Since the October 7th attacks, Israel has waged a devastating war in the Gaza Strip, which has led to the deaths of more than thirty thousand Palestinians. As part of that campaign, Israel has also detained thousands of Palestinians from Gaza; prisoners who have been released have described extensive physical abuse from Israeli forces, and, already, at least twenty-seven detainees from Gaza have died in military custody. At the same time, Israeli forces have arrested thousands more Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, at least ten of whom have reportedly died in Israel prisons.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (P.C.A.T.I.) is an non-governmental organization that was established in 1990, and represents Palestinians and Israelis who claim to have been tortured by Israeli authorities. I recently spoke by phone with Tal Steiner, its executive director. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Steiner and I discussed why so many prisoners have died in Israeli custody since October 7th, the details of the harsh Israeli crackdown in the West Bank, and how P.C.A.T.I.’s work is seen in Israel.
What do we know about what’s been happening in Israeli prisons since October 7th?
We’re currently looking at almost ten thousand Palestinian detainees from the West Bank and Gaza. Of those, we are looking at two groups of concern. The first one consists of more than nine thousand “security” detainees, mostly from the West Bank, who are being held in regular Israeli prisons—not a new phenomenon but one that has changed since the start of the war. That’s an increase of roughly a hundred per cent from normal years. It’s a result of mass-arrest campaigns related to the war.
We know that this means extreme overcrowding of prisons. We’ve heard and collected reports of cells that are designed to hold five or six people holding as many as twelve, or more. We know that this has led to severe shortages of food, of electricity, of sanitary conditions, of being able to walk outside. We know that the International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.) has been banned from visiting all Israeli prisons since October 7th. We also know—through evidence that P.C.A.T.I. and other N.G.O.s have collected—of what we view as systemic abuse and violence by prison guards toward Palestinian detainees since October 7th. We’ve documented nineteen different incidents of torture and abuse in seven different Israel Prison Service (I.P.S.) facilities by different I.P.S. units, all of which have led us to believe that we’re looking at a policy rather than just isolated incidents. [A spokesperson for the I.P.S. said that “all prisoners are detained according to the law” and that “all basic rights required are fully applied by professionally trained prison guards.”]
When you said there was a hundred-per-cent increase, what is the time period for that?
There is a dashboard at HaMoked, a partner N.G.O. here in Israel which monitors incarcerations. In normal years, at any given moment, what you see is between four thousand and five thousand security detainees, mostly from the West Bank, in Israeli prisons. And, as I’ve said, since October 7th, the most recent figures are currently more than nine thousand. So this is about a hundred-per-cent increase. And we also see this through reports that the I.P.S. has provided, during Knesset committee hearings, which report overcrowding.
We have actually petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, because we think this overcrowding violates prior decisions by the Israeli Supreme Court that have ordered the I.P.S. to provide minimum living space. Even before the war, we were looking at less than four metres per person, which is below the international standards of incarceration. But, since the start of the war, the I.P.S. has actually been allowed both by legislators and, later on, by the Supreme Court, to decrease even that, which means that people are now being made to sleep on the floor. The I.P.S. doesn’t have the capacity to even take the people it has detained out for regular walks outside. Prison visitations have been limited.
You said that in normal times there are four thousand to five thousand security detainees, mostly from the West Bank. These are prisoners that are being held in Israel proper?
Yes, most of those prisons are within Israel proper, which in itself is a violation of humanitarian international law. According to humanitarian law, an occupying power cannot take residents of the occupied territory and incarcerate them in its own territory, in the occupying power’s territory. It’s part of the Geneva Conventions, but Israel has not been following that since forever. The vast majority of Palestinian detainees from the West Bank are incarcerated in prison facilities that are inside Israel proper.
Now, that is problematic for many reasons. Firstly, because it means that detainees’ families are quite immediately disconnected from them. It makes it much harder for families to visit. You have to remember that most Palestinian detainees don’t have phone privileges, so they’re absolutely disconnected from the outside world. Since October 7th, both visitations by the International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.) and family visitations that the I.C.R.C. facilitates have been blocked. Beyond the very limited visits by lawyers of N.G.O.s such as P.C.A.T.I., which have also been increasingly hard to arrange, those people don’t see any visitors from the outside, and nobody can learn of their situation. This is why collecting the evidence on the abuse that they’ve been suffering is so crucial: because they cannot report it otherwise.
So most of these people are being arrested by the military, but then going into civilian prisons?
Yes. They’re taken into civilian prisons, but in different sections or wards of the prison designated for what are called “security prisoners.” They can be held there, sometimes with Israeli citizens who are also defined as security inmates, or people suspected or charged or convicted for security-related offenses.
So how does your group learn about, say, a Palestinian man arrested in the West Bank by the Israeli military and brought into the I.P.S.?
