On Aug. 23, I received a call from a Palestinian lawyer informing me that the following day he planned to visit my father, Abdul Razeq Farraj, held in Israel’s Ramon prison. I had not expected the call nor the possibility of the visit. I knew too well the severe restrictions on visits to Palestinian detainees. In fact, I didn’t even know the lawyer, but it didn’t matter — the possibility of the visit was a cause for celebration.
I immediately called my family members and began collecting their messages. “Ask the lawyer to tell him that we miss him dearly,” my family told me and passed along updates about their lives and hopes for his release.
Since the war in Gaza began on Oct. 7, 2023, it has become nearly impossible to receive news from Palestinian detainees. On Oct. 8, new crackdowns on prisoner rights were implemented, isolating the incarcerated from the outside world. This included cutting contact with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and severely restricting lawyer visits. The restrictions add to an overall deterioration in prison conditions, including the starvation policy and denial of medical care that Israel has systematically been practicing inside prisons.
The brutal conditions inside Israeli prisons have led to the death of at least 78 Palestinian detainees due to violence, torture, and medical negligence since the war began. Israel continues to hold the bodies of at least 89 Palestinians killed inside Israeli prisons, the majority of whom were killed since the war began. Since 1967, 318 prisoners have died inside Israeli prisons due to violence and torture.
Like thousands of Palestinians, the Israeli authorities arrested my father numerous times before his current detention, which started in September 2019. He has thus far spent over 22 years in captivity. In the last communication we had with him shortly after the beginning of the war, he described the horrendous and violent conditions inside Israeli prisons. “The prisoners are facing a fascist attack, the first of its kind since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967,” he wrote to me. He went on to describe the collective punishment, violence, torture, starvation strategies, and denial of medical care that Israel firmly put in place since the beginning of the war.
So when there was the prospect of the lawyer’s visit, I was personally elated. I hoped my father would finally hear news about his first grandchild, my daughter Keyan, and how much I think she resembles him. I hoped this might help him imagine how his eight-month-old grandchild looks.
“They came to my house around 3 a.m. I heard loud bangs, and realized that it was the Israeli army and their special forces. They were all dressed in black and had covered their faces. As soon as I opened the door, they pointed their guns towards me, told me to raise my hands, forced me to sit on my knees and immediately shackled my hands to the back. They threw me onto the ground and started stepping on my head.”
Later that day, however, the lawyer informed us that the visit did not occur. According to the guards, the prison authority sent my father to another location using the infamous transportation vehicle al-bosta — what prisoners term a “moving grave.” We had no information about where he might be, and anxiously waited for any news on his condition.
Weeks later, a released Palestinian detainee, who had shared an overcrowded cell with my father, called and told me that my father had been held in the same cell over the past months, including the day the lawyer was supposed to visit him. The Israeli authorities simply did not want to allow the visit. This practice has left thousands of families without any news about their detained family members.
My family’s story is a common occurrence. Since the beginning of the war, the Israeli authorities have intentionally placed detainees in a total state of isolation, disconnecting them from their communities, confiscating communication devices and radios, and banning the entry of books and newspapers. Simultaneously, the Israeli authorities escalated the level of violence and torture practiced against Palestinian detainees, even broadcasting their treatment on public television. This violence begins from the moment of arrest and is accompanied by brutal beatings and degrading treatment.
A former detainee, a Palestinian student at my university, described the violence accompanying military raids in vivid detail:
“They came to my house around 3 a.m. I heard loud bangs, and realized that it was the Israeli army and their special forces. They were all dressed in black and had covered their faces. As soon as I opened the door, they pointed their guns towards me, told me to raise my hands, forced me to sit on my knees and immediately shackled my hands to the back. They threw me onto the ground and started stepping on my head. They brought my brother and similarly began to step on his head. They held me from the shackles, covered my eyes, and violently forced me outside the building. The soldiers threw me inside the military vehicle and continued to beat me. One of the soldiers — I could see he was a male soldier — held my head and brought it to his knees and started saying profanities. This continued until we reached the military detention center, and the violence continued afterward.”
Her testimony points to the degrading and sexualized forms of violence practiced by the Israeli occupation authorities. Torture, rape, and sexual assault are widespread. One notorious example was when nine armed Israeli guards raped a Palestinian detainee in the infamous Sde Teiman military base. Like in other stories, the perpetrators of violence and torture enjoy impunity and cover from the Israeli regime. Stories emerging from Sde Teiman and other detention and interrogation centers point to grotesque forms of violence practiced against Palestinians, including prolonged shackling, brutal beatings, restrictions on religious worship, the use of assault dogs, sleep deprivation, amputations due to torture, denial of courtyard time, and cutting off the water supply inside prison cells. Violence and torture are omnipresent in Israeli prisons and detention centers.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates one million Palestinians have been detained by Israeli forces since 1948. Since Oct. 7, Israel has detained over 20,000 Palestinians. 9,000 Palestinian detainees remain in Israeli captivity following the recent exchange agreement that saw the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees, the majority of whom were from the Gaza Strip. As of early November, Israeli prisons held 350 Palestinian children, 49 Palestinian female prisoners, and over 3,300 Palestinians held under the Israeli policy of administrative detention, a policy that allows Israel to arrest Palestinians without charge or trial. There are also over 1,200 “unlawful combatants,” another classification used to hold detainees without charge or trial. The daily arrests occurring across Palestinian towns and villages, and the intentional killing and maiming of Palestinians inside and outside prisons, indicate that Israeli carceral violence will only escalate.
Palestinians cling to memories of loved ones, alive and deceased, hoping that our chains will finally be broken: the literal chains incarcerating thousands of Palestinians behind Israeli bars, the millions held hostage inside the Gaza Strip, and the chains of a genocidal regime that has long held the entire Palestinian population captive. The history of Palestinian prisoners’ resistance behind bars is a testament to a will to fight and to imagine a radically different reality.