‘I cannot help my clients’: The impossible task of representing Palestinian detainees
Palestinian prisoners being prepared for release as part of a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas, at Ketziot Prison, southern Israel, 26 February 2025
Lee Mordechai and Liat Kozma report in +972 on 27 January 2026:
In Israel today, few issues are met with as much indifference — and at times open hostility — as the human rights of Palestinians held in the Israeli prison system. The marginal circle of lawyers and activists who continue to work on these cases operate in courts and speak out in public, but the abuses they document hardly register beyond their narrow professional and political communities.
Over the past two years, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations have published several reports on the dire condition of Palestinians incarcerated in Israel. The reports describe extreme overcrowding, deprivation of basic necessities, widespread illness, routine violence and torture, and severe restrictions on medical access and care. Between October 2023 and November 2025, nearly 100 Palestinians are known to have died in Israeli custody, which human rights groups describe as likely a significant undercount.
It bears emphasizing that these conditions have not been selectively imposed on Hamas militants captured on October 7 or during the subsequent fighting. Palestinians detained before October 7, workers from Gaza who were in Israel on the day of the attack, and Palestinian citizens of Israel arrested for social media posts have all been subjected to the same regime.
Since spring 2024, when the brutal torture of Palestinian prisoners and the nightmarish conditions at the Sde Teiman detention center were exposed, the core facts of these reports have periodically drawn some attention both abroad and in Israel. However, the conditions that have enabled and normalized such practices across Israeli jails have attracted less scrutiny.
Interviews we conducted with seven attorneys who represent Palestinian detainees point to an aggressive dismantling of monitoring mechanisms, alongside growing obstruction and harassment of legal counsel — developments that, taken together, have allowed the prison system to largely operate with impunity.