Accounts from inside Israel’s prisons reveal a grim picture of systematic abuse, where detainees are subjected to physical and psychological torture under conditions designed to break them completely. Beatings, assaults, sexual threats, medical neglect, and long stretches of solitary confinement are reported across multiple facilities, while even the most basic rights to legal representation and family contact are deliberately obstructed.

In the desert isolation of Nafha, prisoners endure relentless humiliation and brutal punishment, from extinguished cigarettes pressed onto their skin to the use of rubber bullets against defenceless inmates. Women in Damon prison are subjected to degrading strip searches, threats of rape, and the confiscation of their religious garments, their dignity stripped away under the constant gaze of surveillance cameras. They are denied the right to see their children, even in photographs, turning their detention into a form of sustained psychological torture.

Lawyers seeking to defend prisoners face systematic barriers. Visits are frequently cancelled under fabricated emergencies, requests are delayed for months, and those permitted entry often find their clients threatened or punished before and after the meeting. This tightening of restrictions has left many detainees effectively disappeared, cut off entirely from the outside world. The deliberate severing of ties with families and legal teams not only violates international law but also serves to conceal the extent of the abuses being carried out behind bars.

The ongoing silence of much of the international community deepens the sense of abandonment felt by those trapped within these walls. What emerges is not an isolated set of abuses, but a coordinated system of degradation, a machinery of imprisonment that aims to extinguish hope, crush spirit, and erase the humanity of an entire people, one prisoner at a time.