Starvation, Torture, and Killing of Prisoners: A Policy and One of the Goals of the Genocide War

Since the early days of the war on the Gaza Strip, it has become clear that Israel does not view the starvation and torture of Palestinians in prisons as mere byproducts of battlefield chaos or spatial repercussions of what it calls "security necessities"; rather, it considers them an organic part of its colonial doctrine that has persisted since the Nakba: weakening the Palestinian, stripping him of his humanity, and turning the body into a site of repression aimed at breaking the will, branding consciousness, and imposing a continuous state and a tool of control and submission. This policy, whose roots can be traced back to the early years of the occupation, is today being institutionalized with unprecedented brutality in prisons, where thousands of prisoners are subjected to systematic starvation, ongoing torture, and slow killing, all of which falls under the logic of genocide that governs the war in Gaza and its surroundings.

Israeli prisons have never been traditional punitive institutions; rather, they are a central tool in engineering control over Palestinians, used to regulate society and subjugate it, establishing a dynamic based on deterrence and fear, so that the act of arrest itself becomes a process of erasing identity and an attempt to uproot national belonging. Therefore, it is not surprising that prisoners have become a direct target for revenge since October 7, with a food policy based on deliberate starvation tailored for them, left in cells unfit for living, and hundreds of them forced to sleep on the ground in a system that sees the Palestinian as nothing more than a number to be broken until he stops dreaming.

The latest report issued by the Israeli Public Defense Authority, part of the judiciary institution, revealed shocking conditions for the prisoners: acute hunger and significant weight loss, detention conditions "unfit for living," suffocating overcrowding where the space allocated for security prisoners is less than three square meters, thousands sleeping without beds, near-total deprivation of personal belongings, restrictions on water, absence of lighting and ventilation, and confinement 23 hours a day in closed cells. The report also documented systematic violence from guards during searches and transport, and the detention of hundreds of detainees in police stations under life-threatening conditions, which clarifies that what is happening inside the prisons is not merely security violations but a comprehensive policy of starvation, torture, deprivation, and slow killing.

At its core, these practices reveal the historical relationship of the occupation to prisons as laboratories for repression policies, and an organic extension of the colonial logic that does not separate between land and body: whoever controls the body controls the spirit, and whoever breaks the prisoner thinks he is breaking the people. Thus, the starvation of prisoners becomes an extension of the starvation of Gaza, and their deprivation of light is part of the larger darkness imposed on Palestinians in their daily lives.

In the final analysis, the Israeli detention policy, regardless of any legal veneer or security narrative, is part of a strategic structure aimed at re-producing the Palestinian as a "controllable body," and reshaping society under the pressure of fear and slow death. The starvation, torture, and killing of prisoners inside prisons is not merely a violation of human rights, but a direct extension of the concept of genocide being carried out today against Gaza, which is measured not only by the number of victims but by the depth of the assault on the very conditions of life. The state that legitimizes the deprivation of prisoners from food, makes them sleep on the ground, and leaves them prey to illness, darkness, and violence, openly declares that its project goes beyond control to the erasure of Palestinian existence as a political and human being. Despite all that the latest report exposed, Israel finds itself once again facing the truth that has pursued it for decades: despite starvation and killing, it has not succeeded in breaking the Palestinian, nor in turning prisons into cemeteries for consciousness. On the contrary, the harsher the tools of repression, the greater the Palestinian's ability to expose the criminal structure governing his reality, and to affirm that genocide on the streets or inside the cells will not become a "normal policy" no matter how long time passes or how the international silence is reinforced.