🔗 Share this article

Per figures provided by Israel, a minimum of 98 Palestinians have lost their lives while in custody starting from October 2023. An advocacy organization based in Israel has reported that the actual toll is almost certainly substantially greater, due to hundreds of disappeared detainees originating in Gaza.

Investigation Outcomes

A recent report recorded casualties caused by physical violence, failure to provide medical care, and starvation. Researchers utilized freedom of information requests, forensic reports, and discussions with lawyers, activists, relatives, and witnesses.

Government bodies released detailed statistics limited to the first eight months of the war. Over this period, government statistics show an historically high fatality rate among Palestinian detainees, equating to one death every four days.

Updated Statistics

Official armed forces last updated records on custodial deaths for May 2024, and correctional authorities by September 2024. Investigators identified a further 35 fatalities in confinement subsequent to these periods and validated them with government bodies.

Even with the total number of fatalities charted being significantly higher than other recent estimates, it almost certainly fails to capture the full scale of Palestinian loss, per the leader of the detainee affairs unit.

“While we are offering documentation for a larger total of casualties than earlier indicated, this is not the entire story,” he said. “We are sure that there are even now detainees who died in detention that we don’t know about.”

Civilian Casualties

Classified government records suggests that the majority of Palestinian detainees from Gaza who died in prison were civilians, based on a parallel inquiry.

By May of the current year, a armed services record tracking all fighters in Gaza, a registry of over 47,000 listed people, listed only 21 deaths in custody. By that date, 65 Gazans from Gaza had died in jail.

Detention Conditions

Physical violence, torture, and further cruelty of detainees from Palestine is now standard practice across Israel’s prison network during the duration of war. High-ranking authorities have openly admitted minimal sustenance and an underground jail holding detainees who are denied sunlight.

Current and former prisoners and insiders from the defense forces have uniformly asserted routine infractions of global standards.

Systemic Abuse

The organized mistreatment came with a troubling surge in deaths recorded across a minimum of 12 detention centers in Israel. Over ten years before the hostilities, there were typically a couple casualties a year.

“This is not only a single occurrence occasionally. It is systemic and it is likely to persist,” an official said, partly since there is a climate of almost complete immunity for killing and mistreating Palestinian individuals.

Only a single instance of beating detainees has come to trial, with the service member sentenced to 210 days. An effort to try additional individuals over a severe beating involving abuse resulted in right-wing protests and the arrest of Israel’s chief legal officer, with the alleged perpetrators now demanding that indictments against them are dropped.

No Legal Action

“In spite of this significant total of casualties, during 24 months not one individual has been detained,” the spokesperson stated. “There exist no indictments over any fatality.

“While these measures continue to be enforced, all Palestinian detainees in custody is in danger, also the healthy ones, also the juveniles who have no health problems.”

Prominent Examples

Several casualties in custody have been high profile, for instance a senior medical chief who died in confinement after four months in detention.

A detainee held with the individual testified that he was taken to the exercise area by guards just prior to his demise, visibly injured and exposed from the waist down. His body has not been repatriated to Gaza.

Additional detainees who perished in detention in Israel are unidentified. The prison service and defense forces provided investigators with the total of casualties in detention, and limited other details for example the location where they perished, but excluding the prisoners’ names.

Recognition Difficulties

Regarding 21 occurrences, mostly detainees from Gaza, analysts were unable to correlate the limited information given by officials to a casualty registered by advocacy bodies, either through testimony from released detainees or accounts in the media.

The detainees’ families could be unaware about their loved ones’ deaths either, as Israel has impeded efforts to locate Palestinians it is holding. For seven months at the beginning of the war, the Israeli military declined to give basic information about the whereabouts of thousands of individuals confined in Gaza, effectively carrying out a practice of unacknowledged detention, per the advocacy organization.

Limited Transparency

Starting in May 2024, officials have created an email address for enquiries about Palestinian individuals from Gaza, but this has provided only a modest and inadequate enhancement. Investigators noted|observed|commented on