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Based on information provided by Israel, a minimum of 98 Palestinian individuals have perished while in custody since October 2023. A rights monitoring body located in Israel has stated that the actual number is likely substantially larger, as a result of many of disappeared people originating in Gaza.

Report Findings

An updated study recorded fatalities resulting from brutality, lack of healthcare, and starvation. Investigators utilized official data requests, autopsy findings, and testimonies with lawyers, advocates, next of kin, and eyewitnesses.

Israeli authorities disclosed complete information limited to the opening period of the hostilities. Over this period, official figures reveal an historically high death toll among Palestinian detainees, averaging one death once every four-day period.

Recent Figures

Israeli defense forces last updated information on deaths in detention for May 2024, and detention administration during September 2024. Investigators documented a further 35 fatalities in custody after these periods and confirmed them with government bodies.

Although the aggregate figure of casualties charted being substantially larger than previous assessments, it probably does not reflect the complete extent of losses among Palestinians, per the director of the detainee affairs unit.

“Although we are providing evidence for a greater figure of deaths than earlier indicated, this is an incomplete account,” he stated. “We are sure that there are yet individuals who lost their lives in custody that we don’t know about.”

Civilian Deaths

Classified Israeli data shows that the vast majority of Palestinian detainees from Gaza who perished in detention were non-combatants, based on a parallel investigation.

By May of the current year, a military intelligence database monitoring all militants in Gaza, a roster of more than 47,000 listed people, listed merely 21 deaths in confinement. At that time, 65 Palestinians from Gaza had died in jail.

Detention Conditions

Physical violence, mistreatment, and further cruelty of Palestinian individuals has been normalised across Israel’s jail system during two years of conflict. Top government figures have publicly acknowledged inadequate food and an underground jail detaining Palestinian individuals who never see daylight.

Present and past detainees and informants from the defense forces have uniformly asserted widespread breaches of global standards.

Organized Maltreatment

The systematic abuse came with a troubling surge in casualties documented across no fewer than 12 civilian and military facilities in Israel. In the decade preceding the war, there were typically a couple fatalities a year.

“This isn’t merely an isolated incident sporadically. It is institutional and it is expected to endure,” a spokesperson said, partly because there is a climate of near total impunity for harming and abusing Palestinians.

Merely one incident of assaulting detainees has come to trial, with the military personnel given a penalty to half a year. An effort to prosecute others over a brutal attack involving assault led to public rallies and the detention of Israel’s chief legal officer, with the alleged perpetrators now insisting that indictments against them be dismissed.

Absence of Consequences

“Regardless of this significant total of fatalities, over two years not one individual has been detained,” the representative noted. “There have been no prosecutions over any death.

“While these practices are being applied, all Palestinian detainees in confinement faces risk, even the healthy ones, also the young ones who have no health problems.”

Prominent Examples

Several casualties in custody have been widely reported, such as a 50-year-old medical chief who perished in detention after four months in custody.

A prisoner held with the deceased reported that he was led to the yard by correctional officers immediately preceding his death, clearly wounded and unclothed from the waist down. His remains has not been repatriated to Gaza.

Further inmates who died in detention in Israel are unidentified. Correctional authorities and armed services provided investigators with the figure of fatalities in custody, and basic other details such as the location where they perished, but not the prisoners’ names.

Identification Challenges

For 21 instances, mostly detainees from Gaza, investigators could not to connect the few details supplied by government bodies to a fatality recorded by rights organisations, either through statements from released detainees or accounts in the news outlets.

The inmates’ next of kin may not know about their loved ones’ deaths as well, as Israel has impeded efforts to locate Palestinians it is detaining. During 210 days at the outset of the conflict, the armed services declined to give basic information about the status of many of individuals detained in Gaza, practically enacting a approach of unacknowledged detention, according to the advocacy organization.

Restricted Access

From May 2024, government bodies have created an email address for requests about Palestinians from Gaza, but this has resulted in merely a incomplete and restricted improvement. Analysts noted|observed|commented on