'All changed with the genocide': Palestinian women and girls face brutal abuse in Israeli jails
Once you picture schoolgirls, university students, mothers, aunts and grandmothers lying on their stomachs in prison pyjamas - their hands tied behind their backs, and soldiers looming over them, beating them if they move even slightly - you cannot forget the image.
When you hear a female prisoner say she has "nothing but her heart", you immediately grasp how prison can dismantle lives.
Palestinian Prisoners’ Day is marked every year on 17 April to spotlight ongoing human rights violations - and today, conditions are worse than ever. Since the launch of the Gaza genocide, starvation, isolation, humiliation, strip searches, torture and overwhelming fear have become constant realities for Palestinian women in Israeli prisons.
More than 700 Palestinian women have been arrested in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since the genocide began in late 2023, according to rights groups. Enduring night raids on their homes or detention at military checkpoints, most have been subjected to physical and psychological abuse both during and after their arrest.
“Everything is different from the prisons of the 1990s. All changed with the genocide,” Ramallah-based lawyer Sahar Francis, who is also the former director of the prisoners’ rights group Addameer, told a recent webinar entitled Women, Prison Sumoud.
“Seeing people with no words, after five months detained from Gaza, and a level of abuse, starvation and physical attacks, was very, very shocking,” she said. “We failed the prisoners. We were not able to protect them.”
Around 90 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 2023, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society. Among them was Walid Khalid Abdullah Ahmed, a 17-year-old boy.
“The international system is simply not working … hypocrisy is everywhere,” Francis said. “We lawyers are the only window for detainees. People feel [they are] losing hope.”
Tools of control
For decades, Addameer has documented and called attention to violations in Israeli jails, its reports forming a key reference for global rights organisations. This work has made it a repeated target of the Israeli military, which has raided its premises several times since 2002.
In 2021, the Israeli government designated Addameer and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist” organisations, a move that drew heavy international criticism. Last year, Addameer came under US Treasury sanctions on the basis of alleged “terrorism” links.
This is all part of a broader Israeli campaign of violent domination. According to Dr Samah Saleh, a sociologist at An-Najah National University in Nablus and a visiting professor at UCLA, Israel has long used starvation and dehumanisation as powerful tools of control.
The world must not enable the normalisation of this dehumanisation of women, from schoolgirls to grandmothers, in Israel's prisons
For women subjected to Israeli detention, Saleh told the webinar, health problems continue even after they are released. Prisoners are denied showers and clean clothes, deprived of sleep, and underfed, often receiving little more than a few pieces of bread and a few spoonfuls of fruit or yogurt each day, while scabies mites burrow into their skin.
Researcher Dalal Bajes, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley with expertise in Palestinian women’s prison experiences, told the webinar that detention “strips away everything”. Her work underscores the dramatic decline in conditions since the start of the genocide, amid the normalisation of “prolonged incommunicado detention, denial of legal access [and] threats of rape”.
In one case documented by Bajes, writer Lama Khatir - who was also imprisoned in 2018-19 - described “a completely different regime” during her later imprisonment after 7 October 2023.
“We were no longer living time; we were merely staring into emptiness,” Khatir said in an account published by Al Jazeera Media Institute. In her summary of the case, Bajes noted that the absence of books, papers, news or routine “transformed time into an oppressive force”.
Digital surveillance
According to Bajes, between 1948 and 1967, an estimated 100,000 Palestinians were arrested by Israeli authorities. The pace ramped up dramatically in subsequent decades, with around one million reportedly arrested between 1967 and 2021, including more than 16,000 women.
As of last month, 72 Palestinian women were being held in Israeli prisons, mostly Damon Prison in the north, according to a report from Addameer and other prisoners’ rights groups. Most were arrested from the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.
Of these prisoners, three were minors and 32 were mothers, who collectively had 130 children, the report noted. In addition, 17 women were being held under administrative detention, with no charge or trial. Five prisoners were serving sentences, the longest of which was 16 years, while many others were awaiting trial.
The report noted that 18 prisoners were sick, including three with cancer. More than a dozen of those awaiting trial were arrested over “incitement”, a charge that includes online activity such as re-posting content or sharing personal opinions. The digital world has thus become a tightly policed space of surveillance and prosecution, with Israeli authorities targeting journalists, activists and human rights defenders.
Testimonies from the report highlight grim conditions, with one prisoner describing her transfer to Hasharon Prison: “A female soldier … took me to a small, filthy solitary cell that had nothing but a mattress on the floor without a blanket or pillow and a very small bathroom. I stayed there alone for four days without anyone speaking to me. They brought me cold, bad food, and during those four days I didn’t eat.”
Some women are arrested to pressure male relatives. One told researchers that she was “interrogated continuously for 18 days” and then taken to see her father, who she found sitting on an interrogation chair with his hands tied behind his back.
“When I entered, they removed the cover from my eyes, and my hands were tied in front of me. My father started crying a lot when he saw me,” she said. “I ran toward him and hugged him while I was still tied up. He kept kissing me and saying reassuring words to comfort me … He looked extremely exhausted.”
With family visits denied since the start of the genocide, only rare lawyers’ visits serve as a link to the outside world for these prisoners.
This situation demands an urgent public outcry. The world must not enable the normalisation of this dehumanisation of women, from schoolgirls to grandmothers, in Israel’s prisons.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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