Nearly two years into the war, harrowing testimonies are emerging from Gaza detainees held in Israeli prisons and military camps, revealing a landscape of systematic abuse that strips men, women, and even children of their dignity. Ramla, Rakefet, and the notorious Sdeh Teiman camp have become synonymous with cruelty, where lawyers describe detainees weeping through visits, often under threat to claim their conditions were “good.” Behind closed doors, the reality is one of beatings, forced humiliation, and relentless psychological torment.

Survivors recount broken fingers, enforced isolation without sunlight, and a regime of humiliation where prisoners are forced to curse their own mothers. Some detainees show visible scars, others communicate only through gestures, too fearful or too traumatised to speak. Accounts tell of deliberate torture methods: chest fractures from repeated blows, beatings to the head until unconscious, and targeted sexual violence. Food is scarce and foul, diseases like scabies spread unchecked, and medical care is withheld as punishment. Hunger itself has become a weapon, with detainees describing their ordeal as a man-made famine.

The toll is devastating. Since October 2023, thousands of civilians, including doctors, journalists, women, and the elderly, have vanished into prisons or camps, many held in conditions amounting to enforced disappearance. Official records confirm at least 46 detainees from Gaza have died in custody, part of a broader tally of 76 prisoners killed since the war began, their deaths linked to torture, medical neglect, and extrajudicial execution. Calls for international monitoring remain unanswered as Israel continues to bar the Red Cross. For Gaza’s prisoners, survival behind bars has become another front in a war designed not only to destroy lives in the open, but to extinguish them in silence.