September 4, 2025
Yuval Abraham
Yuval Abraham
A classified Israeli army
database indicates that the vast majority of the 6,000 Palestinians who have
been arrested in Gaza and held in appalling conditions in Israeli detention are
civilians, a joint investigation finds.
Only one in four Palestinians
captured by Israeli forces in Gaza were identified by the army as militants,
with civilians making up the vast majority of “unlawful combatants” detained in
Israeli prisons since October 7, a joint investigation by +972 Magazine, Local
Call, and the Guardian can reveal.
This is what emerges from figures obtained from a classified database managed by Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (known by the Hebrew acronym “Aman”), in addition to official Israeli prison statistics disclosed in legal proceedings. Testimonies from former Palestinian detainees and Israeli soldiers who served in detention facilities further indicate that Israel has knowingly abducted civilians en masse and held them for long periods in appalling conditions.
Detention figures cited by the state in May in response to High Court petitions revealed that a total of 6,000 Palestinians had been arrested in Gaza during the first 19 months of the war and held in Israel under a law for incarcerating “unlawful combatants” — a legal tool that allows Israel to imprison people indefinitely, without charge or trial, if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe they participated in “hostile activities against the State of Israel” or that they are a member of a group that has.
Israel’s politicians, military, and media routinely refer to all Palestinian detainees from Gaza as “terrorists,” and the government has not acknowledged detaining or holding any civilians. The Israel Prison Service (IPS) has claimed in public reports, without producing evidence, that almost all the “unlawful combatants” held in Israeli prisons are members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Yet data obtained in mid-May from Aman’s database, which intelligence sources described as the only reliable source for determining who the army considers to be active combatants in Gaza, showed that Israel had arrested only 1,450 individuals from the military wings of Hamas and PIJ — meaning around three-quarters of the 6,000 detainees did not belong to either.
The database, whose existence was recently revealed by +972, Local Call, and the Guardian, lists the names of 47,653 Palestinians whom the army considers to be Hamas and PIJ militants (it is updated regularly, and includes people recruited after October 7). By mid-May, Israel had arrested around 950 Hamas fighters and 500 PIJ fighters, according to the data.
The database does not contain information on members of other armed groups in Gaza, who are listed in IPS reports as accounting for less than 2 percent of “unlawful combatant” detainees. Up to 300 Palestinians are additionally being held in Israel on charges of participating in the October 7 attacks; they are not defined as “unlawful combatants” but as criminal detainees, since Israel claims to have sufficient evidence to prosecute them.
+972, Local Call, and the Guardian obtained the numerical data from the database without the names of those listed or the intelligence that supposedly incriminates them — the reliability of which is itself called into question by flimsy allegations leveled against people like Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who was assassinated last month.
Over the course of the war, partly because of severe overcrowding in prisons, Israel released more than 2,500 prisoners it had classified as “unlawful combatants,” implying that it did not believe they were really militants. An additional 1,050 were released in prisoner exchanges agreed between Israel and Hamas.
Both rights groups and Israeli soldiers have described an even smaller ratio of fighters among those rounded up in Gaza than what emerges from the leaked data. In December 2023, when photos of dozens of Palestinians stripped and shackled caused international outrage, senior officers admitted to Haaretz that “85 to 90 percent” were not Hamas members.
The Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights has represented hundreds of civilians held in Israeli jails. Its work “points to a systematic campaign of arbitrary detentions targeting Palestinians indiscriminately, regardless of any alleged offense,” said deputy director Samir Zaqout.
“At most, perhaps one in six or seven [detainees] might have any link to Hamas or other militant factions, and even then, not necessarily through their military wings. In many cases, political affiliation with a Palestinian faction is enough for Israel to label someone a combatant.”
Palestinians who have been released from Israeli military detention centers and IPS prisons over the course of the war have testified to extremely harsh conditions, including routine abuse and torture. As a result of these practices, dozens of detainees have died in Israeli custody.
Bypassing due process
Enacted in 2002, the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law was designed to allow Israel to detain people during wartime without having to recognize them as prisoners of war, as mandated by the Geneva Conventions. The law also allows Israel to deny detainees access to a lawyer for up to 75 days.
