PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: What happens to Palestinians in Israeli prisons?
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
[music]
Alaa Salama
Welcome to The +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel Palestine. I’m Alaa Salama, Audience Engagement Manager at +972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the river and the sea. Before we dive in, a quick reminder that what we do would not be possible without you, our readers and listeners. If you believe in our mission and would like to support our work, head over to 972mag.com/members and find out how to become a member of +972 or make a one off donation.
For decades, Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation have faced mass incarceration, with almost half of Palestinian men in the West Bank and Gaza detained at least once in their lives. That picture has deteriorated further since October 7th, especially in Gaza, where Israeli soldiers have rounded up thousands of men, women, and children, many never to be seen again. Around 100 Palestinians are known to have died in Israeli custody over the past three years, and with the fate of so many missing Gazans still unknown, the true toll is likely far worse.
Joining us today is Sahar Francis, a Palestinian human rights lawyer with decades of experience defending Palestinian detainees. Together, we’ll examine the grim reality inside Israel’s infamous prison and legal systems designed to uphold apartheid and sow fear in Palestinian society. Sahar, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to The +972 podcast.
We know now that there are more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, possibly a lot more. We don’t have exact numbers. We also know that since October 7th, at least 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli prisons. And again, the number could be much higher. Do we know what exactly changed since October 7th that we’re seeing this unprecedented level of deaths?
Sahar Francis
Actually, the situation of the Palestinian prisoners inside the Israeli prisons deteriorated dramatically after October 7th on all levels. And even on the level of the mass arrest campaigns. And first, allow me to say that officially the prison authority system admit[ted] that they have up to at least the end of July 26, around 9,400 Palestinian detainees. Of course, this is changing on a daily basis because there’s daily arrests and daily releases. here’s also the prisoners that are held under the army that they are not included in the prison authority statistics. As you said, we never know the accurate figure of the total number of the Palestinian prisoners arrested in the Israeli prisons.
But immediately after the 7th of October, when the government decided about the emergency situation in all of the country, the emergency were as well brought into the prisons. They declared [an] emergency security situation inside the prisons. And this [was] reflected immediately in the conditions of the imprisonment. They totally closed all the sections. They canceled all the visits from the outside, which included the Red Cross committee and the families, as well the lawyers for the first couple of months. We were not allowed to visit the prisoners and they closed all the clinics, the medical clinics. They confiscated all the clothes, all the property, the books, the quantity of the materials that the prisoners had in their rooms, and they left the prisoners with nothing, with just the clothes that they were wearing. And they minimized the food. They started with policies of cutting water, cutting electricity, hygiene problems, and physical attacks. Daily, the special units and the guards units were raiding the sections and the rooms of the prisoners, physically attacking them, beating using tear gas or bullets, [rubber-]covered bullets, and so on.
And this is what caused the increase in the cases of the deaths inside custody. People were dying under torture or direct physical abuse that was implemented by the police guards and not the interrogators. Actually, we documented 91 cases that we know the names and the identity of the prisoners who died in custody. And as you mentioned, it could be more than 100 cases that they lost their life in custody, especially from the Gaza Strip, because tens of people and hundreds are still missing. Their families reported that they were arrested by the army inside the Strip or in inside ‘48 areas after the 7th of October. But when we referred to ask the army about these cases, we were answered that they don’t exist. And these cases, actually, we don’t know exactly how many people were killed either in the strip or inside ‘48 areas and they were killed after being detained actually and their bodies are still kept with the authorities.
Alaa Salama
Facilities such as Sde Teiman and Rakefet — do you see more deaths coming out of them or do we just not have the data?
Sahar Francis
I would say that maybe Sde Teiman was the highest facility where people lost their lives there, although we don’t know the exact number of the people that died in this detention facility, but because we collected lots of testimonies from people, from detainees, that they were describing the bad conditions and the treatment and physical attacks and the sexual abuse that the detainees faced in this facility. But it’s not the only facility where people lost their lives. And I would say that there is other facilities like Ofer, Ketziot prison, where people died more than in Rakefet.
