Ben-Gvir is not alone: These are his collaborators in the illegal treatment of Palestinian prisoners
Hagar Shezaf writes in Haaretz on 2 June 2026:
Israel’s treatment of Palestinian detainees and prisoners has recently been at the center of global public discourse. Israel’s public and politicians tend to place the blame on Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, but he isn’t alone. A series of individuals – some of whom are senior officials with respectable positions and training, and some ordinary prison guards or soldiers – enable and sustain what is happening in the prisons. These are Ben-Gvir’s collaborators.
Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times article on sexual violence in detention facilities, and the recent video humiliating Gaza flotilla activists in detention (starring Ben-Gvir), reflect part of a madness that has spread widely through these prisons. Such prisons have effectively become torture camps, where Palestinian prisoners undergo dehumanization, manifested through violence, starvation, and denial of medical treatment.
Over the past three years, I have spoken with dozens of Palestinian prisoners and detainees held in Israeli prisons, and read appeals and reports from organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights Israel and B’Tselem, which monitor the situation. The things they describe are always on the spectrum between horrifying and appalling.
The sight of prisoners emerging from prisons emaciated and weak, with their limbs covered in scabies, has already become the norm. According to data received by Physicians for Human Rights Israel from the Israel Prison Service, since the beginning of the war, 54 Palestinians defined as security prisoners from Gaza, the West Bank, or Israel have died in its custody. According to the organization, another 49 Palestinians have died in detention in Israel Defense Forces custody.
The spirit is undoubtedly Ben-Gvir’s, but who are the people enabling the implementation of his policy? The first of them is the Israel Prison Service chief commissioner, Kobi Yaakobi, against whom an indictment is expected to be filed for obstruction of justice and breach of trust. In addition to Yaakobi’s overall responsibility for what is happening in the prisons, a highly despicable phenomenon has begun during his tenure, in which people he favors visit prisons holding Palestinian prisoners for public relations purposes, as Haaretz’s Josh Breiner reported.
The deterioration of Palestinian prisoner conditions had begun during the tenure of the previous Prison Service chief commissioner, Katy Perry. Since then, various prison commanders have allowed and enabled the policy’s implementation, including the current and former commanders of Megiddo Prison – Muweed Sbeiti and Yaakov Oshri respectively, the current and former commanders of Ketziot Prison – Yosef Hanifas and Menachem Bibas, respectively, and the commander of Ofer Prison – Vadim Goldstein. This is not an exhaustive list, but only the commanders of the three prisons that were repeatedly cited as the worst, in the testimonies I heard.
Next in line is Eiran Nahon, the legal adviser to the Israel Prison Service and the person responsible for upholding the law in a system that, according to many indicators, has become a place where not only is the law absent, but the prevailing policy is one of neglect and abandonment. Now, after allowing Ben-Gvir to act as he pleased in the prisons, Nahon is expected to be appointed head of the police’s legal department.
Next up in the collaborator parade are the medical personnel, who are supposed to maintain professional standards and be subjected first and foremost to an ethical code. The first is the Israel Prison Service’s chief medical officer, Dr. Liav Goldstein, a physician by profession, who is one of the officials who approved Ben-Gvir’s meal plan for prisoners, in which the food they receive was reduced to a minimum.
Since Dr. Goldstein was named as having approved the meal plan in response to a petition filed with the High Court of Justice by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, I am confident that he is well aware of the grave situation, as well as the judges’ ruling from September 2025, which stated that there are indications that the food in prison does not ensure “compliance with the legal standard.”
Even so, just over a week ago I spoke with a recently released prisoner who had lost half his weight in prison and was released suffering from a variety of illnesses. He said the quantities of food he received “would not be enough for a child.”
In his role as head of medical services at the Israel Prison Service, Dr. Goldstein is also the person that receives complaint letters from prisoners who did not receive the medical treatment or aids they needed, or appeals that presented him with evidence of the spread in the prisons of intestinal diseases and scabies.
One of the cases referred to him was that of a 16-year-old Palestinian minor who became underweight in Megiddo Prison in April 2025, and was released after the parole board commented that his appearance was “difficult to look at.” This was about a month after 17-year-old Walid Ahmed died in the same prison, after becoming severely malnourished. Has Dr. Goldstein been investigated regarding his responsibility for the situation in Megiddo and other prisons? Did anyone think he should be held accountable for what happens within the prison walls given the evidence of medical neglect?
One can continue down the chain, another link below Dr. Goldstein, and ask if anyone has investigated the Israel Prison Service district doctors or prison doctors. Those who saw prisoners losing weight, those in Megiddo Prison who witnessed Ahmed’s deteriorating condition, or who examined a detainee named Zaher Shushtari who suffered from multiple sclerosis and whose necessary treatment was stopped upon his arrest, or the doctors who perhaps even treated injuries caused by prison guard violence. Did they raise red flags over what they saw?
In an attempt to get answers to some of these questions, an NGO called Hatzlaha submitted a freedom of information request to the Israel Prison Service, demanding to see reports of investigations into deaths that have occurred in prisons since the beginning of the war. Unsurprisingly, the Israel Prison Service refused to provide the reports, and to this day has not even responded to requests to provide “paraphrases” of them or to give any information on how the investigations are being conducted.
Meanwhile, the police don’t seem to be in a hurry to investigate. More than two years after detainee Thaer Abu Asab was killed in Ketziot Prison, allegedly as a result of violence from prison guards, the State Prosecutor’s Office indeed announced its intention to file an indictment, but has not done it yet. And although the police claim they are still investigating Walid Ahmed’s death – more than a year after his death – there is no sign of real progress, and the court has closed its investigation into the causes of his death.
And then there are those that are outside of the prison system yet are supposed to be responsible for upholding ethics and medical standards: the Israeli Medical Association could have raised an outcry, demanded to know what was happening, and perhaps even denounced certain people, especially considering that the Israel Prison Service’s chief medical officer, Dr. Goldstein, is a member of its ethics committee.
The Ministry of Health could have intervened as more and more deaths were reported, some of which raised suspicions of medical neglect and even starvation; all the more so when the bodies of prisoners have been autopsied at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, which is subordinate to the Health Ministry. The prison service doctors are not employed by the Health Ministry – but is this a convincing argument for why these two institutions are allowed to wash their hands of responsibility in such a national and humanitarian emergency, the consequences of which are arguably not just experienced by Palestinian prisoners?
There are many to blame for the disgrace in Israel’s prisons. Ben-Gvir is the loudest among them, proudly flaunting his illegal policy. But alongside him, for about three years now, many other people have been enabling the implementation of his policy, in all its various aspects. They too have names, and they too must bear responsibility. Without them, Israeli prisons and military detention facilities couldn’t have become what they are today.
This article is reproduced in its entirety