As Hamas fighters swarmed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the power suddenly went out in a remote prison in the Negev Desert.
When the lights briefly came back on a few hours later, a new era of hard-line policies had begun. In the wake of Hamas’s attack—which left some 1,200 in Israel dead and around 250 as hostages—the thousands of Palestinians held at Lavi prison in the Negev and other prisons across Israel now faced harsher conditions. Thousands more joined them, swept up in raids amid the ensuing war.
Auditors from Israel’s Ministry of Justice and United Nations agencies later found that detainees were subjected to beatings, particularly during transfers and searches, and starvation. Autopsies of some Palestinians who died in custody showed signs of physical assault, medical neglect and malnutrition. Doctors and rights groups described instances of sexual violence.
In addition to those reports, The Wall Street Journal interviewed a dozen Palestinians released from Israeli prisons since 2024, mostly as part of ceasefire agreements with Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. All said they experienced physical abuse, such as being bound in stress positions and beaten, and severe hunger. Two men said they were sexually assaulted in front of other prisoners.
“Every day, three times a day, someone was being beaten,” said Iyad Omar, 44, one of the men held in Lavi (formerly known as Ketziot), who had been imprisoned since 2002 and was convicted of attempted murder. “This kind of thing never happened before Oct. 7. Back then, we only faced this type of abuse if there was a hunger strike or a riot.”
Physicians for Human Rights Israel, an Israeli medical-advocacy nonprofit that monitors prisons, said it has visited 59 detainees since February, with all reporting insufficient food and medical treatment.
About 9,300 Palestinians are in Israeli custody for alleged security offenses, up from about 5,200 before the war, according to Hamoked, an Israeli nonprofit that has access to prison population data. Most of them are held without charge, the group says.
Government officials in Israel have said they intentionally made life harder for detainees after Oct. 7, including reducing food rations and banning visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which are standard in conflicts around the world.
The changes were designed to toughen punishments for terrorists and enhance deterrence against extremism, some officials have said. They say basic standards of care are met, and deny allegations of systematic abuses.
“The allegations described are false, recycled, and entirely without factual basis,” a spokesperson for the government’s Israel Prison Service said in response to questions from the Journal. It said that all detainees are held in accordance with the law, with full regard for their basic rights, including medical care, and that complaints or allegations of abuse are investigated.
Pressure is building on Israel to provide a more thorough accounting of its prisons since the Oct. 7 attacks, as more reports of alleged abuses come to light. Some in Israel and many abroad are calling for greater accountability.
“At the margins of our society, there are parts that have normalized violence, and there are, sadly, those who go further and even celebrate it, who take pride in it,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a speech in May. Herzog, a former opposition leader whose role is largely ceremonial and who is viewed as a centrist in Israel, said some Israelis’ actions—including what he said were brutal acts against Palestinian detainees—-were harming the country’s reputation.
Israel already faces international criticism over its military activities in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as for rising attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Recent Pew Research Center surveys have found deteriorating views of Israel in countries worldwide. This month, it said 62% of U.S. adults viewed the Israeli government unfavorably, up from 43% in 2022.
In May, the U.N. added Israel to a list of countries it says has committed sexual violence in warzones, citing violations, including rapes, of Palestinian detainees. Israel said it “has comprehensively, thoroughly, and unequivocally refuted these allegations” and would end relations with the U.N. secretary-general’s office.
Last month, Israel’s High Court ruled that the ban on Red Cross visits to detainees violates international and Israeli law. The visits haven’t resumed, despite the ruling. Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, had warned in 2024 that prison conditions could violate the U.N. convention against torture and called for greater Red Cross access.
Israel’s High Court also ruled last year that the state failed to meet detainees’ basic needs, after a petition from civil-society groups accused the government of starving them.
Much of the criticism has focused on National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right firebrand who oversees the Israel Prison Service. He touts his efforts to impose stricter punishments on Palestinian detainees on social media.
Ben-Gvir denied Israeli auditors access to prisons between January and June even though it is required by law. In June, he restored access to roughly 16 inspectors from the Justice Ministry, down from 100 in previous years, his spokesperson said. That included five from the public defender’s office, down from 60, according to the office. The office had released a scathing report last year that described “extreme starvation” and unprovoked violence from prison staff on a nearly routine basis.