So for the audience to understand more, Rakefet is one section in Ramleh compound, the prison in Ramleh includes several sections. One of them is Rakefet. That was in the past, in the ’70s or the ’80s, were used as well for security prisoners, Palestinian prisoners, that they are classified as security cases. The building is under the ground which makes it also more under security measures and security control. It’s isolation cells. Each cell includes three or four detainees, [a] very small yard for the recreation. Currently, just prisoners from the Gaza Strip are held in this section, and they are in total isolation from the outside world. The lawyers are able to do that and there are lots of restrictions, of course, but the conditions are similar, I would say, to other sections.
For example, the Ofer prison, the new military facility that was developed after the genocide started in Ofer, near the main prison under the prison authority, where they built or constructed a new prison. The conditions in Ofer, as well, are very, very bad, as well as in Ketziot. In all of the prisons, the daily life conditions were very difficult and lack of the health treatment, the proper health treatment, with the development of the diseases, like scabies, the skin disease that is still very active inside the prisons because of the lack of hygiene and proper treatment and the physical abuse, the attacks, the physical attacks on the prisoners caused the increase in death. So we have lots of cases from Ofer, from Ketziot, as well as from Megiddo. Some cases of death happened in Megiddo. The Palestinian child who died in May 2025 died in Megiddo prison out of the combination of starvation and skin disease that he was affected and he couldn’t survive in these conditions.
Alaa Salama
You kind of answered this already, but I’m curious during the more intense period periods of the genocide in Gaza, we saw pictures and videos of hundreds of Palestinians being stripped down, put onto trucks, and driven nobody knows where. And I imagine a lot of them are in Israeli prisons. Do we have any idea what their numbers are, what happened to them, what fate they met? I understand some of them were released back into the Gaza Strip, but I’m sure others haven’t been.
Sahar Francis
I would say, in the first one year and a half, two years after the genocide started, the mass arrest campaigns that were launched in the Gaza Strip were unprecedented, to be honest. In all my 30 years’ experience with the prisoners, I’ve never documented such horrible treatment with the prisoners, the humiliation, the degrading treatment. These scenes that we saw in the media about the strip search and taking the detainees from storing them in these trucks into the detention facilities were the very small part of the full story about the humiliation and the degrading treatment and the torture that these thousands of people endured under custody under the Israeli occupation forces. Honestly, we will never maybe know how many people were arrested from the Gaza Strip in this period because they never disclosed an official figure about how many people they arrested. And as you mentioned, hundreds and thousands were released back to the Gaza Strip after several months, sometimes one year, in the exchange deal that took place in October ‘25.
The majority, I would say, more than 95 percent, 98, 99 percent of these cases were classified as illegal combatant, or unlawful combatant, which means in the legal terminology that these people were arrested based on secret information and were released without being even charged or accused. And some of them, they never were interrogated properly. And most of them, they don’t know even the reason behind their arrest.
The arrest campaigns were targeting mostly men in all ages. I met detainees in their 60s and 70s, children, students, doctors, journalists from all different all different categories of the community, and it was obvious that the aim of such mass arrests, in order to affect the whole society. It wasn’t for security reasons. And it doesn’t mean that these people were involved in any way in the war or in any direct action against the occupation forces. No, because the fact that these hundreds and thousands of people were released just proves that they have nothing against them. And till today, there are still 1,300, if not more, cases from the Gaza Strip for people that they are still held under this unlawful combatant [category].
Those who were interrogated and their detention is still extended under the category of being involved as detainees awaiting trial in the legal description — that we expect they would be facing charges maybe in the future for being responsible or involved in the attacks of the 7th of October — it’s less than 100 people, maybe, that they are still in detention.
And of course, all these detainees from the Gaza Strip that they were arrested in these months were facing very severe physical torture. They were held in Sde Teiman and in other facilities in very humiliating conditions, forced to sit 24 hours on the ground on a very thin mattress. Their eyes would be closed 24 hours, seven days a week, handcuffed and shackled, and not allowed to talk even to your neighbor sitting beside you. Any sound, any movement would cause a mass collective punishment that the special units will raid the section with dogs, with sticks, with electric shocks, devices.
What they didn’t use against the detainees? The sexual harassment, the forced nudity, the starvation policy, even when they were offering them the food, they were humiliating them before allowing them to eat, not allowing them to shower in so long, like some detainees I met, they were smelling very bad smell because they were not able to change their clothes or to shower for more than three months. The first weeks when they were allowing us lawyers to start to implement visits to Sde Teiman, Ofer, or the other facilities, it was really very shocking scenes for us as lawyers the way how we were meeting the detainees, how they looked like, in which conditions they were held, and what they were describing about these conditions and about the treatment that they were facing in detention.
