The Minister of Scabies isn’t done dragging Israeli society down
Amira Hass writes in Haaretz on 15 September 2026:
A family physician from Ramallah, 71-year-old Dr. Mazen Rantisi, who was arrested on June 21 for the crime of doing volunteer work for a veteran Palestinian organization that provides free medical services, has been transferred to an isolation ward in Ganot Prison in the Negev. But he wasn’t put there as a punishment; he was sent to the isolation ward for Palestinians who contracted the skin disease scabies while in an Israeli jail.
A Palestinian prisoner sentenced to 20 years in jail told me upon being released about a year ago that he also contracted this disease, in the final months of his incarceration. “For 18 years I was a prisoner in a jail cell,” he said. “With scabies, I became a prisoner in my own body.”
He had no way to escape the irritating itching, the stubborn rash, the pimples, the small blisters or the secondary infections that spread because the prison authorities didn’t give him appropriate treatment in time. The same is true for thousands of other Palestinian prisoners.
The disease is caused by tiny mites, just a quarter of a millimeter long. The mites dig burrows and tunnels in the skin, using both their mouths and their forelegs. They then lay their eggs in these tunnels.
But for these mites to appear and succeed in their mission of digging in, multiplying and causing itching, they need a suitable environment – namely, the conditions the Israel Prison Service has intentionally created in accordance with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s directive to worsen prison conditions in terms of food, the ability to maintain cleanliness and good hygiene, the number of square centimeters per person and medical neglect.
Are Dr. Rantisi and his fellow sufferers currently receiving the necessary treatment for this skin disease, aside from being isolated? His family doesn’t know. It’s only by chance that they learned he had been transferred to Ganot, near Mitzpeh Ramon in the south of Israel: The lawyer who was supposed to visit him in Ofer Prison, near the West Bank settlement of Givat Ze’ev, was turned away on the grounds that the detainee wasn’t there. And it’s only by chance that his family learned Dr. Rantisi was sick: The lawyer’s request to meet with him in his new place of incarceration was denied because of his skin disease. That was around 12 days ago.
But even once Dr. Rantisi recovers, his family won’t be able to see him. Family visits have been forbidden. Even before October 7, 2023, the authorities found ways to restrict them. While still in Ofer, Dr. Rantisi reported the scandalously unhygienic conditions to a lawyer working for the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. The prison authorities don’t make it possible for the inmates to keep clean, he told her.
Aside from the unprecedented overcrowding (for example, 10 prisoners in a cell meant for six), the humidity and the lack of ventilation, they aren’t given any changes of clothing (aside from two pairs of underpants). There is no floor cleaning liquid and no broom, mop or rags. All the inmates share the same bit of soap, whose stench is terrible; there is no laundry detergent (the Prison Service said at the time that all these statements are smears).
Identical reports of unhygienic conditions forced on the inmates come from all the prisons. The minister of scabies, Itamar Ben-Gvir, visited Damoun, a women’s prison near Haifa, on some unknown date in August. According to a report on the Public Committee Against Torture’s website, the female Palestinian inmates were brought before him with their hands bound.
Even so, they dared to tell him that they don’t have enough water or enough opportunities to shower, that they are denied medical care and that the guards treat them violently. According to the committee’s report, Ben-Gvir announced that he intended to make prison conditions even worse, to reduce them to “the barest minimum.”
To what new nadir does Ben-Gvir want to bring Israeli society? To what new nadir of criminal obedience is the Prison Service willing to descend? On top of the unhygienic conditions and the overcrowding, which foment disease, the prison authorities already make sure to abuse Palestinian inmates in numerous other ways.
These include disgusting food in meager quantities; keeping them in painful, humiliating poses during the daily counts (four times a day) and when moving from place to place in the prison itself; sudden raids on the cells by guards, which are accompanied by beatings and blows, tear gas and curses; the confiscation of mattresses during daytime; reducing time spent in the yard; and a ban on reading, writing, listening to the radio or watching television.
More than 9,000 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli jails. But as of the end of July, according to data given to HaMoked Center for the Defense of the Individual, only about 1,500 had been tried and sentenced. The rest are administrative detainees (meaning people held without trial), detainees whose trials haven’t yet ended or haven’t yet begun, and residents of the Gaza Strip defined as unlawful combatants.
Israel has never upheld the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” when it comes to Palestinians. Moreover, there’s room to dispute the very terms “crime” and “guilt” in the context of an illegal military occupation and oppression that has gone on for 60 years already. But in any case, legal definitions and the severity of the charges or convictions have nothing to do with the fact that the prison authorities and the legal establishment are obligated to provide prison conditions worthy of the word “human.”
More than 9,000 imprisoned Palestinians are living under conditions of daily torture that Israelis have deliberately created – from cabinet ministers through prison officers, military judges and the prison doctors who turn a blind eye, down to the most junior prison guards. All of them mirror our society.
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