From the Dungeons of Darkness to Living Memory: Palestinian Prisoners Between Hunger, Torture, and Disappearance

Israeli prisons are not merely walls of concrete and iron; they are daily laboratories for crafting pain and shattering dignity, where the occupying state exercises the most heinous forms of political and racial revenge against Palestinian prisoners, not for any other reason than that they are part of a people that refuses to bow and insists on staying on its land.

Since October 7, this bloody approach has intensified unprecedentedly, turning detention centers into slow death chambers, documented by the horrifying testimonies narrated by hundreds of released prisoners, and from inside the dungeons themselves through the legal teams that visited them in the detention centers and military camps. These testimonies overflow with unimaginable horrors: continuous brutal torture, severe beatings leading to unconsciousness, rape by soldiers and police dogs, and organized humiliation aimed at killing the human within the human.

The occupation did not limit itself to physical and psychological violations; it also used mothers, wives, and children as pressure cards, hostages, and human shields to threaten and extort prisoners, establishing crimes that go beyond the walls of the dungeons to affect the very fabric of the Palestinian family. These are not individual practices; they are a systematic official policy managed by the occupation's authorities with orders and planning, and executed with cold cruelty.

Hunger was also not merely an absence of food but a deliberate punishment, where every prisoner has lost at least 25 kilograms of weight and suffered from serious health issues, some of which are permanent. Rotten food, contaminated water, deliberate medical neglect, and deprivation of medication are all tools for a silent slow extermination. These prisons do not only punish the body but violate dignity, break the spirit, and seek to turn the prisoner from a resister into a walking corpse, and into a name on the death registry.

The most hidden and terrifying crime is what is happening to prisoners from the Gaza Strip, where thousands of workers and civilians have been kidnapped from the streets of the interior and from the invasion squares, taken away naked and stacked in trucks, and then disappeared. No names, no arrest lists, no lawyers, no contact; no one knows where they are or even if they are among the living. The policy of enforced disappearance that the occupation imposes on Gazans today is the other face of genocide, killing the victim twice: once when they are detained without charge, and once when their existence is denied, stripping them of their name, identity, and humanity.

What is happening inside prisons, detention centers, and camps is not merely a violation of international agreements or a breach of laws; it is a continuation of the essence of the Israeli colonial project: a project based on denying the existence of the Palestinian, breaking their will, and subjugating them by force, or erasing them through silence.

However, these prisoners, despite everything, have not broken. Their bodies are frail, their hearts burdened with pain, but their spirits continue to fight. Their steadfastness behind bars is proof that this people cannot be defeated, and that those who sow dignity in the land cannot be uprooted by chains.

From behind the silent walls, the souls we have not seen nor heard their names scream their pain on behalf of an entire homeland. In every cell, there is a beating heart waiting for freedom, and in every emaciated body, there is a story of steadfastness. Yet, these have not fallen; rather, they have made resistance out of hunger and songs of freedom from chains.