's highest legal authority—reinforcing this isolationist policy. As a result, the sword of Israeli law now cuts deeply in one direction, leaving its other edge entirely dulled.