Israel’s underground jail, where Palestinians are held without charge and never see daylight | Israel

Israel keeps dozens of Palestinians from Gaza in isolation in an underground prison where they never see daylight, are deprived of adequate food, and are prevented from receiving news from their families or the outside world.

The detainees include at least two civilians who are being held without charge or trial: a nurse in scrubs and a young food vendor, according to lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) who represent both men.

The two men have been held in the Rakefet underground complex since January and described regular beatings and violence consistent with well-documented torture in other Israeli detention centers.

Rakefet prison was opened in the early 1980s to house some of the most dangerous organized crime figures in Israel, but was closed a few years later on the grounds that it was inhumane. Far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the facility reopened following the October 7, 2023 attacks.

The cells, a small exercise “yard” and the lawyers’ meeting room are underground, so prisoners live without natural light.

The prison was originally designed for a small number of high-security inmates to occupy individual cells, and when it closed in 1985 it housed 15 people. According to official data obtained by PCATI, around 100 detainees have been imprisoned there in recent months.

Under the ceasefire reached in mid-October, Israel released 1,700 Palestinian detainees in Gaza who were detained indefinitely without charge or trial, as well as 250 Palestinian detainees convicted in Israeli courts.

However, the size of the detentions is so large that even after this mass release, at least 1,000 people are still held by Israel under the same conditions.

“Even though the war is officially over, [Palestinians from Gaza] “We are still imprisoned under legally contentious and violent wartime conditions that violate international humanitarian law and amount to torture,” PCATI said. These include two Rakefet detainees represented by PCATI lawyers.

Ben-Gvir told Israeli media and a member of parliament that Rakefet had been rehabilitated to hold Nukhba, meaning Hamas fighters who led massacres in Israel and Hezbollah special force fighters captured in Lebanon.

But the two people PCATI lawyers visited in September were a 34-year-old nurse who was detained while working at the hospital in December 2023, and a teenager who was seized while passing through an Israeli checkpoint in October 2024.

“In the case of the clients we visited, we are talking about civilians,” said PCATI lawyer Janan Abdu. “The man I spoke to was an 18-year-old young man who worked selling food. He was taken from a checkpoint on the road.”

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) did not respond to questions about the condition and identities of other prisoners held at Rakefet, which means “cyclamen flower” in Hebrew.

Secret Israeli data shows that the majority of Palestinians captured in Gaza during the war were civilians. israel’s supreme court reigned in 2019 It is legal to keep the bodies of Palestinians as bargaining chips for future negotiations, and human rights groups have accused it of doing the same to living detainees from Gaza.

Unique abuse

Tal Steiner, director general of PCATI, said conditions for Palestinians were “deliberately appalling” in all prisons. Current and former detainees and Israeli army informants are all subjected to detailed systematic violations of international law.

But Rakefet imposes a unique form of exploitation. Steiner said keeping people underground without daylight for months had “extreme effects” on psychological health. “It is very difficult to remain intact when you are kept in such oppressive and difficult conditions.”

It also affects physical health, disrupting basic biological functions from circadian rhythms needed for sleep to vitamin D production.

Despite working as a human rights lawyer and visiting prisons at the complex in Ramla, southeast of Tel Aviv, where Rakefet is located, Steiner was unaware of the underground prison before ordering Ben-Gvir to be reopened.

PCATI was closed before it was established, so the legal team turned to old media archives and the memoirs of Rafael Suissa, who was head of the IPS in the mid-1980s, to learn more about the prison.

“[Suissa] “Steiner wrote that he realized that being kept underground 24/7 was too cruel and inhumane for any person, regardless of their actions, to endure,” he wrote.

This summer, PCATI lawyers were asked to represent two men held in an underground prison, so Abdu and a colleague had the opportunity to visit for the first time.

They were led underground by masked, heavily armed security guards, down dirty stairs into a room where the remains of dead insects lay on the floor. The toilet was so dirty it was unusable.

Surveillance cameras on the walls violated the basic legal right to private discussion, and guards warned that the meeting would be interrupted if anyone talked about detainees’ families or the war in Gaza.

“I asked myself: If the conditions in the lawyers’ chambers are so degrading, not only for us but also for the profession, then what is the situation of the detainees?” Abdu said. “The answer soon came when we met them.”

He said customers were brought in bending over, guards forced their heads down, and they were brought in with their hands and feet shackled.

Saja Misherqi Baransi, the second PCATI lawyer on the trip, said the two detainees had been in Rakefet for nine months and the nurse had started the meeting asking “Where am I and why am I here?” He said he started with the question. The guards did not tell him the name of the prison.

In very short video hearings in which the detainees did not have lawyers and in which evidence against them was not heard, the Israeli judges who allowed the men to be detained said only that they would be there “until the war is over.”

Men reported being in windowless cells with no ventilation, holding three or four detainees, and frequently suffocating and suffocating.

Prisoners told lawyers that in addition to being denied adequate medical care and being given starvation-level ration cards, they faced regular physical abuse, including beatings, attacks by iron-mouthed dogs, and guards stepping on prisoners. israeli supreme court reigned This month, the state was depriving Palestinian prisoners of adequate food.

They have very limited time in a small underground enclosure outside the cell, sometimes just five minutes each day. Beds are collected early in the morning, usually around 4 a.m., and returned only late at night; detainees are left on iron frames in empty cells.

His statements matched footage from Ben-Gvir’s televised visit to the prison to announce his decision to reopen the underground prison. “This is the natural place of terrorists, it is underground,” he said.

He repeatedly boasted about the mistreatment of Palestinian detainees; This statement was made by former hostages taken during the October 7 attacks. requested While in captivity, there was an increase in harassment against Hamas.

This involved holding hostages in underground tunnels for months, deprivation of food, isolation from relatives and news from the outside world, and violence and psychological torture (including being ordered to dig graves on camera).

of israel intelligence services They warned that the treatment of Palestinian prisoners puts the country’s broader security interests at risk.

Misherqi Baransi said the detained nurse last came to light on January 21 this year, when she was transferred to Rakefet after passing through other prisons, including the army’s notorious Sde Teiman centre.

The nurse, a father of three children, could not hear from his family after he was taken into custody. The only piece of personal information lawyers can share with Gaza detainees is the name of the relative who gave them permission to take on the case.

“When I tell him, ‘I talked to your mother and she gave me permission to meet you,’ I give her this little thing, telling her that at least her mother is alive,” Misherqi Baransi said.

When the other detainee asked Abdu if his pregnant wife had given birth safely, the guard immediately stopped talking to threaten him. As the guards took the men away, he heard the sound of an elevator, indicating that their cells were even deeper underground.

The young man told him, “You are the first person I have seen since I was arrested,” and his last request from him was: “Please come and see me again.”

In a statement, the IPS said it “operates in accordance with the law and under the supervision of official controllers”, adding that it is “not responsible for the legal process, classification of detainees, detention policy or arrests”.

The Ministry of Justice referred questions about Rakefet and the detainees to the Israeli army. The army forwarded the questions to the IPS.