A Knock at the Door
The scene has become tragically familiar in occupied Palestine: the pounding fists on the door in the dead of night, the splintering wood, the shouts in broken Arabic. Soldiers storm in, rifles raised, children jolt awake, and someone is taken for nothing more than attending a protest or being related to someone who did, or throwing a stone, or posting something on social media in protest to the atrocities committed against their own people.
This past Thursday, April 17, 2025, marked Palestinian Prisoners’ Day amid the height of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank. Commemorated since 1974, this day honors the central role of Palestinian political captives in the struggle for national liberation. It is also a date etched in sorrow as well as resistance. Nearly one million Palestinians have been imprisoned since 1948—teachers, farmers, health workers, children, artists, and leaders. Today, nearly 10,000 remain behind bars, including 3,500 held in administrative detention without charge or trial, 400 children, and 29 women. Many more abducted from Gaza are held in secret military facilities like Sde Teiman, where they endure severe torture, starvation, and denial of medical care. Nearly 40% of Palestinian men in the occupied territories have been imprisoned at least once. These are not statistics. They are fathers, daughters, poets, farmers- lives interrupted, families torn apart, futures deferred.
Palestinian prisoners are not only victims but leaders of the resistance. From inside the prisons, they organize, write, educate, and inspire movements beyond the prison walls. Their leadership is visible not only in political statements and hunger strikes, but also in the forging of cultural and educational collectives that have spread through refugee camps and solidarity tents. During annual commemorations, family members-especially women-gather in massive numbers, surrounding tents and camp walls covered with portraits of imprisoned, martyred, and disappeared loved ones. These gatherings reflect a deep communal identification with the imprisoned, who are seen as both symbols and agents of resistance. In some cases, imprisoned men have smuggled out sperm to enable their wives to conceive, a powerful act of defiance against a system intent on severing family continuity and reproductive futures.
Administrative Detention in Israel
Israel’s policy of administrative detention allows for the imprisonment of individuals without charge or trial, often based on “undisclosed evidence”. This practice has been widely criticized by human rights organizations. As of early 2025, reports indicate that over 10,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, with many detained under administrative orders. Detainees endure harsh conditions, including inadequate food, medical care, and reports of physical abuse.(AP, 2025)
The trauma experienced by detainees frequently extends beyond their captivity, a captivity never justified (Guardian, 2025). Former prisoners have reported severe psychological effects, such as insomnia, anxiety, and difficulty reintegrating into family life. For instance, Amer Abu Hlel, after over a year in administrative detention without charges, suffered from physical injuries and profound psychological distress, leading to social withdrawal and fear of re-arrest. Palestinian captives speak of beatings, deprivation, torture, rape: Palestinians speak of the ‘hell’ of Israeli prisons. (Le Monde, 2024)
Gendered Violence in Israeli Colonial Prisons
In the landscape of Israeli colonial repression, the prison emerges not merely as a site of incarceration, but as a gendered apparatus of control. Palestinian feminist scholars and human rights researchers have long argued that sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is not incidental, but structural to the Israeli occupation regime. From degrading strip searches to sexual torture, these acts serve as tools of humiliation, discipline, and subjugation, part of a calculated strategy to dominate and destabilize both individuals and the broader Palestinian social fabric.
Such acts are not random- they are calculated forms of domination. Sexualized violence against male prisoners is used to demasculinize the colonized subject, to strip away dignity and humiliate in ways that destabilize identity and community. This strategy echoes other colonial regimes where emasculation and rape were used not only to extract confessions but to degrade the captive into an object of scorn-even in their own eyes. On the other side of this gendered war is the violation and control of women’s bodies, used to rupture kinship lines and reproductive futures. As Palestinian feminist scholars have long argued, this is not merely about torture-it is about reconfiguring power through gendered, sexualized trauma.
Palestinian criminologist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2009) has been at the forefront of theorizing sexual violence as a pillar of settler-colonial governance. In her foundational study, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study, she documents how the Israeli state weaponizes threats of rape, sexual humiliation, and coercive tactics such as isqāt siyāsī (political subjugation) to recruit collaborators and terrorize communities. Through a decolonial feminist lens, Shalhoub-Kevorkian contends that sexual violence is not an aberration but a “normal” extension of colonial power, aimed at dismantling kinship structures, eroding resistance, and reinforcing both Israeli domination and internal patriarchal controls (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009).
