Israeli authorities have yet to prosecute or charge a single person over Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023, despite tens of thousands of arrests made since the attack.
According to public records cited by the New York Times (NYT), several hundred Palestinians have been detained on suspicion of direct involvement in the operation. At least 200 remain in custody.
Army officials have said dozens were arrested in or around Israeli settlements during the time of the operation.
Israel also holds around 2,700 others who were taken from Gaza since then, suspected of Hamas affiliation but not necessarily direct involvement in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
The human rights of these prisoners have been systematically violated by Israel. They have not been charged or given trials, and are held in harsh conditions. Media censorship and gag orders have kept details on their situation hidden.
Lawyer Nadine Abu Arafeh said the way Israel is holding the prisoners “effectively erases these individuals from public awareness and strips them of fundamental rights.”
“Families in Gaza live with questions: Are their loved ones alive?” she added.
Israeli authorities are “stretched beyond capacity,” former senior Israeli prosecutor Moran Gez told NYT. As a result, there have been delays in the 7 October cases moving forward.
Simcha Rothman, an Israeli lawmaker from the ruling coalition, put the blame on state prosecutors for failing to adapt legal proceedings to the “unusual scale and nature of the attack.”
Yulia Malinovsky, an Israeli opposition lawmaker, said Tel Aviv fears that pursuing the 7 October cases could ignite public scrutiny of the government and the Israeli army’s failure to prevent the operation.
“They don’t want that discourse,” she said.
The Knesset recently passed an initial vote on a bill to set up a tribunal to try suspects linked to the attack. It requires several more votes and could take months before detainees start going to court.
Gez, the prosecutor who spoke with NYT, had said in January 2025 – nearing two years since the operation – that there were still zero complaints of sexual violence committed by Palestinians on 7 October.
“The biggest difficulty is evidentiary. Using evidence to link a specific crime to a specific defendant when dealing with dozens of crime scenes, where hundreds of suspects were caught and thousands of offenses were committed, is almost impossible,” Gez said at the time, noting that ordinary laws of evidence are not suitable in this case” and admitting that Israel has very little evidence against any specific individual.
The UN has also noted a lack of forensic evidence, testimonies, or eyewitness accounts. While Hebrew and western media continued to push narratives of mass rape on 7 October, Palestinian prisoners were being subjected to sexual violence by their Israeli jailers.
In July last year, Israeli settlers rioted against the decision to arrest soldiers responsible for brutally raping and torturing a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention center – known as Israel’s Guantanamo.
Hellbound and Down 