Systematic Torture and Impunity in Israeli Prisons: Adalah Calls for Action on Palestinian Prisoners’ Day 2025

16/04/2025

On Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, 17 April 2025, Adalah calls for immediate international action to end Israel’s unlawful detention regime, dismantle its system of torture camps – instruments of its ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza – and halt the widespread, inhumane treatment of Palestinian prisoners. These abuses are not isolated – they are deliberate, systematic, and carried out with near-total impunity.

According to Addameer, 63 Palestinian prisoners and detainees have died in Israeli prisons and detention camps since 7 October 2023, including at least 40 Palestinians from Gaza, and a minor, a staggering figure that reflects the scale of violence, medical neglect, and appalling conditions Palestinians face in Israeli prisons.

As of April 2025, according to HaMoked, the Israel Prison Service is holding nearly 9,800 Palestinians under the classification of “security” detainees and prisoners, including 3,498 administrative detainees held without charge or trial.

Israel’s prison system is characterized by systemic and widespread violations of Palestinian prisoners’ rights, which has severely deteriorated over the last year and a half. This includes:

Arbitrary and prolonged detention without trial or minimal safeguards
Isolation from the outside world, including denied and restricted contact with lawyers, and total denial of contact with families
Severe physical violence, torture, and psychological abuse
Sexual and gender-based violence, against both female and male detainees
Starvation, denial of medical care, and other essential needs

Israeli courts have consistently upheld and legitimized these repressive policies, routinely delaying or dismissing urgent petitions aimed at addressing grave human rights violations – including extreme overcrowding, unhygienic conditions leading to the spread of diseases such as scabies, starvation, and the ongoing ban on access for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Adalah continues to challenge these repressive policies, including Israel’s unlawful restrictions on lawyers’ access to Palestinian prisoners, the denial of prison visits by Palestinian Knesset Members, and the blanket ban on family visits – particularly for child detainees.

As part of its genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has instituted an unlawful regime of detention based on its so-called “Unlawful Combatants Law” – a framework that enables systematic enforced disappearances, in clear violation of international law. A petition led by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), and co-submitted by Adalah and several other human rights organizations, challenging recent amendments that significantly extend detention periods without judicial oversight and delay access to legal counsel, remains pending before the Israeli Supreme Court. The Court continues to delay and defer, while violations continue. According to HaMoked, as of April 2025, the IPS is holding 1,747 Palestinians as “unlawful combatants”, and the Israeli military is detaining hundreds more in military camps, many of whom are under total blackout, held incommunicado with no access to lawyers, family, or any other external monitoring.

Released detainees continue to expose the horror of these sites — including Sde Teiman, a military camp that has become a symbol of torture, disappearance, and dehumanization. Yet, even in the face of clear-cut evidence, accountability remains virtually nonexistent. In the only conviction Adalah is aware of, an Israeli soldier received just seven months in prison for brutally assaulting bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees.

Israel is not only detaining the living; it is also detaining the bodies of deceased Palestinians as bargaining chips for future negotiations with Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. The deceased include the bodies of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld this degrading, cruel and inhumane practice, despite a 2016 concluding observations by the UN Committee Against Torture finding the withholding of bodies to to constitute torture, confirming its role as an active participant in Israel’s system of oppression.

The international community has largely turned a blind eye to these violations. When the UN Commission of Inquiry released its findings of systemic sexual and reproductive violence against Palestinians in March 2025, the response was silence. No media headlines, no international outcry. By failing to act, the international community continues to allow Israel’s policies of arbitrary detention and torture to persist. Adalah calls for immediate and concrete steps to address these violations.