On the first day of the new year, Abdul Rahman al-Bahsh’s mother was scrolling through her phone when news began circulating on social media that her son, detained in the Israel’s Megiddo prison, had been killed.
Al-Bahsh, known to loved ones as “Aboud,” worked in a mill owned by relatives in the West Bank city of Nablus. He had been detained in May 2022 and sentenced to 35 months in prison on charges of shooting at military vehicles.
According to his family, the 23-year-old was in good health, and did not die from natural causes or an accident. They accuse Israeli prison authorities of “torturing him to death.”
“Since that day, it’s like we’ve been hit over the head. We have been demanding our son’s body for burial,” Al-Bahsh’s father said. “We visited him four times after his arrest, then the Israeli authorities prevented us from seeing him — and after the outbreak of the war in Gaza, visits were completely banned.”
Al-Bahsh is hardly the only Palestinian prisoner to have died in Israeli prisons in recent months, says the Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs Authority and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club. The two organizations issued a joint statement on Jan. 1, on the death of al-Bahsh in Megiddo prison, saying he was “assassinated” by Israel’s prisons administration.
The statement said al-Bahsh was the seventh Palestinian killed in Israeli prisons since the war in Gaza began, adding that Megiddo was “one of the prisons that witnessed horrific crimes and systematic torture against prisoners after October 7.”
An Israeli court in the town of Hadera, in Israel’s port district of Haifa, opened an investigation into the circumstances of al-Bahsh’s killing following a request from the Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs Authority. The court also allowed a doctor appointed by the family to take part in the autopsy.
Witness to horror
Amani Sarahneh, an official in the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, said they face difficulties in monitoring the prisoners’ conditions due to the rising numbers of inmates in all Israeli prisons, and Israel’s ban on lawyer visits. The accounts of the released prisoners are a major source of documentation of what’s happening inside the prisons.”
The International Red Cross has been unable to visit the detainees.
She said the International Red Cross has been unable to visit the detainees, and the role of all international rights groups has been frozen.
She said that detainees have suffered from a series of violations, including “the policy of starvation, and not providing treatment to patients or those who were injured as a result of being subjected to beatings and torture inside prisons, or in investigation centers during their detention.”
Sarahneh has been gathering “torture testimonies” the past three months, and says the killing of seven prisoners came as part of retaliatory measures implemented against detainees after Oct. 7.
“This is seen as a premeditated assassination,” she said.
Sarahneh said the situation is more serious for Gaza detainees amid lack of information about their conditions, identities, numbers, and whereabouts, even after Israeli authorities revealed that some of them have been killed without giving information about them.
Beaten to death
Addameer, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, said that in every war, Israeli authorities impose collective punishments against detainees, including preventing family visits, closing canteens, and withdrawing television channels.
“But the measures were doubled this time, coinciding with widespread arrest campaigns targeting children, women, the elderly, and activists,” the rights group said. “Most of them were transferred to administrative detention without charges being filed.”
The Red Cross has been barred from visiting detainees since Oct. 7, as Israel imposed more restrictions on visits by lawyers and rights groups. “The achievements of the prisoner movement … have been dismantled amid fears that the restrictions would continue after the end of the war,” the group said.
Addameer detailed the mistreatment and violations against Palestinian prisoners who were severely beaten, sometimes, to death.
The medical report on the death of prisoner Adnan Marae, who was pronounced dead on Nov. 13 in Megiddo prison, showed beating marks and bruises on his body.
The group said accounts from released detainees detailed the new policies Israel’s prisoner administration imposed. But Israel’s Supreme Court, as usual, rejected petitions and appeals submitted by lawyers and rights groups, saying that such policies are lawful.
The group said it has documented the detention of dozens of Palestinians in Gaza, including children, women, and elderly people. “Videos show they have been brutally assaulted,” it said.
Citing accounts from released detainees, the group said Gaza detainees are held in a separate location. “They are held in very harsh conditions in narrow places, like cages,” it said. “They also receive little food.”
Handcuffed, blindfolded
Haaretz, a leading Israeli daily, had earlier reported on the treatment of prisoners inside Israeli prisons. The daily reported “horrific crimes against detainees, women and men,” particularly in Anatot and Sde Teman military camps.
They were provided very limited quantities of food of poor quality, in addition to repeated raids.
The Israeli newspaper report said several detainees died inside Sde Teman without knowing their numbers or their identities. The detainees suffer from very harsh conditions, as “they remain handcuffed and blindfolded all the time, and there are a number of children and elderly people inside the camp, sleeping on very thin mattresses on the floor, in addition to women detained in the Anatot camp,” it said.
They were provided very limited quantities of food of poor quality, in addition to repeated raids and abuses. Five detainees were taken to an unknown location.
According to Palestinian institutions responsible for detainees’ affairs, more than 40 female detainees from Gaza are in Damoun Prison, including children, mothers, and elderly women, including an elderly detainee over the age of eighty who suffers from Alzheimer’s.
Female detainees in Damoun Prison are isolated from the rest of the detainees in other rooms and from the outside world. They are barred from lawyer’ visits. They were provided with very small quantities of food of poor quality, in addition to repeated raids and abuses. Five detainees were taken to an unknown location.
Forced disappearance
Since the start of the random detention campaigns in Gaza, the Israeli authorities have changed legal procedures to facilitate the forced disappearance.
After activating the so-called “Unlawful Combatant Law,” Israeli authorities adopted new amendments that allow the detention of anyone deemed “Unlawful Combatant” to 45 days instead of seven days with judicial review within 75 days not 14 days. The amendments also barred them from meeting their lawyers for 180 days.
Human rights activists consider the central aim is to prevent lawyers from monitoring and documenting crimes and violations against detainees who are subjected to the most horrific and difficult conditions of detention.
Documented reports show that more than 5,500 Palestinians, including 355 children and 184 women, have been detained in the occupied West Bank since the war began on Oct. 7. The detentions over the past three months accounted for half of the whole detentions in 2023.
For Gaza, there has been no documented tally for the detainees, and the fate of detained remains unknown.
