{"id":307230,"date":"2025-11-10T12:01:36","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T12:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=307230"},"modified":"2025-11-10T06:41:32","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T06:41:32","slug":"israels-underground-jail-palestinians-held-without-charge-never-see-daylight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/israels-underground-jail-palestinians-held-without-charge-never-see-daylight\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s Underground Jail: Palestinians Held without Charge Never See Daylight"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rakefet, part of the prison complex in Ramla, pictured, was reopened under the orders of the far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, after the 2023 Hamas attacks.
Photograph: KoKo<\/p><\/div>\n

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Exclusive: Detainees at Rakefet include nurse deprived of natural light since January, and teenager held for nine months.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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8 Nov 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Israel is holding dozens of Palestinians from Gaza isolated in an underground jail where they never see daylight, are deprived of adequate food and barred from receiving news of their families or the outside world.<\/p>\n

The detainees have included at least two civilians held for months without charge or trial: a nurse detained in his scrubs, and a young food seller, according to lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) who represent both men.<\/p>\n

The two men were transferred to the subterranean Rakefet complex in January, and described regular beatings and violence consistent with well-documented torture in other Israeli detention centres.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Rakefet prison was opened in the early 1980s to house a handful of the most dangerous organised crime figures in Israel but closed a few years later on the grounds that it was inhumane. The far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, ordered it back into service after the 7 October attacks in 2023.<\/p>\n

The cells, a tiny exercise \u201cyard\u201d and a lawyers\u2019 meeting room are all underground, so inmates live without any natural light.<\/p>\n

The jail was initially designed for a small number of high-security inmates occupying individual cells, holding 15 men when it shut in 1985. In recent months, about 100 detainees have been incarcerated there, official data obtained by PCATI shows.<\/p>\n

Under the ceasefire agreed in mid-October, Israel released 250 Palestinian prisoners who had been convicted in Israeli courts, and 1,700 Palestinian detainees from Gaza<\/a> who had been held indefinitely without charge or trial. The young trader held at Rakefet was among them.<\/p>\n

However, the scale of detentions has been so vast that even after that mass release, at least 1,000 others are still held by Israel under the same conditions, including the nurse represented by PCATI.<\/p>\n

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\"Israeli<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
Israeli soldiers stand by a truck used to transport Palestinian detainees, who have been stripped, bound and blindfolded.<\/span> Photograph: Moti Milrod\/AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThough the war is officially over, [Palestinians from Gaza] are still imprisoned under legally contested and violent wartime conditions that violate international humanitarian law and amount to torture,\u201d PCATI said.<\/p>\n

The two men who met PCATI lawyers in September were a 34-year-old nurse detained while at work in a hospital in December 2023 and a young trader seized in October 2024 as he passed through an Israeli checkpoint.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the cases of the clients we visited, we are speaking about civilians,\u201d said the PCATI lawyer Janan Abdu. \u201cThe man I spoke to was an 18-year-old who worked selling food. He was taken from a checkpoint on a road.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben-Gvir had told Israeli media and a member of parliament that Rakefet was being rehabilitated to hold Nukhba \u2013 meaning \u201celite\u201d \u2013 Hamas fighters who led massacres inside Israel Oct 7th, and Hezbollah special forces fighters captured in Lebanon.<\/p>\n

Israeli officials said no Palestinians involved in the 2023 attacks were released under the ceasefire deal that resulted in the teenage prisoner being returned to Gaza.<\/p>\n

The Israeli Prison Service (IPS) did not respond to questions about the status and identity of other prisoners held at Rakefet, which means \u201ccyclamen flower\u201d in Hebrew.<\/p>\n

Classified Israeli data indicates<\/a> the majority of Palestinians taken prisoner in Gaza during the war were civilians. Israel\u2019s supreme court ruled in 2019<\/a> that it was lawful to hold the bodies of Palestinians as bargaining chips for future negotiations, and rights groups have accused it of doing the same with living detainees from Gaza.<\/p>\n

Unique abuse<\/h2>\n

Conditions for Palestinians were \u201chorrific by intention\u201d at all prisons, said Tal Steiner, the executive director of PCATI. Current and former detainees<\/a>, and whistleblowers <\/a>from the Israeli military, have all detailed systemic violations<\/a> of international law.<\/p>\n

However, Rakefet imposes a unique form of abuse. Holding people below ground without daylight for months on end has \u201cextreme implications\u201d for psychological health, Steiner said. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to remain intact when you are held in such oppressive and difficult conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

It also affects physical health<\/a>, impairing basic biological functions from circadian rhythms needed for sleep to vitamin D production.<\/p>\n

