Inside Israel’s prisons, where Ben-Gvir’s cruelty is policy | Civil Rights

When Palestinian photojournalist and former prisoner Muath Amarneh saw Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s videos gloating over the decrepit conditions endured by imprisoned Palestinians, he thought of what happened before and after the cameras started rolling.

“When a figure like that comes to the prisons, they don’t show everything. What they do show is only certain video clips where the arrogance of that figure comes through,” Amarneh told Al Jazeera.

“But before and after, the prisoner is subjected to humiliation and beatings they don’t show the public. That whole hour of humiliation, they show half a minute of it, or a minute, or two minutes.”

Ben-Gvir, who oversees Israel’s prison system in his role, has spent recent weeks broadcasting what he views as his accomplishments in office.

An AI-generated video posted to his social media in August showed well-fed Palestinian men on a conveyor belt entering a detention facility, then emerging emaciated, weeping – captioned “We promised, we delivered”. He deleted it as comparisons to Nazi concentration camps mounted.

Days later, he posted footage of himself confronting female prisoners. One told him she had not showered in three days and was not receiving medical treatment. “The good conditions in the prisons are over,” Ben-Gvir told her. “I am directly responsible for everything. I am pleased with these conditions.”

Detainees’ testimonies and data from Palestinian rights groups offer a glimpse of what that policy has meant inside Israeli prisons.

Amarneh, 39, who now lives in the Dheisheh refugee camp south of Bethlehem, has been arrested twice since the genocidal war on Gaza began, both times under administrative detention.

There are now roughly 3,200 administrative detainees – more than double the approximately 1,300 held before October 7, 2023, according to Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ advocacy group.

Israel and the United States accuse Addameer of supporting “terrorism”, a charge the group denies, and Amarneh’s numerous run-ins with Israeli forces started when he began work as a photojournalist.

In 2019, Israeli forces shot him with a rubber-coated metal bullet while he was covering Israeli attacks near Hebron and wearing a press vest. A bullet took out his left eye and left shrapnel lodged near his skull.

Amarneh was first taken into administrative detention in October 2023, a week after Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began, and was held for nine months in Megiddo and Nafha prisons.

After his release, he deliberately moved away from news work towards documentary work, hoping to reduce his risk of being imprisoned again.

Nevertheless, he was arrested again in August 2025 and held for eight months at Ofer prison, still without charge. “My charge was working in media,” he said.

‘Then came October 7’

Sahar Francis, a lawyer who was the executive director of Addameer, said Ben-Gvir’s nearly four-year tenure as minister responsible for the prison authority did not create the system’s cruelty so much as intensify it. “From his first day overseeing the prison authority, he closed the only two bakeries producing bread for detainees.”

“Then came October 7, after which the situation in prisons worsened considerably. Family visits and Red Cross access were suspended, while lawyers were barred for the first four or five months. Clothing, food and books were confiscated, leaving detainees with a single change of clothes,” she added.

Amarneh wore the same trousers for 90 days. Health clinics were shuttered. Special units began raiding sections daily, beating detainees – a practice she says has caused multiple deaths in custody.

“They were always using torture. But what happened after the genocide is that they came back to conditions similar to the early years of the occupation, on the level of the brutality, the physical abuse, the rape, the harassment,” said Francis.

Across his two periods of administrative detention, Amarneh lost 35kg (77 pounds) over nine months.

“I lived through the transformation of the prisons – how they were before the war and how they became,” said Amarneh. “The prisons, where life was already hard to begin with, were transformed into places where life became impossible: a place that isn’t fit for human life.”

By the time of his second arrest in 2025, Amarneh said, he noticed deteriorating conditions in detention facilities.

“I never imagined the situation would be worse than the times before. The scale of the humiliation in there was enormous, to an indescribable degree,” he said.

Amarneh was stripped of his prescription glasses for six months, and others were deprived of regular access to showers and basic hygiene products. When detainees managed to have a rare shower, they were forced to sit out in the rain immediately afterwards. Prison guards regularly referred to Amarneh and others as animals and cursed their mothers and wives. Often, guards remarked they “should have just killed you”.

He remembers guards forbidding prisoners to stand in the sun, telling them “this sun is ours, not yours”. When one detainee simply asked when Eid was taking place, a riot unit stormed into the cell 10 minutes later, beat everyone else inside, and shot the questioner with rubber bullets, “so you won’t dare ask about Eid again”.

‘I’m going to die here’

To make matters worse, Amarneh’s wife was pregnant while he was held in Ofer prison, with no information about her condition. He only happened to learn by chance later from a lawyer visiting another detainee in his section that his wife had given birth and only found out the child’s name, Osama, two months later.

Blankets were forbidden between 5am and 4pm, through the coldest months, leaving the prisoners “the colour of a dead body”, he said.

Medical care was all but nonexistent, with one person given the wrong diabetes medication at the wrong dose.

When an infection in his leg left Amarneh partly paralysed, he was given minimal treatment only after his lawyer noticed his condition at a court hearing. Later, his eye implant became dislodged after a wound reopened, but prison authorities denied him a hospital transfer, saying his condition was “not seriously dangerous”.

“That’s it, I’m going to die here,” he remembered thinking. When the pain from the beatings and infections became unbearable, guards offered a single painkiller tablet to be divided among 11 detainees.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled in 2024 that Amarneh’s first detention was unlawful and discriminatory. Press freedom organisations have also raised his repeated imprisonment as part of a broader pattern targeting Palestinian journalists. But none of it stopped his second arrest, 10 months later.

Francis said international bodies like the UN’s Working Group “don’t have the power to impose their decisions on the Israeli side”.

“At the end, it’s an opinion — a decision that needs more political will in order to be implemented,” she added.

She sees the same double standard in international accountability: cases of torture under Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime have been prosecuted in Germany and France against officers and interrogators, “where in our case we always fail. It’s open for other cases, but not for Palestinians.”

‘I am directly responsible for everything’

Francis believes Ben-Gvir’s on-camera boasts that “I am directly responsible for everything” could be relevant to any potential case against him in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“Such a person – a political figure, a minister – is at the top of the pyramid of decision-making,” she said. “If they are not using these tools against people like Ben-Gvir, then where?”

Al Jazeera has reached out to Ben-Gvir, the Israeli National Security ministry, and the Israeli military for comment, but has not received a response.

Before Amarneh left prison the second time, officers said they were going to monitor what he writes. “If you want to come back to prison, go ahead,” they told him.

A few months after his April release, Amarneh rarely leaves his house in the Dheisheh camp, fearing arrest.

“For me, being in prison is easier than being outside prison. The psychological pressure I’m living with is equivalent to being imprisoned again,” he said. “When you’re in prison, that’s it – you know you’re in prison, you know the situation you’re in. But on the outside, I’m under enormous psychological pressure.”

So, what is Ben-Gvir’s aim in implementing such inhumane treatment in detention facilities?

“He wants the land without the people. But we’re here. Either I die here, or I live here,” said Amarneh. “I’m not a terrorist. I don’t thirst for violence or blood or anything like that. On the contrary, I want to live in peace. But he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t even want us to live.”