Sociologist Nahla Abdo (2014) expands this analysis through her historical account of Palestinian women political prisoners in Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System. Drawing on oral histories and testimonies, Abdo reveals how Palestinian women have endured sexual torture, harassment, and invasive bodily violence as tools of repression. The story of Rasmea Odeh-who was raped, tortured, and later exiled-stands as a harrowing example of how the Israeli prison system targets women’s bodies to punish political dissent and stigmatize resistance. For Abdo, gendered violence is not just about physical harm-it is an assault on Palestinian womanhood itself, aimed at “criminalizing” female fighters and instilling collective fear (Abdo, 2014).
Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian feminist, former political prisoner, and human rights advocate, contributed further to this field with a 2023 report for the Independent Commission for Human Rights. Based on firsthand accounts from detainees during Israel’s war on Gaza, the report catalogues gendered violations against women, men, and children alike-including threats of rape, verbal sexual degradation, forcible removal of veils, and collective strip searches. Jarrar situates these acts within the framework of colonial gendered violence, emphasizing that such humiliations are not isolated misconduct but “systematic strategies of domination” meant to erode identity and social integrity (Jarrar, 2023).
International findings echo these feminist insights. The 2024 United Nations Commission of Inquiry report on the Occupied Palestinian Territory explicitly recognized the use of sexual and gender-based violence by Israeli forces. It concluded that such acts are “intrinsically linked” to the broader framework of occupation and racial domination. The report confirmed the use of rape, sexual torture, and humiliation against both men and women in detention-including forced nudity in front of family members and rape threats used to extract confessions or silence dissent. These findings offer international validation of long-standing feminist critiques, emphasizing that the body-especially the colonized body-becomes a battleground where control is exercised and trauma inscribed (UN COI, 2025).
Together, these scholarly and investigative efforts reveal a disturbing consistency: Israeli prisons and detention centers function as laboratories of colonial violence where gender and sexuality are weaponized with precision. Whether by emasculating men through sexual torture or stripping veiled women to break cultural codes, these acts aim to humiliate and destroy the social and psychological fabric of Palestinian life. Feminist theorists like Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Abdo remind us that this is not merely about individual suffering; it is about domination through intimate, bodily terror. (Abdo, 2014)
Ultimately, the violence meted out in these carceral spaces must be understood as political and gendered. It is not accidental that Palestinian children, women, and men emerge from Israeli detention systems with scars-visible and invisible-that reshape families and futures. Nor is it incidental that these abuses often go unpunished and unacknowledged. As this feminist and decolonial analysis shows, sexual violence is not a side effect of war-it is a core tactic of colonial rule, designed to break resistance from the inside out.
The Machinery of Dehumanization: The Children
A 2013 UNICEF report concluded that the ill-treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention is “widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” The report documented practices such as night arrests, physical violence, blindfolding, and coercive interrogations without legal counsel or parental presence. It also noted that children were often forced to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they did not understand.
Israel’s prison system is not merely punitive-it is a pillar of its colonial regime. It functions to exhaust and disempower a people fighting for freedom. Military courts convict 99% of Palestinians. (Aljazeera, 2018) Children as young as 12 are tried as adults. “Since 2000, an estimated 12,000 Palestinian children have been arbitrarily detained in Israel’s military detention system. They are mostly charged for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, an act punishable by up to maximum 20 years in prison.” (Justice for All, Canada, 2024) Torture, including beatings and stress positions, is routinely used in interrogations-93% of Palestinian children report experiencing it. (Jabr, 2024)
Incarceration becomes a method not only of silencing dissent but of waging psychological warfare.
Solitary Confinement as Torture: Over 500 Palestinian captives are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months or even years. According to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Mandela Rules), solitary confinement exceeding 15 days constitutes torture. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). More than 1400 Palestinians are held in solitary confinement (B’tselm, 2014). Prolonged isolation has severe psychological consequences-ranging from depression and hallucinations to long-term cognitive damage. (Reiter, et al, 2020) In many documented cases, Palestinians with developmental or psychiatric disorders have been subjected to repeated humiliation and neglect rather than care. Ahmad Manasra, arrested at 13 and later suffered serious psychological consequences, in part as a result of prolonged solitary confinement. He is one of many who have suffered under such conditions. (Amnesty, 2023, Abu Sharar, 2021)
Medical Neglect: Writer Walid Daqqa spent 38 years in prison and died in 2024 after Israeli authorities denied him treatment for leukemia. “They are killing me slowly,” he wrote in his final letter, “but my ideas will outlive them.” In March 2025, 17-year-old Walid Ahmad from the West Bank died in Megiddo Prison after six months of detention without charge. An autopsy observed by an Israeli doctor indicated that severe malnutrition and untreated colitis likely contributed to his death. Ahmad had shown signs of starvation, scabies, inflammation of the colon, and overall physical frailty, exacerbated by inadequate food, poor sanitary conditions, and possibly contaminated meals during Ramadan.
