Far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir has made it a point to post videos of himself on social media taunting or mocking Palestinian prisoners. He boasted of threatening the most high-profile Palestinian prisoner. He showed off activists from a Gaza flotilla bound on the floor. And he is proud of a new law he pushed to expand the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terrorism.
But as elections near, his messaging has grown more extreme. His latest AI-generated campaign video shows rows of numbered Palestinian prisoners in brown uniforms moving along a conveyor belt into a fenced compound with watchtowers; the inmates appear well-fed at the start and thinner and distressed after passing through the industrial-style processing line. The post says, “We promised - we delivered.” The video was removed from Ben Gvir’s account on X after amassing more than 4 million views.
The minister has long called for conditions of Palestinian security prisoners to be reduced to “the minimum required by law.”
Ben Gvir is perhaps the best known of Israel’s far-right politicians, a provocateur with his hands on the country’s levers of power. As the minister of National Security, he is in charge of the police and the prisons as his politics have become a defining feature of Israel’s image abroad.
