Behind the barbed wire of more than 26 Israeli prisons and detention centres, 10,400 Palestinians endure conditions that defy humanity. According to the Prisoners' Media Office, detainees, ranging from children to elderly women, are crammed into overcrowded cells, denied basic rights, and left to survive on what has been described as "poisoned bread" and systematic neglect. Their daily reality is one of deprivation, waiting, and slow death.

Among them are 47 Palestinian women, including 66-year-old Sahar Abu Salem from Gaza, who symbolises a lifetime of captivity in a space smaller than a cell should hold. Among these women are two minors, two cancer patients, and two pregnant prisoners. Fifteen are mothers clinging to memories of their children, while names like Shatila Abu Ayada and Aya Al-Khatib echo as testaments to the resilience of Palestinian women abandoned by a world that remains silent.

The fate of children is no less harrowing. The occupation holds 440 Palestinian minors, many sentenced as adults, and at least 100 detained without charge. Recently, children were transferred from Damon prison to Megiddo and Ofer, in violation of all international conventions designed to protect them. This transfer is not just logistical, it is a reflection of a system that criminalises childhood itself.

Illness is met not with care, but cruelty. Around 2,500 prisoners suffer from health conditions, including 260 with serious illnesses and 27 battling cancer. Paralysis, disability, and untreated psychological trauma are widespread. The Prisoners’ Media Office describes this as a “slow death sentence,” where disease becomes another weapon of oppression.

Some 248 prisoners have spent more than 20 years behind bars, 18 of them over three decades. Time has not broken them, but their continued detention speaks to a system built on vengeance, not justice. Journalists, too, are punished for bearing witness: 55 are currently imprisoned for the “crime” of telling the truth.

From Gaza alone, 2,214 prisoners are labelled “unlawful combatants,” stripped of the most basic protections of international law and held in secretive military sites far from legal oversight. Hundreds more are simply missing, unaccounted for. Of the estimated 12,000 detained since October 2023, only 3,000 are known to be alive.

Since 1967, 310 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody, including 73 since October 7, 2023. Many were tortured, denied treatment, or executed in cold blood. Israel still holds the bodies of 80 prisoners, most of them from Gaza, turning even death into a tool of punishment. These statistics are not just numbers, they are lives stolen in silence, under a system that views Palestinian existence as a crime.