Rape. Starvation. Fatal beatings. Mistreatment. Something fundamental has changed in Israeli prisons. None of my Palestinian friends who have recently been released are the same people they used to be
Jonathan Pollak, Haaretz , 9/1/2025
Translated by Shofty Shmaha, Tlaxcala
Jonathan Pollak (1982) was one of the founders of the Israeli group Anarchists Against the Wall in 2003. Wounded and imprisoned on several occasions, he contributes to the daily Haaretz. In particular, he refused to appear before a civilian court, demanding to be tried by a military tribunal, like a common Palestinian, which he was obviously refused.
Jonathan Pollak facing an Israeli soldier during a protest against the closure of the main road in the Palestinian village of Beit Dajan, near Nablus, occupied West Bank, Friday, March 9, 2012. (Anne Paq/Activestills)
Jonathan Pollak at the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court, arrested as part of an unprecedented legal campaign by the Zionist organization Ad Kan, January 15, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Activists hold up posters in support of Jonathan Pollak during the weekly demonstration in the Palestinian town of Beita, in the occupied West Bank, February 3, 2023. (Wahaj Banimoufleh)
When I returned to the territories [occupied since 1967] after a long detention following a demonstration in the village of Beita, the West Bank was very different from what I knew. Here too, Israel has lost its nerve. Murders of civilians, attacks by settlers acting with the army, mass arrests. Fear and terror around every corner. And this silence, a crushing silence. Even before my release, it was clear that something fundamental had changed. A few days after October 7, Ibrahim Alwadi, a friend from the village of Qusra, was killed along with his son Ahmad. They were shot as they accompanied four Palestinians who had been shot the day before - three by settlers who had invaded the village, the fourth by soldiers who were accompanying them.
After my release, I realized that something very bad was happening in the prisons. Over the past year, as I regained my freedom, thousands of Palestinians - including many friends and acquaintances - were arrested en masse by Israel. As they began to be released, their testimonies painted a systematic picture of torture. Fatal beatings are a recurring motif in every account. It happens in prisoner counts, during cell searches, at every movement from one place to another. The situation is so serious that some inmates ask their lawyers to hold hearings without their presence, because the path from the cell to the room where the camera is installed is a path of pain and humiliation.
I hesitated for a long time about how to share the testimonies I heard from my friends who had returned from detention. After all, I'm not revealing any new details here. Everything, down to the smallest detail, already fills volume upon volume in the reports of human rights organizations. But for me, these are not the stories of faraway people. These are people I have known and who have survived hell. None of them is the same person they once were. I seek to tell what I’ve heard from my friends, an experience shared by countless others, even while changing their names and obscuring identifiable details. After all, the fear of reprisals recurred in every conversation.
Blows and blood
I visited Malek a few days after his release. A yellow gate and guard tower blocked the path that once led to the village from the main road. Most of the other roads passing through the neighboring villages were all blocked. Only one winding road, near the Byzantine church that Israel blew up in 2002, remained open. For years, this village had been like a second home to me, and this is the first time I’ve been back there since my release.Malek was detained for 18 days. He was interrogated three times, and during all the interrogations, he was asked trivial questions. He was therefore convinced that he would be transferred to administrative detention - that is, without trial and without evidence, without being charged with anything, under a veneer of secret suspicion and with no time limit. This is indeed the fate of most Palestinian detainees now.
After the first interrogation, he was taken to the Garden of Torment. During the day, the guards would remove mattresses and blankets from the cells and return them in the evening when they were barely dry, and sometimes still wet. Malek describes the cold of winter nights in Jerusalem as arrows penetrating flesh to the bones. He tells how they beat him and the other inmates at every opportunity. At every count, every search, every movement from one place to another, everything was an opportunity to hit and humiliate.
“Once, during the morning count,” he told me, ”we were all on our knees, our faces turned towards the beds. One of the guards grabbed me from behind, handcuffed my hands and feet, and said in Hebrew, 'Come on, move'. He lifted me up by the handcuffs, behind my back, and led me bent over across the courtyard next to the cells. To get out, there's a sort of small room you must go through, between two doors with a small window”. I know exactly which little room he’s talking about, I’ve passed through it dozens of times. It's a security passage where, at a given moment, only one of the doors can be opened. “So we got there,” Malek continues, “and they slammed me against the door, my face against the window. I looked inside and saw that the floor was covered in clotted blood. I felt fear run through my body like electricity. I knew exactly what was going to happen. They opened the door, one came in and stood by the window at the back, blocked it, and the other threw me inside onto the floor. They kicked me. I tried to protect my head, but my hands were handcuffed, so I didn’t really have any way of doing that. They were murderous blows. I really thought they might kill me. I don’t know how long it lasted. At some point, I remembered that the night before, someone had said to me, “When they hit you, scream at the top of your lungs. What do you care? It can’t get any worse, and maybe someone will hear and come.” So I started shouting really loud, and indeed, someone did come. I don't understand Hebrew, but there was some shouting between him and them. Then they left and he took me away. I had blood coming out of my mouth and nose”.