Alaa Salama
Am I right to assume that, especially with Gaza prisoners, especially during the first few months of the genocide, they were completely in the dark, meaning that the Israeli authorities were able to basically do whatever they wanted to them because A) there’s obviously political will not to intervene in any way, but B) because people in Gaza just don’t know. There are thousands of people who are missing in Gaza. If a prisoner from Gaza dies, there’s just no way to verify that they died in prison or somewhere else. This is different from the West Bank, for example, where people know each other. There’s not a war going on. Am I right to assume that they were free to do what they wanted, basically?
Sahar Francis
Add on top of that that the judicial level approved this directly or by ignorance to the petitions that were submitted by the human rights organizations around the disappearances, around the conditions. The Israeli High Court didn’t interfere immediately or directly after complaints started to reach the media and the organizations about the conditions, about the treatment, and it was all done under the changes that the emergency situation forced, actually. Because what the emergency situation meant on the legal level, it meant changing and amending all the laws and the legal procedures inside Israel according to the criminal code, the detention, the period of the detention, and all the phase of the detention and the judicial review, according to the unlawful combatant law.
In parallel, they also amended the military orders that applies even to the detainees in the occupied territories, in the West Bank, I mean, and not just the Gaza prisoners. Actually, first they changed the legal framework to enable the security, like the army, the police, and the other security interrogators, the ability to have a free hand in holding people incommunicado without any legal advice, without enabling lawyers’ visits, for a long period under interrogation, that it reached 180 days. In the six months, people from Gaza were held under interrogation before being allowed to start to meet lawyers, because also banning the lawyers’ visits were amended for more than 120 days.
All these legal changes were supported by the High Court, actually. And on the other, all the complaints around the starvation, when we started to meet the detainees and discover these practices and human rights organizations like Adalah, like ACRI, HaMoked, Physicians for Human Rights, the Committee against Torture, all these organizations started to complain and to take cases around these policies to the Israeli High Court. Unfortunately, the Israeli High Court didn’t interfere in these conditions, and the policy of the starvation and the degrading treatment for the detainees in Sde Teiman continued even after the decision of the Israeli High Court that the conditions in Sde Teiman should be changed, which means even the judicial system gave hands in this deterioration of the situation and the treatment of the prisoners in this period after the genocide.
Alaa Salama
You mentioned the illegal combatant or unlawful combatant framework, which we know thousands of Gazans are under, including doctors such as Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Can you explain this to us, this framework, and how is it different from something normal and legal and global like prisoners of war, for example?
Sahar Francis
So, actually, under the international law, there’s two categories. Either you are a prisoner of war, as you just mentioned, and there’s the conditions under the international humanitarian law when you would be considered as a prisoner of war, and it covers as well militant groups and their occupation because people under occupation in international law have the right to hold arms and struggle against the occupiers or those that they are attacking their land. And the second category is civilians that they would be arrested by the occupation and they would be protected.
Of course, the first category, prisoners of war, is covered under the third Geneva Convention, and civilians arrested under occupation should be covered under the Fourth Geneva Convention. It’s a new category that doesn’t exist in the international law. It’s existing just in the United States concerning the Guantanamo detainees after the 11th of September attack. The United States founded this category of unlawful combatant, which means you belong to a group of people that we declared as terrorist group, we the state, I mean, or illegal group that have fight with us.
And based on this legislation, actually, in 2005, Israel started to use this law against people from Gaza because when in 2005, when Israel withdrew from Gaza, they considered that Gaza is not occupied anymore because this is civil Israeli law, this is not military order. The whole world considered Gaza to continue to be under occupation after 2005 withdrawal. The UN and all the legal experts considered Gaza to continue to be occupied by Israel, but Israel authority denied this and started to implement the Israeli law on the people from Gaza. And they were using this unlawful combatant law the first time in 2008 in the war that they launched in the Gaza Strip in 2008. They used it as well in 2012, 2014. And now we’re facing mass use of this by arresting thousands of people. It’s not applicable to those from the West Bank, so detainees from the West Bank, that they are arrested and there’s no information against them and they will use secret information, they still use the administrative detention that is under the military order set in the occupied territories.
