Palestinians held without trial in notorious underground Israeli jail

UK newspaper The Guardian has revealed that dozens of Palestinians from Gaza are being held in total isolation inside Israel’s underground Rakefet Prison, where they are denied sunlight, adequate food, and contact with the outside world.

According to the report published on Saturday, the detainees are held for months without charge or trial, including civilians such as a nurse arrested in his medical scrubs and a young food vendor. Both are represented by lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI).

The two men were transferred to the subterranean Rakefet complex in January and described regular beatings and other violence consistent with torture documented in other Israeli detention centres, the newspaper said.

Opened in the early 1980s to hold members of Israel’s organised crime network, Rakefet was shut down a few years later because of "inhumane conditions". Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, ordered it reopened following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks.

Cells, a small exercise area, and a lawyers’ meeting room are all located underground, meaning prisoners "live without any natural light," according to The Guardian. The prison, which housed 15 inmates when it closed in 1985, now holds about 100 detainees, based on official data obtained by PCATI.

PCATI lawyer Jinan Abdu said: "In the cases of the clients we visited, we are speaking about civilians. The man I spoke to was an 18-year-old who worked selling food. He was taken from a checkpoint on a road."

Ben-Gvir has told Israeli media that Rakefet was being refurbished to hold elite Hamas fighters and Hezbollah special forces captured in Lebanon, a claim contradicted by the lawyers. The Israel Prison Service (IPS) declined to respond to questions about the detainees’ identities or conditions.

PCATI’s executive director, Tal Steiner, said conditions for Palestinians in Israeli jails were "horrific by intention" but that Rakefet represented "a unique form of abuse".

Holding people underground without daylight for months, he warned, had “extreme implications” for mental health. "It’s very hard to remain intact when you are held in such oppressive and difficult conditions," Steiner said.

Despite years of prison inspections in the Ramla complex, south-east of Tel Aviv, where Rakefet is located, Steiner said he had not heard of the underground facility until Ben-Gvir’s order to reopen it.

Abdu and a colleague, lawyer Saja Misherqi Baransi, visited Rakefet this year to meet the two detainees. They were escorted by masked, armed guards down dirty stairs into a room strewn with dead insects, where "the toilet was so dirty it was in effect unusable".

Surveillance cameras on the walls violated the prisoners’ right to confidential legal consultation, the lawyers said, and guards warned them to avoid mentioning the detainees’ families or the war in Gaza.

"I asked myself, if the conditions in the lawyers’ room are so humiliating - not just personally to us but also to the profession - then what is the situation for the prisoners?" Abdu said. "The answer came soon, when we met them."

Baransi said the two men had been held for nine months. The nurse began the meeting by asking: “Where am I and why am I here?” as guards had not told him the prison’s name.

Israeli judges approved their detention in brief video hearings, without lawyers or evidence, saying only they would remain “until the war ends.”

The detainees described windowless, unventilated cells shared by three or four men, regular beatings, assaults by dogs with iron muzzles, denial of medical care, and "starvation-level rations". Prisoners were allowed outside for only minutes every two days.

Baransi said the nurse last saw daylight on 21 January, when he was transferred to Rakefet after a year in other prisons, including the military’s notorious Sde Teiman centre. "When I told him: ‘I talked to your mother and she authorised me to meet you,’ I was giving him this tiny thing - at least telling him his mother is alive," she said.

When the second detainee asked if his pregnant wife had given birth safely, a guard cut off the conversation and threatened him. "You are the first person I have seen since my arrest," he told Abdu before being led away.

The IPS said in response that it "operates in accordance with the law and under the supervision of official comptrollers," adding that it "is not responsible for the legal process, classification of detainees, arrest policy, or arrests".