Palestinian Prisoners:
“We’re Leaving Hell!”

Oct 27, 2025

This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2986 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

Testimonies of the 1,968 Palestinian prisoners released under Trump’s plan for Gaza confirm the extent to which deprivation, torture, and humiliation are entrenched in Israeli prisons.

Many Palestinian former detainees keep silent after being released. Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet threatens reprisals if they describe the conditions of their detention. Shin Bet wields total power, including in the West Bank. But all the testimonies are consistent and moreover are corroborated by the released prisoners’ physical condition.

“I was hungry for two years,” one of them explained. “No sugar, no salt. They just gave us enough to keep us alive.” “They gave us two pieces of dry bread. Sometimes a spoonful of yogurt. A spoiled vegetable.” The emaciated prisoners were nearly invisible inside their old clothes. Many lost 80 or 90 pounds.

Beatings in detention happened daily. A doctor from Gaza, arrested in January 2024, recounts: “Torture was our daily bread. We would spend entire days handcuffed, blindfolded, and held in painful positions.” With each transfer between prisons, or even between cells, prisoners were stripped naked for hours and beaten: “Every time we were asked to leave our cells or moved, they beat us with batons. It was our daily ration.”

Over the past two years, 77 prisoners died from torture or lack of food and medical care. Very harsh already, detention conditions deteriorated more when far-right Zionist Itamar Ben Gvir became Minister of Internal Security. He boasts of reducing food portions.

Since 1967, one in three Palestinians has been arrested by Israel during their lifetime. While 1,968 prisoners were released in exchange for the last Israeli hostages held in Gaza, between 8,000 and 10,000 still languish in Israeli prisons. Some were sentenced to life imprisonment or decades in prison for certain actions; some, because they participated in the Intifada of the 2000s. But most were arrested and placed in administrative detention without trial or judgment and for unlimited time.

Israel follows practices inherited from the decades when Britain had a mandate to rule Palestine essentially as a colony. Israel uses administrative detention to destroy Palestinian society and break up families. Of the 250 Palestinians recently released after spending 15 to 25 years in prison, only 88 were allowed to rejoin their families in Gaza. The rest were deported to Egypt and other countries, most likely for life.

Torture, deprivation, dehumanization, and deportation. These are the systematic methods of a colonial state oppressing an entire people. Imperialist leaders are actively complicit. They call anyone anti-Semitic who denounces this dictatorship exercised over the Palestinians.