Khaled, one of my closest friends, also suffered from the violence of the guards. When he was released from prison after eight months’ administrative detention, his son didn’t recognize him from afar. He ran the distance between Ofer prison and his home in Beitunia. Later, he said that he hadn’t been told that the administrative detention was over, and he was afraid that there had been a mistake and that they would soon arrest him again. This had already happened to someone who was with him in the cell. In the photo his son sent me a few minutes after their meeting, he looks like a human shadow. All over his body - his shoulders, arms, back, face, legs - were signs of violence. When I came to visit him, he stood up to kiss me, but when I took him in my arms, he groaned in pain. A few days later, examinations showed edema around the spine and a rib that had healed.
Every action is an opportunity to hit and humiliate
After his release, he realized that during the time he was detained, this detainee had not been the only one to die in Megiddo. Tawfik, who was released in winter from Gilboa prison, told me that during a check of the area by prison officers, one of the inmates complained that he wasn’t allowed out into the yard. In response, one of the officers said to him: “You want the yard? Say thank you for not being in the Hamas tunnels in Gaza”. Then, for two weeks, every day during the noon count, they took them out into the yard and ordered them to lie on the cold ground for two hours. Even in the rain. While they lay there, the guards walked around the yard with dogs. Sometimes the dogs would pass between them, and sometimes they’d actually step on the inmates lying down; they’d walk all over them.
According to Tawfik, every time an inmate met a lawyer, it came at a price. “I knew every time that the way back, between the visiting room and the ward, would add at least three more volleys of blows. But I never refused to go. You were in a five-star prison. You don’t understand what it’s like to be 12 people in a cell where even six are cramped. It’s like living in a closed circle. I didn’t mind at all what they were going to do to me. Just seeing someone else talking to you like a human being, maybe seeing something in the corridor on the way, that was worth everything to me”.
Munther Amira - the only one here to appear under his real name - was released from prison by surprise before the end of his period of administrative detention. Even today, no one knows why. Unlike many others who have been warned and fear reprisals, Amira told the cameras about the catastrophe in the prisons, calling them cemeteries for the living. He told me that one night, a Kt’ar unit burst into their cell at Ofer prison, accompanied by two dogs. They ordered the inmates to strip down to their underwear and lie on the floor, then ordered the dogs to sniff their bodies and faces. Then they ordered the prisoners to get dressed, led them to the showers and rinsed them with cold water while clothed. On another occasion, he tried to call a nurse for help after an inmate attempted suicide. The punishment for calling for help was another raid by the Kt’ar unit. This time, they ordered the inmates to lie on top of each other and beat them with truncheons. At one point, one of the guards spread their legs and hit them in the testicles with a truncheon.
Hunger and disease
Munther lost 33 kilos during his detention. I don't know how many kilos Khaled lost, having always been a slim man, but in the photo sent to me, I saw a human skeleton. In the living room of his house, the light from the lamp then revealed two deep depressions where his cheeks used to be. His eyes were surrounded by a red outline, that of someone who hadn't slept in weeks. On his skinny arms hung loose skin that looked as if it had been artificially attached, like plastic wrap. Blood tests on both showed severe deficiencies. Everyone I spoke to, regardless of the prison they passed through, repeated almost exactly the same menu, which is sometimes updated, or rather reduced. The last version I heard, from Ofer prison, was: for breakfast, one and a half boxes of cheese for a cell of 12 people, three slices of bread per person, 2 or 3 vegetables, usually a cucumber or a tomato, for the whole cell. Once every four days, 250 grams of jam for the whole cell. For lunch, one disposable plastic cup with rice per person, two spoonfuls of lentils, a few vegetables, three slices of bread. At dinner, two spoonfuls (coffee, not soup spoons) of hummus and tahini per person, a few vegetables, three slices of bread per person. Sometimes another cup of rice, sometimes a falafel ball (just one!) or an egg, which is usually a bit spoiled, sometimes with red dots, sometimes blue. And that’s it. Nazar told me: “It’s not just the quantity. Even what's already been brought in isn’t edible. The rice is barely cooked, almost everything is spoiled. And you know, there are even real children there, the ones who have never been in prison. We've tried to take care of them, to give them our rotten food. But if you give a little of your food away, it's like committing suicide. In the prison there is now a famine (maja'a مَجَاعَة), and it's not a natural disaster, it’s the policy of the prison service.”
