Israeli Prisons Have Become Central Arena for Systematic Killing of Palestinians: PPS

Ramallah, MINA – The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) said Israeli prisons have undergone a continuing structural transformation since the start of the Israeli war of genocide in October 2023, stressing that they are no longer detention facilities in the conventional sense but have become “a central arena for systematic killing of Palestinian prisoners and detainees.”

In a fact sheet on the prisoners’ issue during the first half of 2026, published Tuesday, the PPS said imprisonment is no longer limited to the restriction of freedom. Rather, it has become an integral part of Israel’s system of genocide through systematic policies targeting Palestinians physically, psychologically and in their dignity and existence.

These policies include torture, starvation, medical neglect, isolation, sexual assaults and enforced disappearance, the society said.

The PPS said Israeli authorities continued during the period in question to expand mass arrest campaigns and the unprecedented use of administrative detention, in addition to holding civilians as hostages under policies of collective punishment.

It said these practices are no longer isolated violations, but have become fixed tools in the management of prisons and detention camps.

The society added that testimonies documented by legal teams, along with accounts from released prisoners, confirm that crimes inside prisons have not decreased. Instead, they have entered a more organized and brutal phase, marked by the continued killing of prisoners, the spread of diseases and epidemics, and a sharp deterioration in their physical and psychological conditions.

The PPS said this is consistent with the genocidal approach governing Israel’s policies since the start of the genocide.

It stressed that the figures included in the fact sheet represent only the minimum that could be documented, given Israel’s continued enforced disappearance of thousands of detainees from the Gaza Strip and its prevention of international and human rights organizations from reaching them.

This means the scale of crimes and violations inside prisons and detention camps is far greater than what documented facts reveal, it said.

The PPS elaborated that the months that followed the start of the genocide exposed Israel’s shift to an unprecedented phase in its treatment of prisoners, surpassing in nature and scale everything documented by the Palestinian prisoners’ movement over decades.

It said violations are no longer individual acts or excesses, but a state policy administered through the prison and camp system and based on official legislation and procedures aimed at turning detention into a central tool of genocide.

These policies have led to the killing of more than 100 prisoners since the start of the genocide, the PPS said. The identities of 90 of them have been announced, while Israel continues to conceal the fate of dozens of Gaza detainees killed in custody and continues to withhold the bodies of dozens of slain prisoners.

The society described this as an extension of the crime of enforced disappearance, which it said has become one of the defining features of the current phase.

The PPS said detention no longer targets only the freedom of Palestinians, but their very existence, through an integrated system of structural torture, starvation, deliberate medical neglect, the spread of diseases and epidemics, sexual assaults, deprivation of treatment and food, and slow killing.[]

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)