‘Welcome to hell’—the barbarity of Israel’s prisons

Israeli soldiers describe the Zionist state’s vast network of prisons as “hell”. In them, at least 9,600 Palestinians are held hostage, almost half of whom were detained “without trial, without being presented with the allegations against them, and without access to the right to defend themselves”, according to a report published in August by Israel-based human rights organisation B’Tselem.

Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as Network of Torture contains 55 testimonies from Palestinians released since 7 October. Despite their being only a fraction of the imprisoned population, their stories shine light on a brutal apparatus of physical and psychological terror designed in every facet to crush the Palestinian people.

Since 7 October, Israel’s prison system has operated under a “prison state of emergency”. Even the most basic inmate rights—such as the right to speak to a lawyer and family—have been stripped away.

Accounts of beatings at the hands of guards and mauling by dogs come up again and again in the report. And some 60 Palestinians have been killed in custody in the past year. Take the case of Arafat Hamdan, a diabetic held in Ofer Prison in the West Bank. When his health rapidly deteriorated, his cellmates called guards for help.

“The guard said Arafat needed food and drink, and I told him we had nothing to feed him. He said to wait for breakfast”, Muhammad Srur, a 34-year-old father of two from the West Bank village of Ni’lin, recounted. But by breakfast, Arafat was dead.

Israel’s torture regime is designed to degrade and humiliate to a level of detail so sophisticated that only the cruellest mind could have conceived it.

Twelve to fourteen prisoners are crammed into cells designed for six. Prisoners are forced to eat spoiled food. One testimony describes having only six slices of bread to eat per day. Another relates how they were forced to eat mouldy yoghurt.

“For 191 days, I didn’t see the sun”, Thaer Halahleh recounts.

Sami Khalili, who spent twenty years in Israel’s prisons, had letters from his late mother confiscated. Olive oil and spices that he and his fellow inmates had previously used to cook for themselves were destroyed. Routinely, guards attempt to force Palestinians to kiss the Israeli flag or sing Zionist songs. Refusal, the response of many, is met with hails of fists and batons.

“Once, when a detainee in the cell next to ours asked to swap his yogurt because the expiration date had passed, they punished all the inmates in the cell: they set dogs on them, beat them with clubs, dragged them to the bathroom and beat them up”, Hisham Saleh recounted. “The next day, I could still see their blood on the floor.”

Long before the “prison state of emergency”, the carceral system had been a pillar of apartheid. Before Israel’s genocidal campaign began last year, 5,192 Palestinians languished in the regime’s vast prison network. Israel employs a series of categories to imprison Palestinians without even a pretence of due process. Administrative detention is one of the most notorious. Human rights group Amnesty International defines it as:

“A form of detention under which individuals are detained by state authorities based on secret security grounds that the defendant and their lawyer cannot review, effectively circumventing due process guaranteed for all persons deprived of their liberty under international law.”

Nearly 40 percent of Palestinian men, and 20 percent of the population, spend time in Israel’s prisons at some point in their lives. Few families are untouched by the system’s vast reach. Having served prison time is one of the legal bases for being denied working rights inside Israel, amounting to de facto discrimination for the “crime” of being Palestinian.

Welcome to Hell is a reminder that apartheid is not simply a government policy in Israel. It is embedded in the structure of the state. Judicial, military and prison apparatuses are structured to oppress and discriminate against the Palestinian people. Their apartheid function is established by more than just legislation.

Even the most rudimentary legal “rights” for Palestinians are rendered meaningless by the racist structure of the state apparatus. Muhammad Srur’s description of his attempt, in a court hearing, to appeal his treatment at the hands of guards illustrates this:

“I also spoke about how we were brutally attacked and abused by the guards during transfers, but the judge didn’t pay attention to that. After the hearing, on the way to the cell, the IPS [Israel Prison Service] people took revenge on me for complaining about their behavior. They hit and kicked me brutally the whole way.”

Under far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, apartheid is open policy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal regime has given the state apparatus licence to commit any and every act of violence. The “prison state of emergency” has emboldened and strengthened the far-right government’s allies in the state machine. Negev Prison chief Brigadier General Yosef Knipes explained as much to the conservative Orthodox magazine Mishpacha:

“We can categorically say that the new policy and the tone set from the top are good for us—the executive authority. When government-level officials back decisions and give the professionals in the field the powers needed to get the job done properly, it produces the desired outcomes.”

A change in government will not fundamentally alter these institutions, not least because every significant party is committed to apartheid. As the report concludes: “Minister Ben Gvir’s influence remains evident, but his policy could not have been implemented without the cooperation of the entire system”.

Liberation for Palestine means the dismantling of the whole system of apartheid between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.