‘They competed in cruelty’: Palestinian doctor recalls 127 days in Israeli prison
Amira Hass reports in Haaretz on 5 November 2026:
The 127 days that Mazen Rantisi, a Palestinian family physician, was held in an Israeli prison were long enough for him to come out looking like the other Palestinians who have left Israeli prisons over the past three years. He walked out emaciated, wearing flip-flops, a gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt (the clothes and shoes in which prisoners are arrested are not returned to them), scratching incessantly; his gaze conveyed several things at once: shock, sadness and anxiety, bewilderment that the world continues as usual, and joy. Only a bleeding bruise on his forehead distinguished him from the others
His period of incarceration – between his arrest on June 21 and his release less than two weeks ago, on October 25 – was also long enough that when he went for a walk in his Ramallah neighborhood, he unwittingly walked with a stooped back and bowed head. This is the torturous posture that the Israel Prison Service imposes on Palestinian prisoners, while their legs and hands are chained, when they move from one place in the prison to another.
On the other hand, his stay in two prisons (Ofer and Nafha) was relatively short, so he felt ashamed “that I’m being released while the young men who were with me in the cells, and often protected me, remain behind.”
As a physician who believes that “humanity is one of the foundations of our profession,” he paid particular attention to the medical staff. “There was one good young doctor,” he recounts. “He didn’t say anything, but in his eyes, I saw sorrow and sympathy. He didn’t shout like the others. I asked for a laxative, and he gave it to me. In contrast, there was a diabetic in our cell who hasn’t received his eye drops since late 2023. He lost sight in one eye, and I’m convinced he will soon lose sight in the other one as well.
Rantisi, 71, known as “the doctor to the poor” due to the very low fees he charges at his private clinic, says that Israel Prison Service doctors “don’t provide Palestinian prisoners with real treatment for scabies” – the infectious disease caused by tiny parasites that burrow tunnels in the upper layer of the skin and lay their eggs there. Over the past three years, scabies has become an epidemic in the Israeli prison system, and a torture device in itself. Rantisi estimates that all Palestinian prisoners are infected, but about a fifth of them don’t suffer from symptoms. “The doctors only check our hands and refuse to examine other parts of the body. This is not an examination. The guys shout from inside the cells into the corridor: ‘We have scabies, give us medicine,’ but they don’t receive it.”
When there’s a widespread outbreak of scabies in enclosed, crowded places, it’s standard practice to treat everyone with oral medication. Rantisi himself received one pill about two months after his arrest, when he was already infected. He and other prisoners didn’t receive the second dose, which is usually given a week or two later. “Especially in an epidemic situation, everyone should receive the repeat treatment at the same time, but this doesn’t happen in the prison. The treatment is sporadic,” he says. The anti-parasitic cream and the ointment to relieve the incessant, sleep-depriving itching are also rarely provided in prison, and are only given to a minority of patients. “Once, a decent medic gave me some ointment in Ofer Prison,” he recalls.
Cleanliness is a fundamental condition for healing from an outbreak and stopping the epidemic. But the Israel Prison Service provides new prisoners with clothes and blankets that, judging by their smell, were not laundered beforehand. Each prisoner washes his own clothes – a prison uniform, a tracksuit and one or two pairs of underwear – and puts them on while they are still damp. The thin foam mattresses provided to the prisoners are foul-smelling.
Apart from one tube of shampoo for showering, there are no cleaning supplies in the room – and when it runs out, the guards don’t immediately provide a new one. The time allotted for showering is very short. Prisoners are frequently moved from cell to cell; during his last of six transfers, Rantisi’s toothbrush was taken away and not returned. There are no detergents and cleaning tools in the cells: no broom, no mop, no floor squeegee. “It can’t be that the doctors and medics are unaware of this situation,” Rantisi says.
When Rantisi was transferred from Ofer Prison, north of the Givat Ze’ev settlement, to Nafha Prison (north of Mitzpe Ramon, he was brought in chained as usual for an assessment with a psychologist. “She said she was sorry about the situation and asked if I wanted water. She didn’t remove the handcuffs from my hands behind my back, and held the glass of water for me to drink.”
He cites her as an example that even those who show humanity are limited by orders from above. But his overall impression of the Israel Prison Service staff is that they “want to show loyalty by displaying cruel treatment toward us. It’s as if there’s a competition among them to see who could be crueler. Some of the nurses even shouted at us more than the guards.”
He noticed that when a female guard was nearby, the male guards felt the need to be even more hostile. He mentions with surprise the long fingernails of the female guards, “who, while shouting at us, were surrounded by a cloud of perfume that made us all cough.” A rumor circulated among the prisoners that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had given them expensive bottles of perfume as a gift.
Rantisi says it was evident that some of the guards were there just to earn a living, but he believes that the majority take pleasure in the power they wield, which brought him to conclude that some of them suffered abuse in their childhood.
“‘Don’t look at me, lower your eyes,’ they shout. They hit and kick us when we’re handcuffed. At night, they pass by and bang on the cell door to wake us up. They turn off the light in the evening during meals, and then at night, they turn the light on and off every half hour. If we turn it off, they threaten to spray pepper spray. To sleep, we have to cover our heads with a blanket, which reeks of urine.” Here too, Rantisi remembers the few decent guards: The ones that didn’t curse, the ones that turned off the light at night. The ones that handcuff the prisoners’ hands from the front.