Deliberate Disease: In 2024, a scabies outbreak spread to 800 captives in Naqab. Guards withheld medicine and hygiene supplies, leaving detainees to scratch their skin raw. An investigation by Haaretz revealed that a quarter of Palestinian captives in Israeli prisons have been infected with scabies in recent months. Prison authorities have been accused of allowing scabies to spread by restricting inmates’ water supply and depriving them of clean clothes and medical care. Without treatment, these wounds become infected. Left untreated in overcrowded, unsanitary cells, even a condition as treatable as scabies becomes a source of ongoing pain and torture, as a result of systemic neglect. These infections are not incidental-they reflect a broader strategy of dehumanization through deliberate medical denial.
Stolen Childhoods: Palestinian children are the only children in the world systematically prosecuted in military courts. Every year, between 500 and 700 are arrested-most during night raids. They are often blindfolded, shackled, and transported to interrogation centers where they are beaten, threatened, denied access to a lawyer, and coerced into signing confessions in Hebrew, a language many do not understand (DCIP-Military Detention).
In 99% of cases, these children are convicted for minor acts such as throwing stones or posting comments on social media. In 2016, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation allowing children as young as 12 to be sentenced to prison, including life imprisonment. This law has been used to target Palestinian children specifically, violating multiple international legal standards (Time, 2025).
In July 2019, a four-year-old boy named Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan from Issawiya in occupied East Jerusalem was summoned for interrogation by Israeli authorities after allegedly throwing a stone. A dozen armed officers arrived at his home (Middle East Monitor, 2019). The child cried in terror. His father accompanied him to the police station where he was questioned. While he was ultimately not charged, the event reflects the extreme and surreal nature of repression faced even by toddlers.
Ahmad Manasra, arrested at age 13, became a global symbol of this brutality. Severely injured and interrogated while bleeding in custody, his forced confession was broadcast publicly. After nearly a decade of unjust incarceration, solitary confinement, and deteriorating mental and physical health, Ahmad was released on April 10, 2025. Despite evidence that he did not participate in the 2015 stabbing incident in Jerusalem, he was sentenced to 12 years (later reduced to 9.5), following a trial that violated his rights as a child. During his imprisonment, Ahmad was subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, denied adequate medical and psychological care, and endured treatment condemned by international human rights organizations. His release came without proper coordination; he was left alone, disoriented, and deeply distressed in the desert near the prison. He was later reunited with his family and continues to receive psychological support. Ahmad’s case remains a haunting emblem of the systemic “unchilding” of Palestinian youth and a call to end the imprisonment of children under military occupation.(Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, 2025)
Ahed Tamimi, detained at 16 after slapping an Israeli soldier in the wake of her cousin being shot in the face with a rubber bullet, spent eight months in prison. Her case drew international attention, not just for the injustice she endured, but for her defiance. “They think they broke me,” she said upon release. “But this generation was born from the womb of the Intifada” (The Guardian, 2018).
The Psychological Toll of Imprisonment on Palestinian Children
Physical and Emotional Abuse: A 2023 report by Save the Children revealed that 86% of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention experienced physical violence, and 69% were strip-searched. Nearly half (42%) sustained injuries during arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones. Such traumatic experiences contribute to long-term psychological distress (Save the Children, 2023).
Psychological Distress and Alienation: The same report highlighted that detained children often suffer from anxiety, depression, and a sense of alienation upon release. Many struggle to reintegrate into their communities, with feelings of fear and mistrust persisting long after their detention (Save the Children, 2023).
Impact on Future Aspirations: A 2023 study titled “Injustice: Palestinian children’s experience of the Israeli military detention system” found that imprisonment disrupts children’s education and future plans. One child expressed, “After you are released from prison you start racing against time trying to catch up… Whatever you had in your mind before your arrest just passed you by” (Save the Children, 2023).
BDS: Breaking the Chains of Complicity
If prison is Israel’s tool of domination, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is our collective tool of resistance. BDS calls for economic and cultural pressure on Israel until it complies with international law.
