Israeli prison authorities gave a tour of a maximum-security facility to Jewish settlers where they held a “Torah lesson” and observed the abuse of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli media reported on 23 February.
Kobi Yaakobi, head of Israel’s prison system, invited 20 members of the synagogue in Har Homa, an illegal West Bank settlement near Jerusalem, on a “safari” tour of Nitzan maximum-security prison.
Palestinian detainees, including alleged members of Hamas’s elite Nukhba forces, were handcuffed and forced to lie on the ground to be observed by the visitors. The Jewish settlers ate an “indulgent lunch” in front of the prisoners, who were fasting for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
The settlers also “blessed” the prison guards.
Israel runs a “network of torture camps,” where rape, physical and psychological abuse, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation, and denial of medical care are common, according to Israeli rights groups B’Tselem.
“The transformation of prisons into a network of torture camps is part of the Israeli regime’s coordinated onslaught on Palestinian society, aimed at dismantling the Palestinian collective,” B’Tselem noted.
The Israel Prison Service (IPS) confirmed to Israeli media that its officers accompanied a “rabbi and his entourage” for a sermon and tour of a security prison.
Yaakobi was appointed as IPS chief in January 2024 by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. The IPS chief has helped Ben Gvir implement a policy to deliberately worsen the conditions of Palestinian prisoners.
Yaakobi is currently under investigation for allegedly helping suppress a probe into Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
As of November, at least 98 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 2023, according to Israeli data.
However, the Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHR-I) says the real toll is likely substantially higher as hundreds of detainees from Gaza are missing.
On 8 February, Israel returned the bodies and human remains of 120 Palestinians to Gaza without providing any information about their identities or how they were killed.
The remains arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in plain white bags, where forensic teams examined them in an effort to determine their identities and notify grieving families.
“The International Committee of the Red Cross handed over 120 body bags containing 54 bodies as well as skull samples placed in 66 separate bags,” forensic official Omar Suleiman told Al Jazeera.
After Israel returned 120 Palestinian bodies in October, officials in Gaza accused it of stealing the organs of the victims.
Israel has a long history of stealing the organs of Palestinians.
Hellbound and Down 