Israeli courts extend the Palestinians’ detention almost automatically, relying on “secret evidence” in hearings that last only a few minutes. According to data from the Israeli rights group HaMoked, the IPS is currently detaining around 2,660 Gazans arrested after October 7 as “unlawful combatants” — the most at any point during the war. Legal organizations believe hundreds more are currently confined in Israeli military detention facilities prior to being transferred to IPS prisons (in May, the total number of “unlawful combatant” detainees in prisons and detention centers put together was 2,750, the army said).
“If Israel were to put all [the detainees] on trial they’d have to draft indictments on specific charges and present evidence of those allegations,” Jessica Montell, director of HaMoked, explained. “Due process can be cumbersome. That’s why they created the Unlawful Combatants Law, to bypass all of that.”
This law, Montell added, has facilitated the “forced disappearance of hundreds and even thousands of people” who are effectively held without any external oversight.
The fact that three-quarters of those held as “unlawful combatants” are not considered in the army’s own records to belong to the armed wings of Hamas or PIJ “undermines the entire justification for their detention,” explained Tal Steiner, director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, whose legal petitions against mass incarceration prompted the state to supply the data on the number of detainees since October 7.
“As soon as the wave of mass arrests began in Gaza in October 2023, there was serious concern that many uninvolved people were being detained without cause,” Steiner continued. “This concern was confirmed when we learned that half of those arrested at the beginning of the war were eventually released — demonstrating that there had been no basis for their detention in the first place.”
An Israeli army officer who led mass arrest operations in Khan Younis refugee camp told +972, Local Call, and the Guardian that his unit’s mission was to “drain” the camp and force its residents to flee further southward. As part of this mission, detainees were arrested en masse and taken to military facilities where they were classified as “unlawful combatants.”
“Everyone was marched out in long convoys, with bags over their heads, toward the coast, to Al-Mawasi,” he said. “[They were taken to] what we called an inspection facility, [where] people were screened. Every night they loaded an open truck with dozens, hundreds of men, blindfolded, bound, stacked on top of each other. Every night a truck like this went to Israel.”
The officer realized that no distinction was being made “between a terrorist who entered Israel on October 7 and someone working for the water authority in Khan Younis,” and that arrests were carried out almost arbitrarily, including of minors. “It’s inconceivable,” he said. “You take a man, a boy, a youth, from his family, and send him to Israel for interrogation. If he ever comes back, how will he even find them again?”
Ahmad Muhammad, a 30-year-old from Khan Younis refugee camp, said he was forced to walk in one of these convoys with his wife and three children on Jan. 7, 2024. At the checkpoint, the army announced over a megaphone that men should stop, identifying them based on the color of their clothes. “‘Blue shirt, come back, come back,’ one soldier shouted at me,” he recalled.
He was separated along with a group of other men. “We were a random group of people — I work as a barber in the camp, not affiliated with any faction,” Muhammad said. “Every time a soldier approached, he cursed at us, until a truck arrived and we were thrown inside, piled on top of each other, deeply humiliated.”
Muhammad was taken to the Negev Prison and questioned about the October 7 attacks. He told the soldiers he knew nothing, but they kept him in detention for an entire year. To this day, he does not know why. “I lived through difficult days in prison — illness, cold, torture, humiliation,” he explained.
Muhammad was released in January of this year alongside around 2,000 other Palestinian prisoners in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas — half of whom had been detained since October 7 under the Unlawful Combatants Law and denied access to a lawyer or due process for months.
‘They’re not returning hostages, so why should we let them go?’
Multiple soldiers confirmed to +972, Local Call, and the Guardian that they witnessed the mass detention of Palestinian civilians at Israeli military facilities. A soldier who served at the infamous Sde Teiman detention center said one compound was nicknamed “the geriatric pen” because all the detainees were elderly or severely injured, some of them taken directly from Gaza’s hospitals.
“From the Indonesian Hospital [in Beit Lahiya] they would just take masses of people,” the soldier said. “They brought men in wheelchairs, people without legs, or with legs that were basically useless. I remember one man, aged 75, with badly infected stumps. I always assumed the supposed excuse for arresting patients was that maybe they had seen the hostages or something.” All of them, he added, were held in “the geriatric pen.”
