Assault, Starvation & Disease: Report Reviews Dangerous Conditions for Palestinian Political Prisoners

May 19, 2025

Ramallah, occupied Palestine – An unprecedented level of systematic crimes continues to be committed against Palestinian political detainees by the Israeli occupation’s prison authorities. Based on testimonies obtained through recent lawyers’ visits and released detainees, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) presents a briefing on the horrific conditions for thousands of political prisoners languishing in Israel’s central prisons and military camps since the genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip. 

Dozens of lawyers’ visits were carried out since the start of May, to detainees in the following prisons: Naqab, Gilboa, Megiddo, Ganot, Shatta, Damon, and Ofer. This report highlights systematic crimes including physical assault, torture, starvation, denial of medical treatment, and sexual assault.

In Gilboa and Shatta prisons in particular, detainees’ testimonies focused on systematic acts of physical assault and repression by heavily armed special prison forces, usually accompanied by attack dogs.

Prisoners reported a large-scale raid on Section 3 of Gilboa prison, where all detainees were removed from their cells, handcuffed behind their backs, brutally beaten, and sprayed with pepper gas. In Shatta Prison, a group of detainees described experiencing violent assaults in Section 7 at the hands of the Matsada special prison forces, including the use of gas against them.

These systematic attacks — with varying levels of physical assault — represent one of the core and consistent policies that the prison system is using to unprecedented levels following the onset of the genocide. Hundreds of detainees have sustained injuries including broken ribs and limbs. Many prisoners continue to suffer severe effects after their release. A significant number of recently-released prisoners bore fractures they sustained due to repeated assaults, to the point that many can no longer remember how many times they were beaten over their time behind bars.

Furthermore, several prisoners recently visited in the Naqab prison confirmed that they were beaten while being brought to the visitation room to see their lawyers — a violation that has now become routine in some prisons, especially Naqab. Although this policy had initially intensified during the early stages of the recent assault on prisoners, it has now re-emerged in prisoners' testimonies.

Deteriorating Health & Growing Starvation

There has been a severe deterioration in the health of the majority of Palestinian prisoners. This issue has now become the central concern, as a direct result of continuous torture, starvation, and the deprivation of medical care. Diseases and epidemics continue to spread among the inmates, further endangering the lives of many, particularly amid an outbreak of scabies skin disease, which, if left untreated, leads to serious symptoms that may result in death, especially among those with weakened immune systems and chronic illnesses.

Many prisoners have been denied lawyers’ visits due to their infection with scabies, especially in Ganot Prison, where prisoner defense groups face extreme difficulty in facilitating visits for hundreds of prisoners. According to recent data, the disease is widely spreading in the prison, and the administration is using the outbreak as a pretext to prevent prisoners from being allowed visits.

Scabies continues to dominate the majority of prisoner testimonies, especially as the prison administration intentionally transfers detainees between sections and prisoners — a policy that has significantly contributed to the outbreak of the disease.

Despite some attempts made by human rights groups through legal appeals to the Israeli occupation’s supreme court, the measures that the prison administration claims to have taken — such as providing certain antibiotics and ointments — have, in reality, had no tangible effect in curbing the spread of the disease. This is due to the ongoing policies that are, in fact, the root cause of the outbreak, which is the denial of detainees from access to hygienic cleaning supplies, to enough clothes, and sunlight or outside air.

Many prisoners, whose numbers are too great to count, have been suffering from the disease for several months, and others have been infected for a second time.

As for the crime of enforced starvation, what is referred to by the occupation’s prison system as “meals,” in reality amounts to meager scraps of food that are insufficient to satiate an average human’s hunger. Palestinian detainees are being starved behind bars, an issue that constitutes the central cause of the deterioration in prisoners' health and the severe weight loss among them. This has been clearly reflected in faces and bodies of hundreds of released prisoners. Others have been martyred in the same way, or as a result of the complex diseases they developed due to starvation. On March 22, 17-year-old child detainee Walid Ahmad succumbed after being starved to death by prison guards.

Detainees across all prisons have reported receiving the same types of food in the same minimal quantities for many months. Many detainees have been diagnosed with various illnesses — some of them serious — as a result of starvation. The diseases that arise have also contributed to the killing of a number of detainees.

The PPS additionally highlighted that overcrowding in prison cells is worsening due to the continued mass arrest campaigns. Some cells originally designed to hold six prisoners now hold up to 11 people, further accelerating the spread of disease among inmates. A large number of prisoners are forced to sleep on the floor, and there is often inadequate space for them to even move inside the cells due to the severe overcrowding.

The systematic crimes being committed against Palestinian prisoners will inevitably lead to a rise in the number of martyred detainees. The number of those who have been killed both directly and indirectly by the occupation’s prison authorities has already reached 69 people since the start of the genocide. This figure includes only those whose identities are known to the relevant institutions. This phase represents the most violent period in the history of the prisoners’ movement.

As of the start of May 2025, the number of Palestinian political prisoners has exceeded 10,100 — a figure that does not include detainees held in military camps run by the Israeli occupation forces.

Among them are 37 female detainees and more than 400 child prisoners. Meanwhile, some 3,577 people arrested in the occupied West Bank are being held without trial or charge under “administrative detention,” and 1,846 people arrested in occupied Gaza are also held without trial or charge under a different legal mechanism, the "unlawful combatants" law.

Palestinian Prisoner’s Society