New Details Emerge on Israeli Regime’s Brutal Detention of Palestinians

Palestinian lawyers say detainees held by the Israeli regime at a covert underground facility are facing severe violence, deprivation, and isolation as new accounts emerge from the Gaza war.
Palestinian lawyers report that dozens of detainees are being held indefinitely in an underground Israeli regime detention site without sunlight and under harsh conditions.

They say prisoners at Rakevet, an underground wing of the Ramla (Nitzan) prison complex, have been beaten, denied food, and left without medical care despite serious injuries.

The allegations add to mounting reports of widespread abuse inside the Israeli prison system as arrests of Palestinians have escalated during the two-year war on Gaza.

More than 9,200 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons, according to prisoner rights group Addameer.

Most are under administrative detention, held without charge or trial.

Many detainees from Gaza have also been kept at the Sde Teiman military camp, where reports of killings, torture, and sexual violence, including rape, have circulated since the war began in October 2023.

Israeli authorities deny the allegations, but recently released detainees freed under last month’s Gaza ceasefire describe severe mistreatment.

Bodies of Palestinian detainees returned to Gaza under the ceasefire deal showed signs of torture, mutilation, and execution, with some still bound with ropes.

Israeli human rights groups say detention conditions amount to torture and cruel, degrading punishment.

“Human rights organizations documented widespread abuses, including physical beatings, sexual violence, harassment, and threats – pointing to systemic and deliberate mistreatment,” the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) said in June.

The surge in reported abuses comes as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government pushes for harsher policies toward Palestinian detainees.

Earlier this week, the Israeli parliament advanced a bill imposing the death penalty for so-called “terrorism” offences committed on a “racist” basis against Israelis.

Rights groups say the measure would exclusively target Palestinians and note that attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians—frequent in the occupied West Bank and often carried out with military backing—would not be covered.

“The enactment of a new law imposing the death penalty exclusively against Palestinians marks a new episode in the ongoing series of oppression and constitutes a grave escalation in Israel’s widespread violations against Palestinians, including hundreds of extrajudicial executions,” Addameer said on November 9.

Basil Farraj, a professor at Birzeit University, said the Rakevet site represents only one part of a larger system of abuse.

“This secret centre is in fact a symptom of the broader phenomenon of Israeli carcerality, where Palestinians continue to be treated in a violent and, in fact, an extremely brutal way that denies and negates all of their rights,” Farraj told Al Jazeera.

He said many Palestinians are detained under the “unlawful combatants” law, which allows indefinite detention on security grounds without evidence being presented.

“The fact that you are held without trial adds another layer of psychological abuse and psychological torture,” Farraj said.

“Not knowing why you are being arrested … adds to these layers of violence and torture that Israel has entrenched over the past two years.”