15/10/2025
Freedom is the Right of Every Palestinian Prisoner Held in Israeli Prisons
While the Israeli prisoners were handed over according to principles, standards, and laws that respect human rights—in an exchange deal with the Israeli occupation, and despite the Israeli authorities’ stubborn refusal to release key figures of the Palestinian national prisoners’ movement, including leaders Marwan Barghouti, Ahmed Saadat, and Abdullah Barghouti, the occupying state—which considers itself “the only democratic state” in the Middle East, according to its officials—threatened the Palestinian prisoners released under the exchange deal, as well as their families. Israeli security agencies warned them against holding any form of celebration, making contact with anyone, or giving any press interviews in which they spoke about what they endured during captivity or what they faced during their release process.
Prisoners are subjected to various forms of humiliation, abuse, and torture during years of imprisonment. Upon release, and during their transfer by bus to the exchange site, the effects of these abuses were visibly clear on their physical condition. They endured deliberate starvation, systematic torture, severe beatings, the spread of epidemics—particularly skin diseases—without receiving any form of medical treatment, in addition to attacks by trained police dogs, solitary confinement, denial of family and lawyer visits, occasional poisoning of the rationed food provided to them, and the stripping and sexual harassment of female prisoners, as well as child detainees, with threats of sexual assault. Even elderly prisoners were not spared from harassment. Psychological manipulation was used against them and their families to break their morale, causing chronic anxiety and distress. Some were told they were included in the exchange deal, only to be later excluded, or told they would not be deported, only to find out they were. Such practices violate all relevant norms and laws, all carried out under complete secrecy, with official Israeli support, and with Arab and international neglect and local popular abandonment, according to testimonies from some of those released.
Targeting prisoners is a longstanding and recurring occupation policy, which escalated after October 7, 2023. The far-right Israeli government views this as a form of revenge. This adds to the brutality and barbarism the Israeli state practiced in response to the resistance operation, targeting all Palestinians and turning Gaza into a place unfit for life.
The Israeli escalation against prisoners is part of a systematic policy that amounts to war crimes and violates all relevant laws. It aims to break the will of the Palestinian people by targeting their imprisoned national symbols, thereby targeting the resistance ideology itself, seeking to uproot it from the Palestinian mindset and replace it with frustration, despair, and deterrence from pursuing their legitimate rights.
One of the most prominent results of this fascist policy has been the martyrdom of dozens of prisoners, buried in numbered graves without allowing their families to hold funeral ceremonies or even take a final farewell, in addition to the spread of chronic diseases among them due to deliberate medical neglect.