Recently, hunger has even increased. Because of the cramped conditions, the prison service is finding ways to make the cells even tighter. Public areas, canteens - every place has become an extra cell. The number of prisoners in the cells, which were already overcrowded before, has increased still further. There are sections where 50 extra prisoners have been added, but the amount of food has remained the same. Not surprisingly, prisoners are losing a third or more of their body weight in just a few months.
Food is not the only thing lacking in prison, and inmates are in fact not allowed to own anything other than a single set of clothes. A shirt, a pair of underwear, a pair of socks, a pair of pants, a sweatshirt. That's it. For the duration of their detention. I remember once, when Munther's lawyer Riham Nasra visited him, he came into the visiting room barefoot. It was winter and freezing cold in Ofer. When she asked him why, he simply said: “There aren't any”. A quarter of all Palestinian prisoners suffer from scabies, according to a statement by the prison service itself in court. Nizar was released when his skin was healing. The lesions on his skin no longer bled, but scabs still covered large parts of his body. “The smell in the cell was something you can't even describe. Like decomposition, we were there and we were decomposing, our skin, our flesh. We’re not human beings there, we’re decomposing flesh,” he says. “Now, how could we not be? Most of the time there's no water at all, often only an hour a day, and sometimes we had no hot water for days. There were whole weeks when I didn't have a shower. It took me over a month to get soap. And there we are, in the same clothes, because nobody has a change of clothes, and they’re full of blood and pus and there’s a stench, not of dirt, but of death. Our clothes were soaked with our decomposing bodies”.
Tawfik recounted that “there was only running water for an hour a day. Not just for showers, but in general, even for toilets. So, during that hour, 12 people in the cell had to do everything that required water, including natural needs. Obviously, this was unbearable. And also, because most of the food was spoiled, we all had digestive problems almost all the time. You can't imagine how bad our cell stank”.
In such conditions, the health of the prisoners obviously deteriorates. Such rapid weight loss, for example, forces the body to consume its own muscle tissue. When Munther was released, he told his wife Sana, who is a nurse, that he was so dirty that his sweat had dyed his clothes orange. She looked at him and asked, “What about the urine?” He replied, “Yes, I peed blood too.” “You idiot,” she yelled at him, ”that wasn't dirt, that was your body rejecting the muscles it had eaten”.
Blood tests on almost everyone I knew showed that they suffered from malnutrition and severe deficiencies of iron, essential minerals and vitamins. But even medical care is a luxury. We don't know what goes on in the prison infirmaries, but for the prisoners, they don’t exist. Regular treatment has simply ceased. From time to time, a nurse makes a tour of the cells, but no treatment is administered, and the “examination” amounts to a conversation through the cell door. The medical response, at best, is paracetamol and, more often, something along the lines of “drink some water”. Needless to say, there's not enough water in the cells, as there's no running water most of the time. Sometimes a week or more goes by without even the nurse visiting the block.
And if there’s little talk of rape, there’s no need to mention sexual humiliation - videos of prisoners being led around completely naked by the prison service have been posted on social networks. These acts could not have been documented other than by the guards themselves, who sought to brag about their actions. The use of the search as an opportunity for sexual assault, often by hitting the groin with the hand or metal detector, is an almost constant experience, regularly described by prisoners who have been in different prisons.
I didn’t hear about assaults on women first hand, obviously. What I have heard, and not once, is the lack of hygienic material during menstruation and its use to humiliate. After the first beating on the day of her arrest, Mounira was taken to Sharon prison. On entering the prison, everyone goes through a body search, but a strip search is not the norm and requires reasonable cause to suspect that the inmate is hiding a prohibited object. A strip search also requires the approval of the officer in charge. During the search, no officer was there for Mounira, and certainly no organized procedure to verify reasonable suspicion. Mounira was pushed by two female guards into a small search room, where they forced her to remove all her clothes, including her underwear and bra, and get down on her knees. After leaving her alone for a few minutes, one of the guards came back, hit her and left. In the end, her clothes were returned to her, and she was allowed to get dressed. The next day was the first day of her period. She was given a sanitary pad and had to make do with it for the whole of her period. And it was the same for all of them. By the time she was released, she was suffering from an infection and severe inflammation of the urinary tract.
End of story
Sde Teiman was the most terrible place of detention, and this is supposedly why they closed it down. Indeed, it’s hard to think of the descriptions of horror and atrocity that came out of this torture camp without thinking of the place as one of the circles of hell. But it was not without reason that the state agreed to transfer those held there to other locations - principally Nitzan and Ofer. Sde Teiman or not, Israel is holding thousands of people in torture camps, and at least 68 of them have lost their lives. Since the beginning of December alone, the deaths of four more detainees have been reported. One of them, Mahmad Walid Ali, 45, from the Nour Shams camp near Tulkarm, died just one week after his arrest. Torture in all its forms - hunger, humiliation, sexual assault, promiscuity, beatings and death - does not happen by chance. Together, they constitute Israeli policy. This is the reality.