Another soldier who commanded a team early in the war said the army arrested a patient in his seventies inside Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital. “He arrived tied to a stretcher. He was diabetic, with gangrene in his leg, unable to walk. He was no danger to anyone.” That man was transferred to Sde Teiman.
In addition to rounding up injured civilians at Gaza’s hospitals and imprisoning them in Israeli detention centers, Israel has arrested hundreds of the doctors who were treating them. Today, more than 100 medical staff from Gaza remain imprisoned as “unlawful combatants,” according to Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), which in February published a report compiling testimonies from 20 doctors and military whistleblowers describing abuse and torture.
Naji Abbas, head of PHRI’s prisoners’ department, said their testimonies revealed a routine of jailing people for months after a single brief interrogation. For Abbas, this undercuts Israel’s claim that such detainees are held because they possess valuable intelligence about Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity, and he sees their detention as part of Israel’s attack on Gaza’s health system.
In one account collected by PHRI, a surgeon from Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis described how soldiers “sat on top of us, kicked us with their boots, and beat us with rifle butts.” In another testimony, the head of the surgery department at the Indonesian Hospital said: “They pushed our heads into the gravel, again and again for four hours, beat us savagely with batons, and electrocuted us.”
A third doctor reported being beaten until his ribs were broken, while a surgeon from Al-Shifa Hospital described detainees being electrocuted, adding that he heard of prisoners who died as a result. “On the way to the interrogation facility they told me they would cut off my fingers because I’m a dentist,” another doctor testified to PHRI.
The doctors who gave testimony to PHRI were classified as “unlawful combatants.” One such detainee, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital, died in custody last year after being arrested in December 2023. According to his family, he was tortured to death. Another, Iyad Al-Rantisi, director of a women’s hospital in Gaza, died last year at a Shin Bet interrogation facility.
The medic who served at Anatot said many Palestinian doctors were jailed there. He remembered one pediatrician, shackled and blindfolded, who pleaded with him in English: “We are your colleagues, can you help me?”
In June 2024, then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning of a prison overcrowding crisis: the number of inmates had exceeded 21,000 while there was capacity for only 14,500. He wrote that the treatment of prisoners “bordered on abuse,” exposing state employees to possible criminal proceedings abroad.
The harsh treatment of detainees is consistent with remarks by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who said last year that one of his top priorities was to “worsen conditions” for Palestinian prisoners, including by providing only “minimal” food. Many Gazan civilians who were arrested and imprisoned by Israeli forces have testified to being subjected to severe abuse and torture.
But the mass arrest of doctors and other civilians also appears to have been at least partly intended to create leverage for hostage negotiations. When Al-Shifa Hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya was released last year, MK Simcha Rothman, chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, complained that he was freed “not in exchange for hostages.” In the same committee meeting, MK Almog Cohen said Israel had missed the chance “to take a significant symbol in Gaza” to use in a deal.
“We kept releasing people ‘for free’, and it made [soldiers] angry,” one soldier who was stationed at a detention facility explained. “[The soldiers] would say: ‘They’re not returning hostages, so why should we let them go?’”
‘Legalizing abduction’
Few cases highlight the arbitrary cruelty of Israel’s mass incarceration policy more starkly than that of Fahamiya Al-Khalidi, whom soldiers arrested at a school in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood on Dec. 9, 2023.
The then-82-year-old suffered from Alzheimer’s and struggled to walk independently, but the Israeli army nevertheless took her to the Anatot military detention center before transferring her the next day to Damon Prison in northern Israel, where she was jailed for six weeks. A document from the prison reveals that she was held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, confirming details first published in Haaretz in early 2024.
The Israeli army initially stated in response to our inquiry that Al-Khalidi had been arrested “in order to rule out her involvement in terrorism.” It later stated that she was detained “based on specific intelligence concerning her personally,” adding that “in light of her current condition, the detention was not appropriate and was the result of a local, isolated error in judgment.”
A military medic who was stationed at Anatot told +972, Local Call, and the Guardian that he was called to treat Al-Khalidi after she collapsed on the first night after her arrival. “She fell and got hurt, probably from the barbed wire,” he recounted. “We stitched her hand in the middle of the night.” Photos taken by the medic, seen by +972, Local Call, and the Guardian, confirm his presence at Anatot at the time Al-Khalidi was held there.
