In October 2023, Fadiah Barghouti’s home in Ramallah was raided by Israeli forces. Soldiers broke down her door and smashed everything that they could get their hands on. They were searching for her son Basel, whom they beat along with her other son, saying they would all “pay the price for supporting Hamas.” It was a claim Barghouti was familiar with: Her husband Mahmoud is currently being held in an Israeli prison for the same unsubstantiated charge, as he has been on and off for 10 of the last 30 years.
Still, Barghouti was unwilling to lose Basel, a computer engineering student at Birzeit University, to the abyss of the Israeli prison system. She began advocating for his release, along with other Palestinian detainees like her husband, on social media, in interviews and at public demonstrations. So, in February, Israeli forces arrested her too.
“I experienced the meaning of the stories that we have heard about Guantánamo,” Barghouti told Truthout.
Barghouti and her son are among the more than 10,000 Palestinian men, women and children who have been arrested by Israeli forces since October 7. Taken into custody in violent raids and held indefinitely without charge under conditions that include hunger, torture and even death, many Palestinian detainees are essentially held hostage by the Israeli prison system.
Due to the churn of the Israeli prison system, in which detainees can be apprehended and released following a few months’ detention, not all of the 10,000 Palestinians arrested by Israeli forces since October 7 are still being held. Some, like Fadiah Barghouti, were released after a few months’ detention, while others, like her son Basel, are still being detained.
Those who are still held joined the thousands incarcerated prior to October, like Barghouti’s husband, bringing the current number of Palestinian detainees up to 12,000, according to Addameer, a Palestinian human rights organization dedicated to advocating for prisoners. Jenna Abu Hsana, Addameer’s international advocacy officer, estimates that of the current Palestinian detainees, 9,700 are from the occupied West Bank and 2,300 are from Gaza. The vast majority are men, although there may be up to 84 women and 250 children, who face conditions indistinguishable from the men except in extremity, including overcrowding, hunger and violence.
As Hsana explains, more than a third of Palestinian detainees are held by Israeli authorities under what they call “administrative detention.” Many are apprehended in what have become near-nightly raids by Israeli forces in the West Bank, which, along with Gaza and East Jerusalem, is internationally recognized as Palestinian territory. During these raids, Israeli forces destroy public and private property with bulldozers, bomb buildings, kill bystanders and even take hostages, threatening the family members of the suspect in order to force their surrender.
“One of the cases of excessive use of force after October 7 was when the [Israeli] occupation forces raided a home and they attached a bomb to the door,” Hsana told Truthout. “The same time that the bomb had gone off, the brother of the Palestinian who was being targeted for arrest had gone to open the door. The door exploded and, in that, he was killed. … All of this happened in front of the........