We have a field worker in the West Bank, and families whose members have been detained can reach out and give details. We also coöperate with different Palestinian organizations representing prisoners. We can also learn about it from the media. When there are wide-scale arrests in the West Bank, it usually gets reported on. We compile a profile of the people who are most likely to become victims of torture. We trace them, which means we understand which prison they’ve been moved to, because one of the problems is that the Israeli military doesn’t give Palestinians information about the whereabouts of their family members.
The second thing is to arrange for a visit. We visit them as lawyers based on their right to counsel. We take their narrative from the moment of the arrest, subsequent interrogation, and incarceration, and identify if they’ve been victimized; then we decide together with them what kind of representation they want.
When you said you were concerned that in some of these cases torture was a policy; what makes you think that?
If a person is detained in an arrest that also has the presence of the Israeli Security Agency (I.S.A.), for example, that means that, most likely, he’ll be taken into interrogation. Again, I would say this is one of the things that make this period of time unusual. Typically, P.C.A.T.I. would document cases of torture within the framework of the I.S.A. interrogations. Since the start of the war, the abuse that we’ve been documenting comes mostly from I.P.S. prison guards, but that was not the case before this. I think that, before the war, the Israel Prison Service understood its mission to be a professional custodial agency. And, since October 7th, what we’ve been looking at—the type of abuse, how random it is, how brutal it is—we see that as giving rise to a more vengeful sentiment allowing prison guards to lash out at prisoners more brutally and randomly than before.
You said you thought that, before October 7th, the I.P.S. was a professional agency to some degree. But you’ve also documented a lot of torture in Israeli prisons before October 7th. So how do you sort of synthesize this?
No, not to the same scale. Most cases of actual torture that we would document were during interrogation—not so much during I.P.S. custody. I.P.S. custody had different problems. The living conditions were not good, but we didn’t see many cases of torture. There were a few a year, but not as many as we’re seeing now. And I want to say that the incidents which we and our partner organizations have documented are of extreme physical violence. And we also have to note that, at the time of a report we and our partner organizations sent, last month, to the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, at least six Palestinian detainees had already died in I.P.S. facilities. Since then, there have been reports of at least ten deaths in prison. That is also another figure which is unprecedented. And, at least for some of those cases, there is evidence leading to concerns that the deaths were linked with violence and with medical negligence. This is a phenomenon that is new.
I want to ask you about the deaths, but when you say that, previously, abuses happened while detainees are being interrogated by the Israeli Security Agency, not held by the I.P.S., does that mean that these prisoners who are deemed security risks are interrogated before they land in the prisons or they’re taken out of the prisons and they undergo some sort of military interrogation? What’s the distinction there?
Again, in normal times, a person who is targeted by the Israeli Security Agency, is arrested by the military, then taken into interrogation in a specific location operated by the I.S.A. And then, finally, he’s moved to I.P.S. facilities to await his trial or to be detained administratively. It could also be the case that a person, even after being convicted, would be taken into interrogation again.
I’m not saying that torture in interrogations is not happening right now. It’s likely that, as a result of this emergency situation and the attack on Israel, many such detainees would be characterized as what we, in Israel, call a “ticking time bomb” situation or people withholding information that may jeopardize lives, which, in P.C.A.T.I.’s analysis, is a way of enabling and legitimizing the use of torture. But those are the cases that we would learn about only months from now because all of them are still denied counsel. The I.S.A. does not allow visitors, and we’re unable to reach them. But the cases that have emerged so far are those that have already concluded their interrogation or perhaps were never interrogated in the first place and were just placed in administrative detention or otherwise.
You mentioned reports of at least ten Palestinian detainees who died in I.P.S. facilities in the past five months. Do you have some idea of how many Palestinian detainees might die in I.P.S. facilities in a normal year?
One to two cases, usually of veteran detainees or prisoners, or elderly people with prior medical conditions. The number of deaths we’re seeing in five months is unprecedented. And many of them, by the way, have been younger detainees, recently detained. All of those lead to the concern that violence was involved in their deaths.
Do we have evidence about how they died?
There have been autopsies conducted on at least some of the deceased. We know that our fellow-organization, Physicians for Human Rights—Israel, has attended some of those autopsies.
In one other case, of a detainee who died in Ktzi’ot Prison, a police investigation has been opened in regard to his death, and it has been reported that nineteen prison guards have been removed from service and will stay out of service until that investigation has concluded.
Let’s turn to Gaza, which you said in your very first answer was the second part of this. What do we know about Palestinian detainees from Gaza since October 7th?
A portion of them, more than six hundred, are people who were captured on or after October 7th. They’re being held in the I.P.S. as well. Beyond that, after cross-referencing some reports, we estimate that there are between a few dozens and a few hundreds detainees from Gaza in military camps at any given moment. Those are people who’ve been detained during the military operation. The military invades a neighborhood, a hospital, some other facility, and arrests many of the people there. And we’ve all seen the pictures of men on trucks naked, often in very humiliating ways, and they’re taken into three military camps that have been turned into detention camps.
