An open wound: 9,100 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons amid western silence

by Adnan Hmidan

A view of the Ofer Military Prison after the transfer of Palestinian prisoners to be released in Ramallah, West Bank on October 12, 2025. [İssam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]

Beneath the world’s silence, Israel’s prisons consume lives like black holes — devouring the living and releasing only broken bodies and haunted souls.

Behind those walls are more than 9,100 Palestinians: around 400 children and 75 women, as well as doctors, teachers and journalists whose only act was to serve their people with a stethoscope, a pen or a camera that revealed the occupation’s cruelty.

Among them are Dr Husam Abu Safiya and Dr Marwan al-Hams, respected medical and humanitarian figures, both taken from their hospitals without trial or charge. The same occupational power that has long seized land now seizes human beings — a grotesque reality playing out in the twenty-first century while Western capitals continue to preach the language of “freedom” and “international law”.

Palestinians have long lost faith in Israel’s so-called judiciary, a system that operates as part of the same machinery of repression. These are military tribunals where a civilian stands before a judge, an officer and soldiers from the very army occupying his land. Through administrative detention, Israeli authorities can imprison anyone indefinitely, without charge or evidence — a practice that violates every principle of justice and human dignity.

What cuts deeper than the bars themselves is the willful silence of the Western media. The same outlets that fill their screens with stories of prisoners elsewhere have turned Palestinians into faceless, nameless statistics.

There are no reports of children robbed of their childhoods behind bars, no interviews with mothers waiting years for a word from their sons, no images of those released — hollow-eyed, their bodies ravaged by disease after months of neglect.

Doctors who have examined recently freed detainees describe rampant skin infections, severe malnutrition and trembling hands — not merely from cold, but from the lasting scars of months spent in shackles.

If any other state were responsible for such abuse, Western newsrooms would erupt with outrage. Reporters would stand outside prisons demanding accountability. But when the victim is Palestinian and the perpetrator Israeli, the moral compass twists: condemnation becomes silence, and the oppressor is gifted the vocabulary of “self-defence” while the victim is accused of exaggeration.

The imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians amounts to a crime against humanity. The international community — foremost the International Committee of the Red Cross — must act now: visit every Israeli detention centre, document the conditions, ensure medical care and permit lawyers and independent observers inside.

All Palestinian detainees — men, women and children — must be released without delay, and those responsible for torture, abuse and enforced disappearance must face justice. The policy of administrative detention must end, once and for all.

Anyone who has witnessed the genocide and deliberate starvation in Gaza will not be shocked by what takes place inside these prisons. The same hand that presses the trigger of a bomb tightens the chains around a prisoner’s wrists.

And yet, even in darkness, these detainees endure — living witnesses to the brutality of occupation and to the moral collapse of a world that has lost its conscience. Only a few still dare to say aloud: freedom is a right, and dignity is not negotiable.