I’m terrified of prison. I grew up between Syria and Palestine — both places where people are constantly disappeared into facilities notorious for torture and abuse, and where prisoners waste away for months, years, and sometimes even decades with little to no legal oversight. The brutality, the humiliation, and the randomness of it all is the stuff of nightmares. Anyone can find themselves being abducted and locked away simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s no secret that since October 2023, Israel’s abuse of Palestinian prisoners has reached unprecedented levels of cruelty. It is impossible to forget the images from Gaza of hundreds of women, men, and children stripped naked between the ruins of their destroyed neighborhoods, rounded up and hauled into trucks to god-knows-where The reports that began surfacing soon after — of secret military facilities, torture, sexual abuse, starvation, and killings — were bone-chilling. 

At the same time, Israel ramped up its detention of journalists, activists, and ordinary people all across the West Bank, imprisoning them for months or even years without charge. Those who came out are often unrecognizable: emaciated, traumatized, and bearing physical marks of torture and medical neglect.

The faces of those detainees, especially the ones we saw being rounded up in Gaza, still haunt me, along with the simple question that in many cases remains impossible to answer: What happened to them?

That is why sitting down with human rights lawyer Sahar Francis for the latest episode of The +972 Podcast was both essential and profoundly heavy. Sahar has spent decades defending Palestinians in Israeli prisons. She has dedicated her life to helping those whom the Israeli authorities are doing everything possible to isolate and erase. The Gazans we saw being rounded up? Sahar has met some of them. The widespread reports of sexual abuse we’ve read? Sahar has listened to firsthand accounts from survivors, and pursued their cases against a judicial system that does not recognize their basic humanity.

This is the precedent Israel is setting for the world: a reality in which anyone can be snatched from their home, thrown into a military vehicle, and disappeared into a desert facility without charge or trial. And it should terrify all of us. As Sahar explains, Israeli and American efforts to shield Israel from accountability are dismantling the very international legal framework meant to protect civilians everywhere. 

This was not an easy episode to record, and it will not be easy to listen to. But it is vital for understanding the reality Palestinians face today, and the decades of systemic brutality that led us here.