According to the soldier, Al-Khalidi could not remember her age and thought she was still in Gaza — yet the army still considered her a militant. “They tell soldiers the person is an ‘unlawful combatant,’ which is equivalent to a terrorist,” he explained. “When Al-Khalidi arrived, I remember her limping badly toward the clinic. And she’s classified as an unlawful combatant. The way that label is used is insane.”
Al-Khalidi was one of about 40 women the soldier recalls seeing at Anatot in his two months at the facility. “There was someone who had a miscarriage; her guards said she bled heavily. Another woman, a nursing mother brought without her baby, wanted to keep breastfeeding to preserve her milk.”
Abeer Ghaban, 40, was already being held at Damon Prison when Al-Khalidi arrived. She said the elderly woman looked frightened, and her face and hands were swollen. Al-Khalidi barely spoke with any of the other detainees at first, but gradually they learned that she had fled when the Israeli army threatened to bomb her building, and was subsequently arrested.
Ghaban said she spent weeks caring for Al-Khalidi while they were incarcerated together. “We used to feed her with our own hands,” she recalled. “We changed her clothes. She moved around in a wheelchair.”
In one incident, Ghaban explained, prison guards mocked Al-Khalidi until she attempted to flee, crashed into a fence, and injured herself.
Ghaban had been raising her three children, aged 10, 9, and 7, alone for years, so they were left to fend for themselves when Israeli soldiers arrested her at a checkpoint in Gaza in December 2023. Ghaban realized in interrogation that the army had confused her husband, a farmer, with a Hamas member with the exact same name. A soldier admitted this mistake after comparing photographs, but she was kept in prison for six more weeks, worried about her children.
The two women were released together in January 2024, without explanation. Ghaban helped Al-Khalidi contact her children, who live abroad, and she found her own children begging in the street and barely recognizable. “They were alive,” she said, “but seeing the state they had been in for 53 days without me broke me.”
A journalist documented Al-Khalidi in Rafah after her release, disoriented and confused, without any of her family members. She did not remember how long she had been detained. “They took me from the school,” she said, still dressed in gray prison pants. “I went through a lot.”
International law allows the internment of civilians only if they pose an imperative security threat, and guarantees basic rights which Israel is violating, said Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers.
“The conditions of Gazans in detention in Israel absolutely, without doubt, do not meet what is stipulated in the Fourth Geneva Convention,” he explained, noting that violent abuse, food deprivation, and the denial of Red Cross visits and family communication is routine. The legislation used to hold them, he added, is also itself “a flagrant violation of international law.”
Hassan Jabareen, director of the Haifa-based Palestinian legal rights group Adalah, agrees. “The Unlawful Combatants Law is designed to facilitate the mass detention of civilians and enforced disappearances, effectively legalizing the abduction of Palestinians from Gaza,” he said. “It strips detainees of protections guaranteed under international law, including safeguards specifically intended for civilians, using the ‘unlawful combatant’ label to justify the systematic denial of their rights.”
The Israeli army did not initially deny the numerical data appearing in this article, but a follow-up statement said the figures were “wrong” and argued that our claims “reflect a misunderstanding of the detention procedures in Israel.” It continued: “IDF forces are required to detain suspects in the field, either based on existing intelligence or due to reasonable suspicion arising from the circumstances of their apprehension, and examine who among them is involved in terrorist activity. The IDF categorically rejects claims of arbitrary detentions.
“Prior to the issuance of a permanent internment order, and as part of the standard process, a temporary detention order is issued for the detainee under the Unlawful Combatants Law, allowing for their detention for a limited period during which investigation and assessment take place. During this time, it is not yet determined whether the individual qualifies as an unlawful combatant. Only if the individual is found to meet the criteria and pose a security threat, a permanent internment order would be issued under this law. Every person held under a permanent internment order undergoes judicial review before a District Court judge after the order is issued, and again every six months as long as they remain in detention.