So, the unlawful combatant basically is the same as the administrative detention policy based on secret information, which means you don’t need to prove any charge, any evidence, anything to the court. The claim is a very general claim that this person is a member of any illegal organization. And it’s very important to highlight that Israel considers all the Palestinian political parties as illegal, including Fatah, by the way. In this genocide, the Israeli occupation forces arrested hundreds of people from Gaza that they are Fatah members. They were working in the government before Hamas took over the Strip and changed the government in the Gaza Strip. And they continued to be working in Gaza municipality as accountants, as working as teachers in the education system and so on, and they found themselves arrested these years under the unlawful combatant because they are members of a political party that is considered to be illegal inside Israel. So even not all of these thousands of prisoners that they were held from the Gaza Strip in these three years were Hamas members. No, of course not. It includes all different political parties, and it’s the same justification that we are in emergency situation and for security reasons, you would be kept till the end of the war.
And people are still held. People that they were arrested in November, December ‘23, they are still arrested under this unlawful combatant because the only procedure is that the court has to do a judicial review every six months. But this judicial review is one minute or two minute video conference call that the prisoners, we lawyers, decided not to share in this process because we know that it’s just a show to say that ‘we are offering a judicial review’. It’s not related to any fair trial procedures that can guarantee justice for these detainees. And the detainees were saying that they were not even understanding fully what’s going on. In some cases, most of the cases, they didn’t see the face of the judge, the translator in the court, who were explaining to them that they will be detained till the end of the war. They didn’t understand what it means to be arrested till the end of the war.
And this is how they kept thousands of people for one year, two years, or even more in detention. Because it’s a very easy tool, actually, to arrest as many as you want without being forced to go for the usual legal procedures. And the same goes for the administrative detention. Currently, there are still more than 3300 administrative detainees from the West Bank in the Israeli prisons on the same way. The only difference that the administrative detention, the order itself, is for six months, and every six months they have to renew the order. Where in unlawful combatants it’s an open-end[ed] order. They just sign it the first time and then every six months they have to do judicial review. Here, they have to issue the order every six months and based on secret information, the same. Children were held under administrative detention in the West Bank for more than one year. It’s arbitrary detention.
Alaa Salama
Just for people who might not be familiar with both of these, we’re talking about holding people without trial and without charge. So they’re not even charged with anything.
Sahar Francis
No, definitely. Without any charges. It’s the same.
You would have in the order, the detention order, a very general phrase saying you are a threat to the security, and that’s it. In some cases where they have affiliation, like you are a Hamas member, you are a Fatah member, you are a Islamic Jihad member, and so on. And this is why you should be under arrest for six months or for till the end of the war. So, there’s no evidences there’s no clear charges. Most of the detainees would be released even before knowing why they were arrested and held for two years in administrative detention.
Alaa Salama
We actually published an investigation on +972 that showed that even Israel claims only about 20 percent of the prisoners it has as Hamas members or as Islamic Jihad. So even Israel thinks that 80 of these people are civilians.
Sahar Francis
Of course, in the prison authority statistics, they have this classification of the political affiliation, but again, the problem here that the Israeli authorities, since the early years of the occupation, classified all the political parties as illegal entities, which means that automatically, if you are affiliated with any of these political parties, you are a member of illegal organizations. And this is the legal way how they arrest people and claim that they are terrorists. So actually, in practice, maybe they are not arresting Fatah members as they arrest Hamas member, but if we want to discuss according to the international law, Hamas itself as a political party shouldn’t be considered as illegal. The same as Fatah is not supposed to be considered illegal under international law, people under occupation have protection, and as I said before, they have the right to resist the occupation. If you commit a war crime as an individual you would be prosecuted for committing a war crime.
But there is a specific definition of war crimes. Being a student active in any of the Palestinian universities is not a war crime. And hundreds of students are arrested on an annual basis by the Israeli occupation forces and prosecuted being active in illegal organizations because all of the student movement in Palestine, all the student groups are illegal in the Palestinian context. Israel arrests on a daily basis students from Al-Najah, Birzeit, Jenin, Hebron universities, everywhere. This is illegal. This violates international law.
