On February 2, 2025, as an exchange of detainees brokered by the United States proceeded between Israel and the Hamas militia, freed Palestinians accused their Israeli captors of abusing them in detention. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu did not respond to the allegations, though it released a report a month earlier summarizing similar claims from unnamed hostages freed by Hamas.

Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis and took another 251 hostage in a surprise raid in Gaza on October 7, 2023, demanding release of some 5,200 Palestinians held by the Israeli Prison Service (IPS)—including 170 children. In response, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) launched a military invasion into Gaza that turned an estimated 2 million residents into refugees and killed at least 61,700 Palestinians.

“The situation in the prison was very hard,” said Thaer Abu Sara, 17, a student detained in the occupied West Bank for suspected ties to Hamas in October 2023. “They beat us every day, didn’t feed us … and during the interrogation electric shocks were used in different areas of my body.”

“They put me in a prison cell with a camera on the toilet,” said fellow detainee Shatha Jarrar, 24, who avoided using the toilet for fear of being filmed there. Also a student, she was arrested by Israeli police in August 2024 for pro-Palestinian Facebook posts. In addition to leaving scars on her wrists from handcuffs, she said that IPS guards withheld medication she takes for insulin resistance.

Detainees’ families were also targeted by IPS, which vowed to quash any “public displays of joy” over their release. “They raided our house, and seized flags and symbols associated with Palestine,” said Amal Barber, whose daughter, Zina Barber, 24, was set for release after more than a year in an IPS lockup.

Abdullah al-Zaghari, of the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS), said that detainees freed in the most recent releases reported physical and medical neglect, along with degrading treatment by IDF personnel who burned them with boiling water and urinated on them. IPS has denied mistreating prisoners in the past, yet national security minister Itamar Ben-Guir has endorsed harsh treatment of Palestinian detainees. Israel’s parliament also “temporarily” approved filling prisons “beyond capacity.”

Israel has not refuted the recent allegations, though it attempted to counter them. Amit Soussana, 40, an Israeli detainee released in an earlier deal, said in a March 2024 interview that a Hamas guard named Muhammad punched her, groped her and forced her at gunpoint to “commit a sexual act on him.” Andrey Kozlov, another detainee rescued by IDF in June 2024, was beaten by his captors, who repeatedly threatened to shoot him and once wrapped him in thick blankets to swelter outside in the heat, he said.

An Israeli report to the United Nations in December 2024 recounted the testimony of two unnamed teenage girls freed in an earlier prisoner exchange, who said that they were sexually abused and forced to perform sex acts with one another. The report also catalogued wounds suffered by other unnamed detainees, whose “[f]ractures, shrapnel wounds, and burns” were “treated inadequately,” sometimes in “painful procedures [performed] without anesthesia.” At least one detainee death was attributed to “untreated medical complications,” the report said.

A December 2024 report from the Associated Press said that the jailing of Palestinian youth, often for nothing more than throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, has become a “grim rite of passage.” The International Red Cross reported on February 1, 2025, that 18 Israeli hostages had been released in the latest ceasefire, plus 533 Palestinian detainees. An estimated 97 Israelis remain detained by Hamas detention. IPS now holds around 10,400 Palestinian prisoners.  

Sources: CNN, The Guardian, The Independent, Middle East Eye, New York Times, Times of Isreal, Washington Post

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