Dear Friends and Partners,
The ceasefire and the exchange of hostages and prisoners between Israel and Hamas are as vital to all of us as air to breathe. Yet October 7 and the war in Gaza will continue to accompany us for a long time to come. The horrific moral low to which we have sunk - and which we have experienced both in Gaza and in Israel - demands a profound restoration of the value of human life, human dignity, and human rights, as well as a thorough restructuring of legislation and of the conduct of military and law enforcement bodies.
The Israeli hostages who returned from Hamas captivity recount a harrowing ordeal of torture and prolonged detention under conditions of hunger, violence, fear, denial of medical treatment, and complete isolation from anyone other than their captors. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) stands beside the survivors and their families, ready to support them through our accumulated legal and forensic expertise - documenting the atrocities they endured and ensuring the realization of their rights.
In exchange for the release of the hostages, about 1,700 detainees from Gaza - held in Israel under the “Unlawful Combatants Law” - and around 250 prisoners from the West Bank were released from prisons and military facilities. One after another, the released Palestinians describe being arrested arbitrarily and without cause, imprisoned for extended periods in conditions of isolation and hunger, subjected to torture and humiliation, denied medical care and access to legal counsel, and deprived of any information about the fate of their loved ones. Some of them we have represented - and continue to represent - in legal proceedings to obtain recognition and justice, and to hold perpetrators accountable, including in cases involving families of several dozen detainees who died in Israeli prisons and detention facilities over the past two years.
The war may have ended, but the policy of torture against Palestinian detainees remains firmly in place. More than 9,000 “security” prisoners are still held in Israeli prisons. Among them are 3,544 administrative detainees from the West Bank and East Jerusalem - individuals against whom no evidence exists and no indictment has been filed. About a thousand others are held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, which deprives them of the right to due process and effectively constitutes another form of administrative detention. At least 300 of these detainees are minors, of which over 100 are held under administrative detention.
As the tides of battle recede, the paths of devastation they left behind are being revealed. Over the past three years, Israel has entrenched in law and policy norms of arbitrary killing and torture, turning the abuse of defenseless individuals into a routine practice across government branches involved in the war. These bastions of institutionalized cruelty have yet to be dismantled, and they rise high above the ruins of the rule of law in Israel - ground down by this war to the very dust.
Now is the time to act decisively to eradicate the criminal norms that have taken root in the detention system and to replace them with values consistent with international law and human rights. We call for an end to the punitive policies in prisons - overcrowding, starvation, denial of medical treatment, and the routine physical and psychological abuse of detainees; for the repeal of the amendments to the Unlawful Combatants Law and the immediate closure of military detention facilities; for restoring access to prisons for representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross; and for the prosecution of all those responsible for torture, abuse, and loss of life in Israeli detention facilities.
The writer and essayist Jamaica Kincaid wrote in her book ״A Small Place״:
“Nothing can erase my rage - not an apology, not a large sum of money, not the death of the criminal - for this wrong can never be made right, and only the impossible can make me still: can a way be found to make what happened not have happened?”
We are determined to do everything in our power to ensure that the horrors we have witnessed since October 7, 2023, will never be repeated.
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