Once you picture schoolgirls, university students, mothers, aunts and grandmothers lying on their stomachs in prison pyjamas - their hands tied behind their backs, and soldiers looming over them, beating them if they move even slightly - you cannot forget the image.
When you hear a female prisoner say she has "nothing but her heart", you immediately grasp how prison can dismantle lives.
Palestinian Prisoners’ Day is marked every year on 17 April to spotlight ongoing human rights violations - and today, conditions are worse than ever. Since the launch of the Gaza genocide, starvation, isolation, humiliation, strip searches, torture and overwhelming fear have become constant realities for Palestinian women in Israeli prisons.
More than 700 Palestinian women have been arrested in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since the genocide began in late 2023, according to rights groups. Enduring night raids on their homes or detention at military checkpoints, most have been subjected to physical and psychological abuse both during and after their arrest.
“Everything is different from the prisons of the 1990s. All changed with the genocide,” Ramallah-based lawyer Sahar Francis, who is also the former director of the prisoners’ rights group Addameer, told a recent webinar entitled Women, Prison Sumoud.
Human Rights Glance
Significant shortages of bread and essential supplies, including food and fuel, have returned to the Gaza Strip as Israel continues to tighten restrictions on the entry of goods and aid.
The struggle over a fallen police barrier lasted less than a minute, but it has forever altered the course of student Muhammad Ali’s life.
On September 25, 2025, David McIntosh filed a report to his bosses at Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) detailing an account of Israeli soldiers gunning down a young Palestinian boy as he was getting food at a site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). “There’s no way he survived,” McIntosh told Drop Site News and Middle East Eye in his first interview since returning from Gaza five months ago. “He was murdered. He was straight up murdered.”
The report, seen exclusively by Middle East Eye, is based on testimonies from Palestinian former prisoners gathered by the rights watchdog Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
Ritaj Abdulrahman Rihan was practising the subtraction of four-digit numbers during a maths lesson in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza.
A prominent Palestinian children's rights charity has shut down its operations after decades of documenting violations against Palestinian children, blaming sustained Israeli pressure and restrictions.





