“Most of those held under the unlawful combatants law are members of terrorist organizations, while others were involved in terrorist activity without being affiliated with a specific group. The detainees receive appropriate medical care, which includes an examination by a doctor upon admission to the detention facility and regular medical check-ups to monitor their condition. If necessary, detainees are transferred to hospitals for treatment. Detainees who require medical supervision may be held together in order to facilitate access and care by the medical staff.”
This is what emerges from figures obtained from a classified database managed by Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (known by the Hebrew acronym “Aman”), in addition to official Israeli prison statistics disclosed in legal proceedings. Testimonies from former Palestinian detainees and Israeli soldiers who served in detention facilities further indicate that Israel has knowingly abducted civilians en masse and held them for long periods in appalling conditions.
Detention figures cited by the state in May in response to High Court petitions revealed that a total of 6,000 Palestinians had been arrested in Gaza during the first 19 months of the war and held in Israel under a law for incarcerating “unlawful combatants” — a legal tool that allows Israel to imprison people indefinitely, without charge or trial, if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe they participated in “hostile activities against the State of Israel” or that they are a member of a group that has.
Israel’s politicians, military, and media routinely refer to all Palestinian detainees from Gaza as “terrorists,” and the government has not acknowledged detaining or holding any civilians. The Israel Prison Service (IPS) has claimed in public reports, without producing evidence, that almost all the “unlawful combatants” held in Israeli prisons are members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Yet data obtained in mid-May from Aman’s database, which intelligence sources described as the only reliable source for determining who the army considers to be active combatants in Gaza, showed that Israel had arrested only 1,450 individuals from the military wings of Hamas and PIJ — meaning around three-quarters of the 6,000 detainees did not belong to either.
The database, whose existence was recently revealed by +972, Local Call, and the Guardian, lists the names of 47,653 Palestinians whom the army considers to be Hamas and PIJ militants (it is updated regularly, and includes people recruited after October 7). By mid-May, Israel had arrested around 950 Hamas fighters and 500 PIJ fighters, according to the data.
The database does not contain information on members of other armed groups in Gaza, who are listed in IPS reports as accounting for less than 2 percent of “unlawful combatant” detainees. Up to 300 Palestinians are additionally being held in Israel on charges of participating in the October 7 attacks; they are not defined as “unlawful combatants” but as criminal detainees, since Israel claims to have sufficient evidence to prosecute them.
+972, Local Call, and the Guardian obtained the numerical data from the database without the names of those listed or the intelligence that supposedly incriminates them — the reliability of which is itself called into question by flimsy allegations leveled against people like Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who was assassinated last month.
Over the course of the war, partly because of severe overcrowding in prisons, Israel released more than 2,500 prisoners it had classified as “unlawful combatants,” implying that it did not believe they were really militants. An additional 1,050 were released in prisoner exchanges agreed between Israel and Hamas.
Both rights groups and Israeli soldiers have described an even smaller ratio of fighters among those rounded up in Gaza than what emerges from the leaked data. In December 2023, when photos of dozens of Palestinians stripped and shackled caused international outrage, senior officers admitted to Haaretz that “85 to 90 percent” were not Hamas members.
The Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights has represented hundreds of civilians held in Israeli jails. Its work “points to a systematic campaign of arbitrary detentions targeting Palestinians indiscriminately, regardless of any alleged offense,” said deputy director Samir Zaqout.
“At most, perhaps one in six or seven [detainees] might have any link to Hamas or other militant factions, and even then, not necessarily through their military wings. In many cases, political affiliation with a Palestinian faction is enough for Israel to label someone a combatant.”
Palestinians who have been released from Israeli military detention centers and IPS prisons over the course of the war have testified to extremely harsh conditions, including routine abuse and torture. As a result of these practices, dozens of detainees have died in Israeli custody.
Bypassing due process
Enacted in 2002, the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law was designed to allow Israel to detain people during wartime without having to recognize them as prisoners of war, as mandated by the Geneva Conventions. The law also allows Israel to deny detainees access to a lawyer for up to 75 days.
Israeli courts extend the Palestinians’ detention almost automatically, relying on “secret evidence” in hearings that last only a few minutes. According to data from the Israeli rights group HaMoked, the IPS is currently detaining around 2,660 Gazans arrested after October 7 as “unlawful combatants” — the most at any point during the war. Legal organizations believe hundreds more are currently confined in Israeli military detention facilities prior to being transferred to IPS prisons (in May, the total number of “unlawful combatant” detainees in prisons and detention centers put together was 2,750, the army said).
