Why are so many Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails? Four in 10 Palestinian men spend time in Israel jails. Hamas says it wants to exchange captured Israelis for them.

 

 

 People gather with the pictures of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli custody during a rally in solidarity with them in the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on April 17, 2023 [File: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP]
Published On 8 Oct 20238 Oct 2023

In golf carts, vans and on motorbikes, Hamas fighters have taken dozens of Israeli civilians and soldiers back to the Gaza Strip after their attack on Israel on Saturday.

As Israel’s fighter jets bomb the Gaza Strip in retaliation against the surprise Hamas assault, the Palestinian group has said that it plans to use the captured Israelis to strike a deal for the release of Palestinians in Israel’s prisons.

 

 But just how many Palestinians are currently in Israeli custody? And how many of them are children?
The Palestinians in Israel in prisons

Many would argue that all of Gaza is effectively an open-air prison — 2.2 million people blockaded by Israel in a tiny coastal enclave.

But the number of Palestinians who have actually spent time in Israeli jails too is of a similar order. Since 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, it has arrested an estimated one million Palestinians, the United Nations reported last summer.

One in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged under the 1,600 military orders that control every aspect of the lives of Palestinians living under the Israeli military occupation. That incarceration rate doubles for Palestinian men — two in every five have been arrested.

By comparison, in the United States, the country notorious for the world’s largest prison population, one in 200 people is imprisoned. The imprisonment rate among Black Americans is more than three times the overall rate — but even then is a tiny fraction of an average Palestinian’s likelihood of spending time in jail.

Palestinian Prisoner rights group Addameer has described the Israeli prison system as a “complex of monstrous machinery in form, laws, procedures, and policies…designed to liquidate and kill”.

 

 

Today, the number of Palestinians currently behind Israeli bars is 5,200, including 33 women and 170 children. If tried, Palestinian prisoners are prosecuted in military courts.

So, why are there so many prisoners?

Two months after Israel occupied Palestinian and Arab territories in the 1967 war, its government issued Military Order 101 which essentially criminalised civic activities under the basis of “hostile propaganda and prohibition of incitement”.