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RAMALLAH, OCCUPIED WEST BANK—Early on the morning of May 6, Israeli forces raided the home of 49-year-old Wael Jaghoub in the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank and detained him. Two weeks later, he was sentenced to six months in administrative detention.
A prominent writer and advocate of Palestinian liberation, Jaghoub has already spent a total of 30 years in Israeli prisons. He was first arrested in 1992 and sentenced to six years behind bars for taking part in the First Intifada. He was arrested again in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Second Intifada as a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This past January—nearly 24 years later—he was released as part of a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.
Jaghoub is not the first prisoner to be rearrested after being released in recent exchange deals. At least 27 freed Palestinians have been detained again and thrown back into Israel’s prison labyrinth, with seven of them still held under administrative detention. Jaghoub is among the most prominent of them. During his decades in prison, he became a highly visible leader in the Palestinian prisoners movement, publishing several books and studies that chronicle the experience of life in Israeli detention.
While news reports and testimonies have emerged of the torture of Palestinian prisoners held in detention camps like Sde Teiman—where there are frequent beatings, starvation, forced stress positions, rape, and death—there has been less recognition that these conditions are prevalent across all Israeli prisons and detention centers. There are 19 carceral facilities in Israel, and Ofer Prison, which operates in the West Bank.
Following October 7, 2023, prisoners’ conditions inside Israeli detention centers have rapidly deteriorated. The last 19 months have seen a dramatic escalation in the number of Palestinians behind bars, alongside increasing prisoner abuse and mistreatment by Israeli authorities.
There are currently more than 10,100 Palestinians held in Israeli detention, according to the prisoner rights group Addameer. This is nearly double the number from before October 7. That figure does not include detainees from Gaza held in detention camps run by the Israeli military. Some 3,500 people are held in administrative detention, including 119 children.