“If Israel were to put all [the detainees] on trial they’d have to draft indictments on specific charges and present evidence of those allegations,” Jessica Montell, director of HaMoked, explained. “Due process can be cumbersome. That’s why they created the Unlawful Combatants Law, to bypass all of that.”
This law, Montell added, has facilitated the “forced disappearance of hundreds and even thousands of people” who are effectively held without any external oversight.
The fact that three-quarters of those held as “unlawful combatants” are not considered in the army’s own records to belong to the armed wings of Hamas or PIJ “undermines the entire justification for their detention,” explained Tal Steiner, director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, whose legal petitions against mass incarceration prompted the state to supply the data on the number of detainees since October 7.
“As soon as the wave of mass arrests began in Gaza in October 2023, there was serious concern that many uninvolved people were being detained without cause,” Steiner continued. “This concern was confirmed when we learned that half of those arrested at the beginning of the war were eventually released — demonstrating that there had been no basis for their detention in the first place.”
An Israeli army officer who led mass arrest operations in Khan Younis refugee camp told +972, Local Call, and the Guardian that his unit’s mission was to “drain” the camp and force its residents to flee further southward. As part of this mission, detainees were arrested en masse and taken to military facilities where they were classified as “unlawful combatants.”
“Everyone was marched out in long convoys, with bags over their heads, toward the coast, to Al-Mawasi,” he said. “[They were taken to] what we called an inspection facility, [where] people were screened. Every night they loaded an open truck with dozens, hundreds of men, blindfolded, bound, stacked on top of each other. Every night a truck like this went to Israel.”
The officer realized that no distinction was being made “between a terrorist who entered Israel on October 7 and someone working for the water authority in Khan Younis,” and that arrests were carried out almost arbitrarily, including of minors. “It’s inconceivable,” he said. “You take a man, a boy, a youth, from his family, and send him to Israel for interrogation. If he ever comes back, how will he even find them again?”
Ahmad Muhammad, a 30-year-old from Khan Younis refugee camp, said he was forced to walk in one of these convoys with his wife and three children on Jan. 7, 2024. At the checkpoint, the army announced over a megaphone that men should stop, identifying them based on the color of their clothes. “‘Blue shirt, come back, come back,’ one soldier shouted at me,” he recalled.
He was separated along with a group of other men. “We were a random group of people — I work as a barber in the camp, not affiliated with any faction,” Muhammad said. “Every time a soldier approached, he cursed at us, until a truck arrived and we were thrown inside, piled on top of each other, deeply humiliated.”
Muhammad was taken to the Negev Prison and questioned about the October 7 attacks. He told the soldiers he knew nothing, but they kept him in detention for an entire year. To this day, he does not know why. “I lived through difficult days in prison — illness, cold, torture, humiliation,” he explained.
Muhammad was released in January of this year alongside around 2,000 other Palestinian prisoners in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas — half of whom had been detained since October 7 under the Unlawful Combatants Law and denied access to a lawyer or due process for months.
‘They’re not returning hostages, so why should we let them go?’
Multiple soldiers confirmed to +972, Local Call, and the Guardian that they witnessed the mass detention of Palestinian civilians at Israeli military facilities. A soldier who served at the infamous Sde Teiman detention center said one compound was nicknamed “the geriatric pen” because all the detainees were elderly or severely injured, some of them taken directly from Gaza’s hospitals.
“From the Indonesian Hospital [in Beit Lahiya] they would just take masses of people,” the soldier said. “They brought men in wheelchairs, people without legs, or with legs that were basically useless. I remember one man, aged 75, with badly infected stumps. I always assumed the supposed excuse for arresting patients was that maybe they had seen the hostages or something.” All of them, he added, were held in “the geriatric pen.”
Another soldier who commanded a team early in the war said the army arrested a patient in his seventies inside Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital. “He arrived tied to a stretcher. He was diabetic, with gangrene in his leg, unable to walk. He was no danger to anyone.” That man was transferred to Sde Teiman.
