Expert: Yuli Novak, Executive Director of B’Tselem: Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
Question: Last month, you released a report, “Living Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps,” which detailed abuse and torture of Palestinians in Israeli captivity, including the use of sexual violence. It was a follow up to a report you released in July 2024, entitled “Welcome to Hell,” and echoes the findings of investigations by journalists and other rights groups. Can you describe what your latest report found in terms of the methods of torture and how widely they’re being used?
Yuli Novak: This report continues our July 2024 report, “Welcome to Hell,” which identified the transformation of Israeli detention facilities into a network of torture camps for Palestinians. That earlier report, based on 55 testimonies from released detainees held in 16 facilities, documented the systemic nature of the ongoing abuse in these facilities.
A year and a half later, we revisited the same system and found the same patterns entrenched. The current report is based on testimonies from 21 Palestinian detainees from the West Bank and Gaza. Their accounts converge in striking detail: severe physical violence, starvation, inhumane living conditions, denial of medical care, psychological torment, and in some cases sexual abuse.
The consistency across testimonies makes it clear that this is not the work of “rogue” guards but a deliberate policy led, shaped, and encouraged by Israeli decision-makers.
Since October 2023, at least 84 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli custody: 50 from Gaza - 31 from the West Bank - and three Palestinian citizens of Israel, as a result of extreme violence, inhumane conditions, systematic starvation, and denial of medical care. Israel continues to hold the bodies of 80 of them, refusing to return them to their families for burial.
Taken together, the evidence leaves little doubt: what we are documenting is institutionalized torture.
Q: How many Palestinians are currently being held in these torture camps and who are they?
YN: As of December 2025, approximately 9,300 Palestinians are being held in Israeli detention facilities for what Israel calls “security prisoners.”
Of these, around 3,358 are held in administrative detention, and approximately 1,249 are classified as “unlawful combatants.” Both categories allow for detention without charge or trial, and without a meaningful opportunity to challenge the allegations against them.
Those detained include doctors and other medical professionals, journalists, political leaders, activists, farmers, university lecturers, and students. Among the detainees are approximately 350 minors and 56 women.
These numbers reflect not only a policy of mass incarceration, but also the scale of people who have been subjected to torture inside Israeli prisons, as the abuse is directed at all detainees, albeit in varying forms and degrees, and without any meaningful possibility of fully avoiding it.
Q: For decades prior to October 2023, torture of Palestinians was permitted under Israeli law under the euphemism “moderate physical pressure.” What Israel has been doing in the past two-plus years goes far beyond that. Are the torture methods currently being used officially sanctioned by the government, and are they legal under Israeli law?
YN: The Israeli legal reference to what it calls “moderate physical pressure” relates to interrogation methods used by Israeli security services. What we are examining now is something fundamentally different, in scale and meaning - reflecting the transformation of the entire detention system into a system of abuse.
Entire detention facilities operate under conditions that amount to torture. Every Palestinian held in them is subjected to inhumane conditions and daily abuse: starvation, sleep deprivation, denial of medical treatment, extreme overcrowding, lack of access to water, sanitation, and basic hygiene - in addition to routine physical and psychological violence.
The Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, who oversees the prison system, has openly boasted on social media and in televised interviews that harsh treatment of Palestinian detainees is his deliberate policy. The broader state system has largely fallen in line through explicit government backing and the silence or inaction of legal authorities.
The dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli public discourse has reached a point where a cabinet minister can publicly showcase detainees bound, humiliated, and attacked by dogs, knowing that such images will earn him political support among significant segments of the public.
At the same time, legislative efforts to expand the use of the death penalty against Palestinians are advancing, and prison authorities are reportedly preparing logistically for its implementation. Even without formal executions, dozens of Palestinian detainees have already died in custody over the past two years. Expanding the death penalty would institutionalize yet another mechanism for the killing of Palestinians while further entrenching dehumanization in Israeli society.
Whether framed as legal or administrative policy, torture and inhumane treatment are prohibited under international law. No domestic legal maneuvering can legitimize them.
Q: Is the Israeli public aware that Palestinians are being tortured and sexually abused in these ways? If so, what is their reaction?
YN: What is happening in Israeli prisons is not hidden from the public. On the contrary, it is regularly broadcast on national television. The Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, uses the abuse and brutality inside the prisons as a tool to build political support. He openly and, at times, almost sadistically boasts about the changes he has introduced - reduced food, harsher conditions, visible humiliation of detainees - through carefully staged media coverage aired on Israel’s most-watched news channels. In them the treatment of Palestinian detainees is presented as a source of strength and pride. We understand this as part of a broader genocidal mindset that has taken hold in significant parts of Israeli society since October 2023, a reality we analyzed in our report “Our Genocide.”
The public reaction to the exposure of sexual abuse at the Sde Teiman military base illustrates this clearly. When footage and testimonies revealed the sexual assault of a Palestinian detainee, members of Knesset and other public figures publicly defended the suspects. The public debate did not center on the illegality or immorality of torture, but on whether such violence against Palestinians could be justified.
There are Israelis who oppose these abuses and protest them. However, they remain a small minority with limited political influence.
Q: You recently visited the U.S. and met with members of Congress and others to share the report. What kind of response did you receive, and what would you like the U.S. and other governments to do to compel Israel to end its use of torture?
YN: During my recent visit to the United States, I found that many people, including policymakers, are trying to process and make sense of the massive scale and the systemic, structural nature of the violence directed at Palestinians that they are witnessing, particularly in Gaza. There is a willingness among parts of the American public and some elected officials to listen, to confront the reality of the devastation, and to hold Israel accountable for its crimes.
In our meetings and public events, there was receptiveness to the argument that the core problem today lies in the Israeli system itself - a system that is carrying out policies we identified as genocidal. There was also recognition of a deeper connection: Gaza has become the most extreme site of the erasure of human rights. The acceptance or normalization of genocidal policies there is not only about Palestinians - it amounts to an attack on the very idea of human rights and universal protections. When the destruction of a civilian population is justified or ignored, it weakens international legal institutions and signals that some lives are outside the protection of the law. That erosion does not remain contained. It is connected to the weakening of international law, to the decline of democratic safeguards, and to the reality that civilians, including American citizens, can be killed in the streets.
As human rights defenders, we are asking governments around the world for the same thing: do everything within your power under international law to stop Israel from continuing to harm the people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
And to citizens around the world, we say: do not look away from Gaza, from the West Bank, or from any place where the Israeli system is intensifying its treatment of Palestinians. There is no mechanism inside Israel today that will stop this. The international community must recognize the Israeli system as an illegitimate regime of apartheid and genocide, and demand that Israel end its ongoing harm to Palestinians.