The number of Palestinian prisoners detained from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by the Israeli occupation forces has risen to record numbers since the start of the aggression on Gaza on October 7.

Today, Tuesday, Israeli data showed that the number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli occupation prisons has risen to 8,600, including those who have been arrested since the outbreak of the war on the Gaza Strip about 3 months ago.

According to the Israeli HaMoked Human Rights Defense Center, by January 2024, Israel is holding 2,114 sentenced prisoners and 2,534 pretrial detainees.

The center explained that among the detainees in Israeli prisons are 3,291 administrative detainees without trial, and Israel is also detaining 661 people as illegal combatants, who were arrested by Israel as of October 7 last year around the Gaza Strip and inside the Strip.

The Center indicated that it bases its data on the Israeli Prison Service.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the number of detainees from the Gaza Strip in Israeli prisons rose by 150% over last month.

In the middle of last month, Rami Abdo, founder of the Euro-Mediterranean Observatory for Human Rights, based in Geneva, reported that Israeli forces arrested at least 900 Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip. The Observatory stated that Israel is holding most of the detainees from Gaza at the Zikim military base.

The Observatory indicated that there is no accurate count of the number of detainees from Gaza yet due to the policy of enforced disappearance pursued by Israel, and the difficulty of receiving reports in the Gaza Strip due to the dispersal of the population and the almost permanent interruption of communications and the Internet. However, preliminary estimates indicate that more than 3,000 arrests have been recorded. Among them are at least 200 women and girls.

A terrifying campaign

The Associated Press reported in a report about the "terrifying" arrest campaigns carried out by the occupation army against Palestinians in northern Gaza, and revealed that men were forced to take off their underwear before transferring some of them to the Beach Detention Camp, where they spent hours, and in some cases days, they are exposed to hunger and cold.

The report stated that the Israeli army arrested hundreds of Palestinians throughout the northern Gaza Strip, separating families, according to human rights activists, stunned relatives, and the released detainees themselves.

It stated that Palestinians detained in the destroyed town of Beit Lahia, the Jabalia urban refugee camp, and the neighborhoods of Gaza City had been tied, blindfolded, and gathered on the backs of trucks. Some of them said they were taken to the camp in an undisclosed location, almost naked, with little water.

In the same context, the number of Palestinian detainees in the occupied West Bank has risen to 4,695 since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, according to human rights reports.

For its part, the National Campaign to Recover the Bodies of killed (unofficial) explained that the Israeli authorities are detaining 450 Palestinian bodies in occupation cemeteries and morgues, including 256 martyrs in the Numbers Cemetery, and 194 dead since the return of the detention policy in 2015.

The campaign indicated that 18 of the detained bodies belong to prisoners who died inside occupation prisons, 21 children under the age of 18 and 5 women, and 52 bodies from the Gaza Strip, before October 7, 2023, in reference to the start of the war on Gaza.

Since the outbreak of its devastating war on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation army has intensified its operations in the West Bank, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of detainees, in addition to the destruction of infrastructure in many areas.