In addition to rounding up injured civilians at Gaza’s hospitals and imprisoning them in Israeli detention centers, Israel has arrested hundreds of the doctors who were treating them. Today, more than 100 medical staff from Gaza remain imprisoned as “unlawful combatants,” according to Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), which in February published a report compiling testimonies from 20 doctors and military whistleblowers describing abuse and torture.
Naji Abbas, head of PHRI’s prisoners’ department, said their testimonies revealed a routine of jailing people for months after a single brief interrogation. For Abbas, this undercuts Israel’s claim that such detainees are held because they possess valuable intelligence about Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity, and he sees their detention as part of Israel’s attack on Gaza’s health system.
In one account collected by PHRI, a surgeon from Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis described how soldiers “sat on top of us, kicked us with their boots, and beat us with rifle butts.” In another testimony, the head of the surgery department at the Indonesian Hospital said: “They pushed our heads into the gravel, again and again for four hours, beat us savagely with batons, and electrocuted us.”
A third doctor reported being beaten until his ribs were broken, while a surgeon from Al-Shifa Hospital described detainees being electrocuted, adding that he heard of prisoners who died as a result. “On the way to the interrogation facility they told me they would cut off my fingers because I’m a dentist,” another doctor testified to PHRI.
The doctors who gave testimony to PHRI were classified as “unlawful combatants.” One such detainee, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital, died in custody last year after being arrested in December 2023. According to his family, he was tortured to death. Another, Iyad Al-Rantisi, director of a women’s hospital in Gaza, died last year at a Shin Bet interrogation facility.
The medic who served at Anatot said many Palestinian doctors were jailed there. He remembered one pediatrician, shackled and blindfolded, who pleaded with him in English: “We are your colleagues, can you help me?”
In June 2024, then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning of a prison overcrowding crisis: the number of inmates had exceeded 21,000 while there was capacity for only 14,500. He wrote that the treatment of prisoners “bordered on abuse,” exposing state employees to possible criminal proceedings abroad.
The harsh treatment of detainees is consistent with remarks by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who said last year that one of his top priorities was to “worsen conditions” for Palestinian prisoners, including by providing only “minimal” food. Many Gazan civilians who were arrested and imprisoned by Israeli forces have testified to being subjected to severe abuse and torture.
But the mass arrest of doctors and other civilians also appears to have been at least partly intended to create leverage for hostage negotiations. When Al-Shifa Hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya was released last year, MK Simcha Rothman, chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, complained that he was freed “not in exchange for hostages.” In the same committee meeting, MK Almog Cohen said Israel had missed the chance “to take a significant symbol in Gaza” to use in a deal.
“We kept releasing people ‘for free’, and it made [soldiers] angry,” one soldier who was stationed at a detention facility explained. “[The soldiers] would say: ‘They’re not returning hostages, so why should we let them go?’”
‘Legalizing abduction’
Few cases highlight the arbitrary cruelty of Israel’s mass incarceration policy more starkly than that of Fahamiya Al-Khalidi, whom soldiers arrested at a school in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood on Dec. 9, 2023.
The then-82-year-old suffered from Alzheimer’s and struggled to walk independently, but the Israeli army nevertheless took her to the Anatot military detention center before transferring her the next day to Damon Prison in northern Israel, where she was jailed for six weeks. A document from the prison reveals that she was held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, confirming details first published in Haaretz in early 2024.
The Israeli army initially stated in response to our inquiry that Al-Khalidi had been arrested “in order to rule out her involvement in terrorism.” It later stated that she was detained “based on specific intelligence concerning her personally,” adding that “in light of her current condition, the detention was not appropriate and was the result of a local, isolated error in judgment.”
A military medic who was stationed at Anatot told +972, Local Call, and the Guardian that he was called to treat Al-Khalidi after she collapsed on the first night after her arrival. “She fell and got hurt, probably from the barbed wire,” he recounted. “We stitched her hand in the middle of the night.” Photos taken by the medic, seen by +972, Local Call, and the Guardian, confirm his presence at Anatot at the time Al-Khalidi was held there.