At this moment in history-when the genocide in Gaza continues unabated, when the bodies of the dead and maimed outnumber the living, when fascism parades through global capitals and tyrants rule with impunity-it is easy to lose hope. When every weapon is being waged against our Palestine and her people, when those who speak are censored or arrested, when friends hide their articles and delete their words, and when we all feel we are waiting our turn to be plucked from the path of resistance—it is tempting to believe that our struggle is lost.
But it is not. It is not lost when we remain on the path of steadfastness (sumud), of clarity, of collective care.
History is our witness:
+ Apartheid South Africa was brought to its knees by coordinated global boycott, cultural isolation, and a refusal to normalize oppression.
+ British colonial rule in India fell after decades of economic noncooperation and moral resistance.
+ The U.S. Civil Rights Movement broke segregation’s legal backbone with sustained boycotts and protests.
+ Chile’s Pinochet regime, Argentina’s military dictatorship, and East Germany’s Stasi rule all crumbled in the face of international solidarity and internal resistance.
These movements teach us that boycott, divestment, and sanctions are not abstract theories-they are tools that have toppled empires. Yet we must also recognize that such victories are not permanent. The recent far-right resurgence in Argentina under Milei and the dismantling of civil rights protections in the U.S. under Trump remind us that gains can be reversed when fascism reasserts itself. That is why the fight for Palestinian freedom must be connected to broader global anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements-because the forces we confront do not remain in one place. They metastasize.
And so it is with BDS. Launched in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, BDS is our weapon and our lifeline. If Israel’s tools are walls, prisons, and erasure, ours are presence, refusal, and solidarity.
BDS has already shown its power:
+ AXA Insurance divested from Israeli arms company Elbit Systems.
+ Ben & Jerry’s halted sales in illegal settlements, stating, “It’s inconsistent with our values.”
+ Veolia lost over $20 billion in contracts and withdrew completely from Israel.
+ G4S, under pressure, sold its Israeli prison operations.
+ Dozens of universities, churches, and pension funds have divested from companies profiting from apartheid.
This is not symbolic. This is material. Every contract canceled, every artist who says no, every pension fund that walks away-weakens the machinery of domination.
Freedom Is the Only Antidote
Palestinian captives are not just victims. They are witnesses. They are leaders. They are the barometers of our shared humanity.
When a blindfold is tightened on a child in the dark, it is our moral vision that is obscured. When a prisoner is denied medicine, our silence sharpens the knife.
BDS is not a slogan. It is a form of care. It is a nonviolent weapon in a world that knows only violence.
As Assata Shakur, a Black activist, author, and former member of the Black Liberation Army, wrote:
The chains will break. The cell door will rust.
And we will still be here,
roots deeper than their prisons.
And so we return to the knock on the door—a summons in the dead of night that, for too many Palestinian families, has become the echo of generational pain. These prisons, with their barred cells and perpetually shadowed halls, are meant to vanish people and break their spirits. But from these very sites of despair come the songs, letters, smuggled stories, and steadfast courage that galvanize a global movement.
This article aims to name the systematic brutality against Palestinian prisoners for what it is—an intentional, gendered, colonial assault designed to cripple an entire people’s struggle for self-determination—and, at the same time, to honor the indomitable spirit that refuses to submit. By shining a light on the prison system and the suffering within it, we also illuminate a path of resistance and solidarity. When we choose Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, we choose a peaceful but potent form of collective action—one that can weaken the pillars of apartheid just as similar movements have toppled oppressive regimes worldwide.
What is at stake here is not just the fate of the imprisoned, but the moral fabric that binds us all. Each time a child is blindfolded or a woman is threatened with sexualized violence, our collective conscience is tested. Each time we stay silent or look away, we risk allowing injustice to calcify into permanence. But every refusal to be silent—every poem written on contraband paper, every protest sign raised in the streets, every institution that cuts ties with profiteers of apartheid—becomes proof that solidarity can transcend walls and barbed wire.
If these prisons exist to bury hope, then hope must outgrow the walls. If this system thrives on complicity, then let our voices, our actions, and our global alliances sever the chains. In the unbreakable words of Palestinian prisoners and in the unwavering commitment of those who stand with them, we find the enduring truth: that freedom is both a right and a responsibility. We owe it to one another—and to all who have been caged—to turn each knock at the door into a rallying cry for liberation.
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