In Ofer Prison, only one prisoner was older than Rantisi, and in Nafha, he was the oldest. From the young prisoners, he learned not to let the guards’ shouts and curses rattle him too much. “He didn’t curse you; he was cursing the other guard,” they used to tell him, or they would offer an “excuse” for the guard’s outburst, telling him: “Let him be, his wife got angry at him this morning.” He doesn’t know why, but the guards were particularly enraged by a birthday “cake” that the young prisoners had improvised from several layers of bread slices spread with tahini and jam – which they had saved for several days from their meager rations.
“When the guards discovered the ‘cake,’ they went crazy and beat the prisoners,” he recounts, adding: “Three and a half months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to bring myself to taste it, like most of the food given to us.” But hunger forced him to eat the meager, stale food, whose color, texture and smell were repulsive. Sometimes, some of the young men, concerned for his health as he rapidly grew weaker, gave him an egg to strengthen him.
In Nafha Prison, a prisoner in the next cell over suffered from seizures and vertigo. His cellmates panicked and shouted out the symptoms to Rantisi, who diagnosed the issue and calmed them down. But immediately after, they had to go out to the yard for their walking period. Some of the prisoners supported the sick man and laid him on the ground. “In the yard, you’re not allowed to sit, you’re not allowed to stop for a moment, so especially in the sun and when we are so weak, going out is not rest but torture,” Rantisi explains. A male and female guard appeared immediately, shouting at those who violated the orders and pulling out their pepper spray. Rantisi intervened, said he was a doctor, and tried to explain what medication should be given to the sick detainee. According to him, the two laughed at him, but ultimately didn’t use the pepper spray. The young man didn’t receive the medication.
Pepper spray is another common form of tormenting the prisoners. “When they spray, we flee to the other end of the cell, cover our heads, and suffer from the burning and choking for another two or three hours afterward,” Rantisi says. “Then we have to clean off the residue from the floor: We pour water on it and scrub it with our flip-flops, directing the water to the toilet.”
On his last day in prison, only the intervention of the young prisoners saved him from this torture. This happened in the “waiting room” – where prisoners wait for a meeting with a lawyer or a military court hearing via video conference. The wait time before and after the actual event can last up to 12 hours. Everyone sits packed together on concrete benches, shackled at the legs and handcuffed behind their backs.
“You can’t scratch, and the scabies blisters itch and bleed, and we writhe and rub against each other in an attempt to relieve the irritation,” Rantisi not only recounts but also demonstrates. Often, the guards tighten the handcuffs – made in England, he notes – too much. “We don’t drink all day before waiting, because every trip to the toilet is humiliating: We wait two hours until they allow us to urinate, and they don’t even remove our handcuffs.” The waiting was so torturous that he once asked a lawyer from the Public Committee against Torture not to visit again.
On October 25, when he was taken from his cell before 5 A.M. and led to the waiting room, he knew that within hours the court would accept the plea bargain between the defense attorney and the military prosecution: an admission of membership in an unlawful association (the Union of health work Committees) and a prison sentence equal to the number of days he had been detained, in addition to a fine of 100,000 shekels “which we collected from friends and family members.”
The hearing was around 9 A.M. in the designated room. On his way back to the “waiting room,” he started choking slightly, and his eyes burned. It turned out that in his absence, the guards had sprayed the prisoners with pepper spray because they had been talking among themselves. “In the waiting room, talking is forbidden. We stay silent for half an hour and then talk in whispers. After all, even a rooster in a cage will crow,” Rantisi explains. While still outside the cell, he saw one of the prisoners whose face was “red as a tomato ” and a guard wearing a gas mask. The young men, choking and with tearing eyes, began to shout: “‘Don’t bring him in, he’s old, he’ll die.'” For Rantisi – who feared they would be punished for daring to demand something – it was another reason to feel proud of these young men.
Rantisi was indeed returned to the room where he had viewed the court hearing and from there, after several hours of waiting, he was led on foot, blindfolded, legs and hands chained , to the adjacent Ramon Prison. The distance seemed immense and full of obstacles: a puddle of water, piles of garbage, mud. In the Ramon Prison yard, the guard holding him pushed him forcefully, “and I fell forward, onto my forehead, and literally saw stars.” Somehow, he managed to get up and reach the final inspection room: There, he was required to bend over naked three times with his buttocks facing the guards.
In the tiny cell holding the prisoners awaiting their release, there was a boy whose features told Rantisi immediately that he was a Tamimi, from the village of Nabi Saleh. The boy asked about the fresh, bleeding wound on his forehead, and when Rantisi told him, he said: “You must report it to the director. Not for your sake, but so it doesn’t happen to others.” Rantisi followed the boy’s advice and told the facility director that a guard had pushed him. According to Rantisi, the director told him, “You are a liar.”
The Prison Service provided Haaretz with the exact same response, word for word, that it gave to requests for comment for previous Haaretz articles: “The claims described are incorrect, lack factual basis and constitute part of the defamation campaign against the State of Israel and its legal institutions worldwide. The Israel Prison Service operates in accordance with legal provisions, mandatory orders and procedures, and under the review and supervision of authorized bodies. All prisoners receive the necessary living conditions, hygiene facilities and medical treatment in accordance with the law and the professional judgment of the relevant personnel.”
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