Alaa Salama
Maybe here it’s good to think about the whole legal framework because I keep hearing the word arrest. And to me, arrest is a legal term and it’s usually performed by a representative authority with a legal standing to protect the law, to uphold the law, whatever. In the case of Israel, we hear they’re arresting people in the West Bank or in Gaza or in Lebanon or in Syria. Legally speaking, is this even arrest?
Sahar Francis
There is a serious problem with this system. I would say, especially after the decision of the International Court of Justice in 2024 around the whole legality of the occupation itself, the ICJ confirmed in their decision in 2024 that the Israeli occupation of the occupied territories is not legal, which means all the practices of this occupation are illegal. This includes the arrests, the military courts, and the whole military court system that the Israeli occupation forces are imposing on the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. Of course, it’s a bit different in Lebanon and in Syria. We can discuss it, but let me focus on the occupied territories.
Because we have an illegal decision by the highest court in the world confirming that after all these decades, and because of different reasons, but mainly because also Israel is not respecting the international law, they are not implementing the international humanitarian law and the international human rights law that is supposed to be binding for any occupation in the world. They’re violating it systematically. And because of the long term, any occupation is not legal for these decades. And this is why the military court, with the military orders that is composing the framework for these arrests actually in the occupied territories, is illegal, which means that for me, as a lawyer and someone that knows the international law, wants to work within the framework of the international humanitarian law and international human rights law that should be the framework for the context of the occupation, these arrests are supposed to be illegal.
The Israeli occupation forces have no authority to arrest these thousands of people. But unfortunately, of course, on the reality, we have no power in order to enforce this understanding decision or whatever. And this is why we continue to represent people in the military courts and supporting the prisoners and their interrogation. I mean all the Palestinian lawyers and the Israeli lawyers that work with the Palestinian prisoners, they don’t focus much on this argument and discussion of the international humanitarian law framework and decisions like the ICJ, because we know that the judges in the military court will not listen. They will not take this in consideration. And this is even not, I don’t think that even the Israeli High Court will give space for such discussion in these cases in front of, about the legality of the whole system. This issue should be discussed in the international level. I mean, in the International Criminal Court, in the General Assembly, in the Security Council. These are the platforms where we can request more effective measures in order to impose this strategy, this policy of mass arrest should stop and you should release all the prisoners because it’s illegal.
Alaa Salama
There are currently hundreds of Palestinian children in Israeli prisons and hundreds go through the system each year. What does the arrest, interrogation, and detention process look like for these minors?
Sahar Francis
It’s a very harsh experience. Currently, there are 370 children still inside the prisons. But of course, in the last couple of years, hundreds of children would be arrested on a daily basis. Most of the children would be involved in throwing stones cases or incitement in Facebook, like any post, any share of any picture or any other visual material that you would dare to share in your Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, or any other social media platforms could be considered as incitement. It’s very easy in the military system to prosecute people for this very wide crime of incitement or affecting the security of the area and of course, throwing stones. This would be the main reason for the arrest of the children. And currently, they are held in two prisons, actually, separate sections than the adult prisoners. But in reality, they face the same conditions, whether under interrogation or in the daily life conditions in the prisons.
So they could be tortured with the same methods of torture, the physical torture, the sleep deprivation, the tying in very painful position, the ban on lawyer visit, the total isolation, playing very loud music, all the typical methods of torture could be used against children. Strip search with sexual harassment, threatening to be raped, and so on. They were suffering from starvation, the lack of hygiene, the lack of clean clothes, the scabies. They were affected. As I mentioned earlier, the only child that died in custody in Megiddo Prison last year, he was sick with scabies. And the doctor, the physician who attended the autopsy from the Physicians for Human Rights organization confirmed that this boy wasn’t about, wasn’t supposed to die out of this scabies, but because he was facing starvation, he lost weight, his body couldn’t survive the infection out of the scabies.
Alaa Salama
How old was this child?