According to the soldier, Al-Khalidi could not remember her age and thought she was still in Gaza — yet the army still considered her a militant. “They tell soldiers the person is an ‘unlawful combatant,’ which is equivalent to a terrorist,” he explained. “When Al-Khalidi arrived, I remember her limping badly toward the clinic. And she’s classified as an unlawful combatant. The way that label is used is insane.”
Al-Khalidi was one of about 40 women the soldier recalls seeing at Anatot in his two months at the facility. “There was someone who had a miscarriage; her guards said she bled heavily. Another woman, a nursing mother brought without her baby, wanted to keep breastfeeding to preserve her milk.”
Abeer Ghaban, 40, was already being held at Damon Prison when Al-Khalidi arrived. She said the elderly woman looked frightened, and her face and hands were swollen. Al-Khalidi barely spoke with any of the other detainees at first, but gradually they learned that she had fled when the Israeli army threatened to bomb her building, and was subsequently arrested.
Ghaban said she spent weeks caring for Al-Khalidi while they were incarcerated together. “We used to feed her with our own hands,” she recalled. “We changed her clothes. She moved around in a wheelchair.”
In one incident, Ghaban explained, prison guards mocked Al-Khalidi until she attempted to flee, crashed into a fence, and injured herself.
Ghaban had been raising her three children, aged 10, 9, and 7, alone for years, so they were left to fend for themselves when Israeli soldiers arrested her at a checkpoint in Gaza in December 2023. Ghaban realized in interrogation that the army had confused her husband, a farmer, with a Hamas member with the exact same name. A soldier admitted this mistake after comparing photographs, but she was kept in prison for six more weeks, worried about her children.
The two women were released together in January 2024, without explanation. Ghaban helped Al-Khalidi contact her children, who live abroad, and she found her own children begging in the street and barely recognizable. “They were alive,” she said, “but seeing the state they had been in for 53 days without me broke me.”
A journalist documented Al-Khalidi in Rafah after her release, disoriented and confused, without any of her family members. She did not remember how long she had been detained. “They took me from the school,” she said, still dressed in gray prison pants. “I went through a lot.”
International law allows the internment of civilians only if they pose an imperative security threat, and guarantees basic rights which Israel is violating, said Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers.
“The conditions of Gazans in detention in Israel absolutely, without doubt, do not meet what is stipulated in the Fourth Geneva Convention,” he explained, noting that violent abuse, food deprivation, and the denial of Red Cross visits and family communication is routine. The legislation used to hold them, he added, is also itself “a flagrant violation of international law.”
Hassan Jabareen, director of the Haifa-based Palestinian legal rights group Adalah, agrees. “The Unlawful Combatants Law is designed to facilitate the mass detention of civilians and enforced disappearances, effectively legalizing the abduction of Palestinians from Gaza,” he said. “It strips detainees of protections guaranteed under international law, including safeguards specifically intended for civilians, using the ‘unlawful combatant’ label to justify the systematic denial of their rights.”
The Israeli army did not initially deny the numerical data appearing in this article, but a follow-up statement said the figures were “wrong” and argued that our claims “reflect a misunderstanding of the detention procedures in Israel.” It continued: “IDF forces are required to detain suspects in the field, either based on existing intelligence or due to reasonable suspicion arising from the circumstances of their apprehension, and examine who among them is involved in terrorist activity. The IDF categorically rejects claims of arbitrary detentions.
“Prior to the issuance of a permanent internment order, and as part of the standard process, a temporary detention order is issued for the detainee under the Unlawful Combatants Law, allowing for their detention for a limited period during which investigation and assessment take place. During this time, it is not yet determined whether the individual qualifies as an unlawful combatant. Only if the individual is found to meet the criteria and pose a security threat, a permanent internment order would be issued under this law. Every person held under a permanent internment order undergoes judicial review before a District Court judge after the order is issued, and again every six months as long as they remain in detention.
“Most of those held under the unlawful combatants law are members of terrorist organizations, while others were involved in terrorist activity without being affiliated with a specific group. The detainees receive appropriate medical care, which includes an examination by a doctor upon admission to the detention facility and regular medical check-ups to monitor their condition. If necessary, detainees are transferred to hospitals for treatment. Detainees who require medical supervision may be held together in order to facilitate access and care by the medical staff.”
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