Ben-Gvir’s spokesperson said six Israeli family members of terror attack victims were also appointed as official inspectors.
Ben-Gvir marked his birthday in early May with a noose-themed cake to celebrate a new law he championed to make terrorism punishable by death in Israel. He and his political allies also often wear golden lapel pins in the shape of a noose.
Several Western countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia and recently France, have banned Ben-Gvir from their territories for allegedly inciting violence against Palestinians.
Many Israelis support tougher penalties for security inmates. A 2025 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, an Israeli think tank, found that around 61% of Jewish Israelis opposed investigating soldiers suspected of abusing Gazan detainees.
There have been only a handful of investigations into alleged crimes against Palestinians in Israeli detention, with one known conviction since the start of the 2023 war in Gaza.
In the highest-profile case, five military reservists were indicted over the alleged assault of a Palestinian detainee held without charge in 2024 at the Sde Teiman military detention facility, a camp where some new detainees were taken before being transferred into Israel’s prison system. The indictment said the detainee was blindfolded, shackled and severely beaten, resulting in injuries including seven broken ribs and an inner rectal tear. The reservists denied the allegations.
One doctor who reviewed the patient’s medical records told the Journal in 2024 that the injuries were life-threatening, involved “obvious signs of assault,” and required a blood transfusion and rectal surgery.
The case was ultimately dropped amid a political backlash led by right-wing protesters who at one point swarmed the facility in protest. Israel’s top military prosecutor at the time subsequently leaked a video that allegedly showed the assault. She said in her resignation letter last year that the leak was meant to counter a smear campaign by critics who opposed investigating soldiers during wartime.
Authorities are now investigating the prosecutor, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, for the leak and an alleged subsequent coverup. Her legal team declined to comment.
Charges against the reservists were dismissed by her successor in March. The new prosecutor said that although the case “revealed a grave and very troubling picture,” the evidence was insufficient for conviction and the trial’s fairness was compromised. The prosecutor noted that the detainee had been released in a ceasefire with Hamas before he could testify, and that the actions of his predecessor had undermined the criminal process.
Israel’s military rejected allegations of systemic abuse at Sde Teiman, and said it takes complaints seriously. Last year, the military sentenced a reservist soldier to seven months in prison after he confessed to beating Palestinian detainees while they were bound and blindfolded.
Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute said harsher prison conditions are a reflection of the pain Israelis felt after Oct. 7.
“There’s no way to understand Israeli society without understanding the depth of the trauma caused by Oct. 7,” he said. “The rise of Ben-Gvir was a direct result of frustration, a sense that if you don’t pay a price as a terrorist, then there’s no deterrence.”
‘Wished that I would die’
When the power went out in Lavi the day Hamas attacked, inmates initially cheered, according to three former prisoners who spoke to the Journal. They knew Hamas was taking hostages, and believed they might win their freedom through a swap.
Later that day, they said, guards searched each cell one by one, seizing almost all personal items. They and detainees in other facilities said beatings became more severe and frequent, often carried out by special tactical units called Keter and Metzada.
“The Israel Prison Service rejects attempts to portray systematic abuse or unlawful conduct by its personnel,” the agency’s spokesperson said.
Mohammad Mardawi, 47, said he was imprisoned in 1999, and official records show he was later convicted of membership in a militant group and shooting toward people. He told the Journal that while he was held in Lavi, he was put into a small, single-person cell in April 2024 with two other men, and watched through a sliver of space beneath the door as Israeli soldiers fired guns at the feet of a group of new detainees, then beat them.
Later that day, he said, guards came into the cell and bound him and the other two prisoners and told them to kneel on the floor with their heads to the ground.
“That’s when they put the stick inside me,” Mardawi said. He gestured to explain how a guard slipped an object into his pants and penetrated him anally.
“I wished that I would die,” he said.
Mardawi was released in early 2025. By then, he said, his injuries had healed.