Sahar Francis
17 years old. The children actually are not protected at all. They are not offered. There is no respect to the minimum standards of the treatment of children according to the international law. And here it’s very important to highlight that Israel, as a state, is committed to the Convention of the Rights of the Children. They signed the Treaty. They should, and they know that they should implement the treaty even for the Palestinian children. This was confirmed several times by the different international bodies, especially the Committee for the Rights of the Children, confirmed for the Israeli state in the periodic review that they should implement the treaty and the standards of the treaty for the Palestinian children arrested. But they never respect this, and the children basically face the same conditions as the adults in custody. They even were subjected to administrative detention in very high numbers, like in the early months after the genocide in ‘24, ‘25, we documented more than 100 cases of children arrested by administrative detention. This was very surprising because since 1967 till today, we never had 100 children under administrative detention. This shows how bad the situation is and how they weaponize the laws and the military orders and all these procedures in order to control basically the society and to oppress and to break the soul of the people.
Alaa Salama
Recent reports show that there is a systematic use of sexual violence in Israeli prisons. What patterns of this abuse have you documented in your work? And why aren’t we seeing repercussions? For Israel or for the perpetrators?
Sahar Francis
You know, it was really very serious systematic abuse, forced nudity that they used against everyone. All of the prisoners that were arrested, at some point they were forced to get off all their clothes and they were facing physical search by the soldiers, the police, female, male, whatever. Lots of people were facing very intimidating physical search that included even pushing fingers or other objects into the sensitive areas of the people. Like some people, of course, were facing rape in custody, whether the rape were done by the magnometer device or the stick, the baton that police use to attack or to suppress demonstrations or any, and others with other objects as well. And I believe, as a lawyer that visited a lot and documented several cases of very severe sexual violence that amounted to rape in some cases, not all of the detainees were able to talk about it. And we believe that hundreds of detainees maybe will never speak about what they endured in this detention in the way, but I can confirm that it was systematic because it wasn’t a few individual cases. No, no, hundreds of cases because other colleagues as well, other lawyers I know that they were meeting, visiting, documenting, some of the lawyers complained to the police about some cases and no investigation were open.
And the only case that was reported in the media, actually, because of the fact that the video was leaked to the media and published, so they opened an investigation against the soldiers. We saw how the whole case was closed at the end. The soldiers themselves that they were charged with. And by the way, the charge sheet of the soldiers never included the description of the crime of sexual assault. It was describing very severe physical assault. And at the end, they dismissed the case. They decided to close the criminal case because the person, the detainee who was facing this, was released back to Gaza. So the claim that they cannot investigate him in the process, in the trial, and they will never receive a fair trial, and this reflects the policy. This is the decision in this case, reflects how the authorities, the investigating authorities, and in general the justice system, how they deal with these cases of rape or sexual harassment.
And this is not the first time.Hundreds of cases on torture and other serious violations of torture and other abuses where submitted to the different investigating authorities. It never ended with a very serious outcome, with real accountability against anyone. This is a very serious problem with the system that they don’t investigate properly, they don’t take measures, they don’t take serious actions against perpetrators. This is part of why the policies continue. This is why the torture has a long history in the Israeli context in the prisons, in the interrogation centers, because no one paid the price for such practices. And I doubt that this would be changing, especially after the genocide, after what we witnessed in the last three years.
Alaa Salama
There are also hundreds of female Palestinian prisoners. Have you witnessed gender based violence against them? And do you think the authorities take into consideration that this is a way also to break the Palestinian society or to frighten people from any sort of political activism?
Sahar Francis
Of course, this is not a new practice.
Like currently, there are 92 female detainees in custody. But of course, the gender violence issue is not something new. It didn’t emerge after the genocide in ‘23. It was always the case that female prisoners were facing gender violence, especially under interrogation. And of course, the main aim was to terrify people, to break their soul and to affect their dignity and to send a clear message that you shouldn’t dare to be politically active or involved in these actions. And out of conscience that the Palestinian society is traditional society that, and we documented me as a lawyer, I represented female prisoners in the ‘90s, in the second intifada, and after. And I can witness that some families were really very worried and they took measures after the release of the woman to isolate her or to put her under strict conditions because she was interrogated or she was under bad conditions under interrogation and so on. So, the Israeli investigating authority, the security service, are very well aware about the impact of such practices on the whole society.