And I know this because the military commander had to make an announcement that those military camps were serving as detention centers. One is Sede Teiman, in the south of Israel. And the other two are Anatot and Ofer, in the occupied territories. Those are military camps that have been turned into ad-hoc detention centers. We don’t know the exact numbers because the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.) would not release them. Many people are detained, questioned. The ones who are identified as suspects are held; the others are released or deported back into Gaza. This is how we’ve learned of the very difficult conditions that the detainees are held in, according to multiple reports in international media. They’re held in open-air cages, and blindfolded and handcuffed; they can be subjected to physical punishment, humiliation, and abuse. They’re made to sleep on the floor. It gets very cold in the Israeli desert at night right now. It has been confirmed that, already, twenty-seven people have died in those military camps. Now those military camps are barring N.G.O.s and the media from entering. The I.C.R.C. doesn’t visit, and our lawyers can’t visit. As far as we know, nobody from the outside world has entry into these detention sites. [A spokesperson for the I.D.F. cited security reasons for not disclosing the number of detainees. The spokesperson said that “detainees who return to the Strip are subject to the control of the terrorist organization which can harm them and force them to speak out against the State of Israel against their will.” The spokesperson added that the military acts in accordance with Israeli and international law, and could not comment on pending investigations into the deaths of the detainees.]
And we can also tell you that the people held in those military camps are defined under a legal framework that’s totally different from that of West Bank detainees. This is the legal framework that allows for them to be so far removed from any access; it’s called the unlawful-combatants law.
Is this the 2002 law that allows Israel to detain people it deems to be unlawful combatants?
Yes. The initial law was legislated in 2002 and has since been applied to a few people each year, initially to Hezbollah combatants who had been captured in Lebanon and brought to Israel. It has never been applied to so many people at the same time. Again, we’re looking at possibly hundreds of people being defined as illegal combatants. The more than six hundred people from Gaza in I.P.S. custody are unlawful combatants, and so is everybody else in the military camps.
On December 18th, the Knesset amended the law, basically eroding all the minimal procedural safeguards that were there in the first place. So, right now, according to this law, a person can be arrested without so much as an arrest warrant for up to forty-five days. This detention can go up to seventy-five days without judicial scrutiny, and, if a court judge decides it, a detainee can be held for up to a hundred and eighty days without counsel. That’s six months that a person can be held without having the right to visitation by a lawyer.
What do you think about this number of twenty-seven Palestinians from Gaza being killed or dying since October 7th? One of the reasons I wanted to call you was that number jumped out at me.
This whole context is a new one for us. The number of deaths in regular prison is way beyond any figure that we had seen a year ago. Twenty-seven deaths in military camps in a span of five months is alarming because we understand it in the context of the living conditions. People are brought into those camps, and many of them could have been wounded because they’d been captured in combat. They could have been elderly or unwell. Many of them were captured in hospitals. We don’t have the exact numbers of the age differentiation, but we do know from multiple reports that the living conditions have been subhuman. Being forced to kneel most hours of the day, blindfolded and handcuffed; being afforded very minimal medical care, if at all.
This is also based on a procedure that was published by the Israeli Ministry of Health stipulating in what manner detainees would receive medical attention in those facilities—a procedure that disregards very basic ethical standards of health care. Then you factor in the abuse, the physical punishments, the fact that many Israeli hospitals have refused to give them care since the onset of the war. This is the context in which we understand those twenty-seven deaths.
How will you go about finding out how much torture occurred? What will you be looking for, going forward?
Once this war ends and the emergency situation subsides, there will still be a lot of work ahead of us. We will still need to gain access to prisons that are for now limiting entry. We will need to gather more evidence, more testimony, to gain the trust of victims to file complaints on their behalf. We’re not very optimistic because Israel already had a huge accountability gap with incidents of torture. We know that, even prior to the war, out of fourteen hundred complaints of torture filed to the Ministry of Justice, zero cases have resulted in indictments. And, again, those are numbers up to 2023.
Going back how far?
To 2001.
There have been fourteen hundred cases of torture complaints and zero indictments?
So Israel already has a huge accountability gap which is perpetuated by the Israeli judiciary and legislators. So of course the challenge, once the current war is over, will even be bigger. We also understand that this is not solely our responsibility. The responsibility is firstly for the Israeli legal system to investigate those cases, and we expect and demand them to do exactly that. To open public and thorough and sincere investigations into each incident of death, and, where appropriate, to place criminal charges.
I imagine that, before October 7th, there was not always full-throated support for your work within Israel. Do you feel a little bit like you’re howling at the wind after October 7th?
Well, I would say that we are an Israeli N.G.O. which does a lot of protection of Palestinian detainees, and our work has never been popular in Israel. There’s been much criticism over our very uncompromising moral standard that torture is absolutely prohibited under any circumstances. But of course, since October 7th, since the tragedies that Israelis have experienced, the atrocities that have been committed, I would say whatever little empathy the mainstream Jewish Israeli audience had for our cause has been eroded to a great extent. I can’t say that most Israelis or even a few of them support what we do right now. We understand that, for Jewish Israelis, the empathy for the conditions of these people is all but gone. ♦