Ala’a Nabhan, 39, a mother of three who works in a public library on the outskirts of Ramallah, said she was threatened and beaten soon after her arrest in July 2024 for sharing Facebook posts, such as one that said, “God, send down your birds of prey on the Zionists.” A military court convicted her of incitement and support of terrorism.
She said interrogators at the Ofer military detention center put a hood over her head and slowly tightened a rope around her neck to pressure her to unlock a phone. When she said she couldn’t because it wasn’t hers, they threatened to rape her, she said. They beat her, leaving her with a broken nose, she said. She was released about six months later as part of a hostage swap.
Six of the 12 former Palestinian detainees the Journal spoke to said they had been denied necessary medical care. Three said they had contracted scabies—a skin disease associated with inadequate sanitary conditions that can become fatal if untreated.
Physicians for Human Rights Israel also found new outbreaks of scabies in five detention centers, according to a letter it sent to the prison service that was viewed by the Journal.
One 19-year-old Palestinian detainee held without charge became paralyzed last year in both legs and partially in one arm, and lost the ability to control his bowels. The problems emerged after he developed a spine infection following repeated scabies exposures, according to a ruling to release him by an Israeli military court viewed by the Journal, and an accompanying doctor’s report.
A high-profile prisoner in Israel, Zakaria Zubeidi, 50, once led a militant brigade in Jenin, a crowded enclave in the West Bank known as a hotbed of insurgency. He took credit for planning a 2002 attack that killed six Israeli civilians, and was convicted on several charges, including homicide.
Zubeidi was pardoned in 2007, but Israel later rearrested him. In 2021, he famously led a jailbreak from Israel’s Gilboa prison. He was soon captured.
He told the Journal he was kept in chains from the time the war began until his release as part of a ceasefire in early 2025, and that three beatings left him disfigured. He showed the Journal his toothless gums and said his eight front teeth—four on top and four on the bottom—were knocked out in the alleged beatings. He now wears dentures.
“You see my face, you see my teeth, this is from the mistreatment,” he said.
The Journal also reviewed postmortem examination reports of a dozen Palestinians who died during detention since the start of the 2023 Gaza war. The Israeli government hasn’t released official autopsies or causes of death for the Palestinian detainees. In some cases, however, it has permitted a physician on behalf of the family to attend the autopsy and provide a postmortem report.
One, viewed by the Journal, involved a 45-year-old man who died in December 2024. The report said he showed signs of physical assault and excessive use of restraints on his wrists and ankles.
Another, of a 63-year-old man who collapsed in November 2025, showed that he died from untreated sepsis, which the report said likely developed following poorly controlled diabetes, malnutrition and overall frailty. Another showed a 17-year-old who suffered from “extreme, likely prolonged malnutrition” and collapsed and died in March 2025.
Physicians for Human Rights Israel says it has tracked 105 Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody between October 2023 and June 2026, relying on official data.
Ben-Gvir used ministerial directives as head of the Israeli prison system to restrict food and suspend privileges such as access to electronic devices and commissaries. Ben-Gvir detailed some of the changes in a letter responding to a 2024 lawsuit by civil-society groups.
“It is indeed my policy to reduce the conditions of security prisoners to the minimum required by law, including regarding food and calories,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with this—on the contrary, security prisoners receive and should receive less than criminal prisoners.”
Lawmakers approved a temporary suspension of a rule requiring detainees be given at least 48 square feet of space, about the same area as a tournament-sized pool table, to help make room for new detainees swept up during the war. The suspension remains in effect.
A former Palestinian prisoner, 52-year-old Khaled Abu Hanoud, said the tougher approach was noticeable from Oct. 7, 2023 until his last day in incarceration in early 2025.
Abu Hanoud had been serving a life sentence since 2004 for military training, bomb-making, attempted murder and other charges, according to official records.
On the day he was released as part of a ceasefire, he and others in his group were taken to have their heads shaved and each given a white sweatshirt to wear. They were forced to kneel and photographed, in an apparent response to Hamas’s theatrics during a hostage release it had staged earlier in Gaza.
The photos were shared by the prison service. The sweatshirts were printed with the Star of David, a symbol of Israel, and the phrase, in Arabic: “We neither forget, nor forgive.”