And the Palestinian female detainees suffered even more after the genocide in detention. Because you can imagine if it was always used against them, the fact that they are women, how bad it will be now. Till today, their sections are raided without any sensitivity for the special needs. For example, most of the female women would be religious practicing women, which means they will cover their heads. So imagine the units, the police and the special units raiding these rooms without noticing them. And they enter, just enter to the room where all of the female prisoners are not covering their heads. It’s very affecting the dignity of these women. The strip search that is forced whenever you move from the room to another facility inside the prison or outside the section and back, you would be forced to have this trip search.
They were affected by the scabies as well, without any treatment. So there are different forms of the gender violence that the Palestinian woman detainees would face, whether under interrogation or even using the fact that as a detainee under interrogation in the monthly period of time, not offering you the enough hygiene stuff you need. This is a gender violence issue. When you weaponize this need in order to pressure the woman, or when you ban them from going to the toilet or to the bathroom or to shower or to change clothes, all these issues become part of the gender violence that is imposed on these female detainees.
Alaa Salama
Recently, we saw the Israeli Knesset passing a law to apply capital punishment exclusively to Palestinians. How likely are we to see this actually take place? And what does the international law and the domestic law have to say about this?
Sahar Francis
First, I think it should be highlighted that the Israeli authorities are using the policy of target killing, even in the context of prisoners. Tens of cases, hundreds of people were killed in the process of arrest. And just in the last three years, more than 100 detainees were killed in custody. So I mean, they were not needing this specific legislation to confirm the practice of killing people outside the legal system. And it’s a very racist, discriminatory law, because as you said, if you review the law itself, the language is very clear. It will be implemented just against Palestinians. It will never be implemented against Israeli Jews, even if they commit the same crime like killing a Palestinian. I believe it needs pressure from both internal but also external from third States on the Israeli government to stop it.
Alaa Salama
Especially since October 7th. I mean, I’ve seen this with my own eyes before, but especially since October 7th, we’re seeing the Israeli army go into Palestinian towns and rounding up tens, sometimes hundreds of young men, blindfolding them, taking them to not detention centers, taking them to buildings in the town and violently interrogating them, beating them up. Do we know what conditions these people have gone through? And legally speaking, where are these people? They’re not arrested, they get to go home right after, but like where do they fall in the legal system?
Sahar Francis
The military order gives power to the soldiers to arrest anyone, basically. Even without proving that you committed some wrong action It’s enough that the army claims we have a suspicion that this person committed something. So they can grab you, they can have you somewhere, not even in a detention facility. They can keep you in the military vehicle, they can keep you in any military base for a couple of hours, actually, before they have the obligation in the military order to bring you for a detention facility.
This is a grey area where lots of things can happen.
They can, as you mentioned, in these raids to the refugee camps or to the villages, like what happened in Qalandia last week, in the two days raid to the Qalandia refugee days’ raid to the Qalandia refugee camp. And it happens everywhere, actually, when the army raids these villages, that they take one house, two houses, three houses, and they make them as a temporary detention facility. It could be the yard of a school, or a yard of a medical center or whatever, whatever facility they decide on the spot about, it could be used as a temporary detention facility, they can bring tens of people blindfolded, handcuffed, forced to sit on the ground the whole day. Sometimes they can keep them for more than 12 hours in these conditions, just humiliating them, physically abusing them, trying to collect information, and that’s it.
And most of these people would be released after a couple of hours without being charged because they didn’t do anything. They were abducted in this way in order to really send a clear message that we are the powerful control here and we can do whatever we want whenever we want. Actually, we don’t have very accurate statistics about how many people every year they are arrested in this way. It could reach thousands of people. Like, yearly, we estimate more than 10000 people would be arrested in this way. Of course, not all of them would be kept in detention.
Alaa Salama
Historically, the prisoners movement has been very active in the Palestinian politics. I think it’s very clear that that has changed. But what kind of change are you seeing?
Sahar Francis
Of course, the change is totally connected to the fact of the cut and total disconnection between the prisoners inside the prisons and their society that was imposed by the Israeli authority by banning the family visits, the Red Cross visits, and the lawyers’ visit. Although we as lawyers visit, but it’s under lots of restrictions. It’s not happening very often. It’s not the way that how these prisoners can communicate with their families and their society outside. Also, the prisoners don’t have any newsletters, any books, any TVs. They don’t know what’s happening in the world. You know that the prisoners wait for those that they have court sessions, that they can talk to the lawyer over the video conference in order to know some bit of news what’s going on in the world. They’re totally disconnected.
