The Israeli army has arrested more than 23,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, along with thousands from Gaza, since the war in the enclave began in October 2023, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said Friday.
The group said the Palestinian prisoners’ movement is enduring its “bloodiest and harshest period since 1967.”
Israeli authorities have detained nearly 23,000 Palestinians from the West Bank since the start of the genocidal war in Gaza, including women, children, wounded people and former prisoners, according to the society. The figure excludes thousands of arrests from Gaza, where the group said Israel continues to forcibly disappear hundreds of detainees.
“Detention has formed and continues to form one of the main pillars of the Israeli colonial project, it is used as a systematic tool to target the Palestinian presence and break the social and national structure of the Palestinian people,” the group said.
According to the society, the war on Gaza has brought “unprecedented changes” to the conditions of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, while Israeli prisons have become “organized spaces for torture, starvation, humiliation and systematic denial of medical treatment.”
