Palestinian held without charge dies in Israeli custody

A Palestinian detainee has died in Israeli custody after being held without charge or trial for five months.

Palestinian prisoner monitoring groups - the PA’s Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) - said on Tuesday they had been informed of Ahmad Hatem Muhammad Khdeirat’s death at Soroka Hospital in Israel.

Khdeirat, 22, was detained by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron on 23 May and placed under administrative detention, without charge or trial.

Administrative detention is a controversial Israeli policy that allows for the imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or trial.

Detainees are held for periods of three to six months, which can be extended indefinitely, and detainees are not informed of the evidence against them and have no right to appeal.

Khdeirat became the 78th identified Palestinian prisoner to die in Israeli custody over the past two years, since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The deaths have occurred amid widespread reports of Israeli torture, physical abuse, sexual assault, medical neglect, and starvation of detainees.

'Inhumane conditions'

According to the Palestinian rights groups, Khdeirat spent most of his detention in the notorious Negev prison, where he was held in "harsh, inhumane conditions".

Israel's Negev prison has been compared by several rights groups to the notorious US facilities at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were tortured and abused.

Khdeirat, who was already suffering from chronic diabetes, experienced further health complications in detention, with his weight dropping to around 40 kilograms.

The prisoner groups reported that his health “seriously deteriorated” after he contracted scabies, which caused severe itching and frequent muscle cramps.

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These symptoms, combined with intense hunger pangs and dangerously low blood sugar linked to his chronic condition, left him unable to move. His lawyer testified that he had been confined to his bed and unable to stand for two months.

"The Commission and the Club indicated that the crime of Khdeirat's martyrdom adds to the list of crimes carried out by the occupation regime, its policy of killing prisoners and detainees, as part of the ongoing war of extermination against the Palestinian people," the groups said in a statement. 

While the mistreatment of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons has long been documented by human rights organisations, the abuses have sharply escalated since the onset of the war on 7 October 2023. 

Arrests, deaths in custody, and allegations of abuse have all surged to record levels.

Both international and Israeli human rights groups have condemned the abuses, with B'Tselem referring to Israeli prisons as “torture camps”.

Currently, an estimated 11,100 Palestinian prisoners are being held across 23 prisons, detention facilities and interrogation centres, more than double the number held prior to 7 October 2023.

This figure excludes unaccounted-for detainees held in Israeli military camps, primarily Palestinians abducted from Gaza, whose precise numbers remain unknown but are believed to be in the thousands.