And this is the main reason why the prisoners have no way how to be active or connected to the reality outside of the prison. It’s very powerful. It’s also affecting the mental health of 9400 people sitting in this total solitary confinement for long periods. And imagine this prisoner that comes for five minutes to the court session that he needs to know about his family, what’s going on, because he’s not allowed also to talk to his family member that sits in the court. They cannot communicate. So the lawyer also needs to know from the family what’s going on in order to inform him. And the prisoners expects that he should ask about the general situation. When a prisoner asks me about what’s going outside, the policeman, who’s supposed to see what we are doing but never listening to our conversation, would jump immediately and tell the prisoner ‘stop, you’re not allowed to ask about the news. You just need to discuss the legal case’.
Alaa Salama
The organization that you used to lead, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, along with other Palestinian civil society organizations that used to document these abuses in Israeli prisons, they’ve been designated as terrorist organizations by Israel in October 2021. And they’ve been sanctioned by the Trump administration in 2025. Why is Israel going after these organizations?
Sahar Francis
Of course, the occupation always aimed to silence the Palestinian civil society. So it wasn’t just these seven organizations that you mentioned that they were illegalized in 2021. Hundreds of Palestinian charitable organizations, civil society organizations, and community based organizations were declared illegal in all these years of the occupation. But what happened in ‘21, of course, part of the Palestinian human rights organizations, whether Al-Haq, Addameer, or others as well, we communicated with the International Criminal Court and with other international bodies in order to seek accountability via using these legal measures that were opened as an opportunity for us to find the perpetrators accountable for the war crimes and crimes against humanity that were committed. It’s not a secret we were involved in this kind of work. We know that this is the main cause why we were under attack.
In the time when the case was submitted against settlement and the war on Gaza, and all the responsible people on the crimes were committed in the war of 2014, and it was very clear that it’s again based on secret information without any evidences, without legal, proper legal procedures to even try to defend yourself. The US decision came in 2025 against the organizations, and it was more clear that the reason is the ICC work. This is another proof that the aim is to affect the legal measures that we are trying to bring on the international level.
Alaa Salama
It sounds like the international pressure is key in almost every aspect of standing up to Israel. Practically and realistically, what do the Palestinians and their allies have as tools that could help them secure the freedom of prisoners?
Sahar Francis
I think we cannot discuss the issue of the prisoners separately from the whole issue of the occupation. For me, prisoners will not be released without ending the occupation. For me, the way or the future is how we fight to dismantle the system of colonization, occupation, oppression, whatever. So, this is why for me it’s very, very important to combine efforts in all levels, whether we are talking about legal strategies to find legal cases and legal arguments and legal strategies to be used in the international level.
And again, for me, it’s very clear, and this is what the international society should see and work against: that Israel and the United States are aiming to destroy the whole international legal system. Sanctions on the International Criminal Court in the way that we are seeing. How the United States is doing, it means that they want to destroy the international legal system. No other explanation for it. It should be clear for everyone. And if not the whole 153 state members in the International Criminal Court don’t join effort to stop this, it will really mean the end of the international human rights era in the world. And do we want to live in a jungle governed by power, the balance of power, that just if you are powerful, you can survive? If you’re not powerful enough you cannot survive? I don’t think so.
This brings me to the work on the grassroots and the social movements and the organizational movement that also we have to join efforts to fight against all those that want to destroy the system and want to benefit from the colonization, the occupation, and the control. This means that international corporations, big companies that they are benefiting from settlements, from armed industry, from security industry that is controlling our lives. Why? Like the same biggest software that was used against the Palestinian civil society is used in other countries, is affecting not just human rights defenders, political activists, sometimes politicians in other countries.
And this is the way how we should fight together, all those that believe that we are equal and should live in a world that is equal, human rights should be respected equally for everyone, should join efforts to fight against these policies and these strategies that is used in order to oppress us and to silence us. And there is similarities in the oppression that is used by different countries, so this is why we should also use same strategies to fight back as activists.
Alaa Salama
Thank you so much, Sahar. Thank you for all the work that you do and for joining us on the +972 podcast.
Sahar Francis
Thank you for this initiative.
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Alaa Salama
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