Despite working as a human rights lawyer, and visiting prisons at the complex in Ramla, south-east of Tel Aviv, where Rakefet is located, Steiner had not heard of the underground jail before Ben-Gvir ordered it back into service.<\/p>\n

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\"Itamar<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
Itamar Ben-Gvir visiting the Rakefet prison wing.<\/span> Photograph: KoKo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was closed before PCATI was founded, so the legal team turned to old media archives and the memoir of Rafael Suissa, the head of the IPS in the mid-1980s to find out more about the jail.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Suissa] wrote that he understood being held below ground 24\/7 is just too cruel, too inhumane for any person to endure, regardless of what their actions have been,\u201d Steiner said.<\/p>\n

This summer, PCATI lawyers were asked to represent two men held in the underground prison, so Abdu and a colleague were able to visit for the first time.<\/p>\n

They were led underground by masked, heavily armed security guards, down a flight of dirty stairs into a room where the remains of dead insects dotted the floor. The toilet was so dirty it was in effect unusable.<\/p>\n

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A newspaper report from May 1985 on the closure of Rakefet prison that also details its original purpose as a high-security facility for members of organised crime groups.<\/span> Photograph: Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Surveillance cameras on the walls violated the basic legal right to a confidential discussion, and guards warned that the meeting would be cut short if they talked about detainees\u2019 families or the war in Gaza.<\/p>\n

\u201cI asked myself, if the conditions in the lawyers\u2019 room are so humiliating \u2013 not just personally to us but also to the profession \u2013 then what is the situation for the prisoners?\u201d Abdu said. \u201cThe answer came soon, when we met them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The clients were brought in bent over, with guards forcing their heads to the ground, and remained shackled at their hands and feet, she said.<\/p>\n

Saja Misherqi Baransi, the second PCATI lawyer on the trip, said the two detainees had been in Rakefet for nine months, and the nurse began the meeting by asking: \u201cWhere am I and why am I here?\u201d The guards had not told him the name of the prison.<\/p>\n

Israeli judges who authorised the detention of the men at very brief video hearings, during which the detainees had no lawyer and did not hear evidence against them, said only that they would be there \u201cuntil the war ends\u201d.<\/p>\n

The men described windowless cells with no ventilation, holding three or four detainees, and reported often feeling breathless and choking.<\/p>\n

Prisoners told the lawyers they faced regular physical abuse including beatings, assaults by dogs with iron muzzles, and guards stepping on prisoners, in addition to being denied adequate medical care and given starvation-level rations. Israel\u2019s high court ruled<\/a> this month that the state was depriving Palestinian prisoners of adequate food.<\/p>\n

They have very limited time outside the cell in a tiny underground enclosure, sometimes just five minutes every other day. Mattresses are taken away early in the morning, usually at about 4am, and only returned late at night, leaving detainees on iron frames in otherwise empty cells.<\/p>\n

Their descriptions matched images from a televised visit to the prison made by Ben-Gvir to publicise his decision to reopen the underground jail. \u201cThis is terrorists\u2019 natural place, under the ground,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He has repeatedly boasted about mistreatment of Palestinian detainees, rhetoric that former hostages taken during the 7 October attacks say prompted<\/a> an escalation of Hamas abuse when they were in captivity.<\/p>\n

This included holding hostages in underground tunnels for months, depriving them of food, isolating them from news of relatives and the outside world, and violence and psychological torture, including being ordered to dig a grave on camera.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s intelligence services<\/a> have warned that the treatment of Palestinian prisoners puts the country\u2019s wider security interests at risk.<\/p>\n

Misherqi Baransi said the detained nurse last saw daylight on 21 January this year, when he was transferred to Rakefet, after a year passing through other jails including the military\u2019s notorious Sde Teiman centre.<\/p>\n

The nurse, a father of three, has had no news of his family since his detention. The only fragment of personal information lawyers can share with detainees from Gaza is the name of the relative who authorised them to take on the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I told him: \u2018I talked to your mother and she authorised me to meet you,\u2019 then I am giving him this tiny thing, at least telling him that his mother is alive,\u201d Misherqi Baransi said.<\/p>\n

When the other detainee asked Abdu if his pregnant wife had given birth safely, the guard immediately cut off the conversation to threaten him. As the guards took the men away, she heard the sound of an elevator, suggesting their cells were even deeper underground.<\/p>\n

The teenager had told her: \u201cYou are the first person I have seen since my arrest,\u201d and his last request to her was: \u201cPlease come see me again.\u201d His lawyers were later informed he was released to Gaza on 13 October.<\/p>\n

The IPS said in a statement that it \u201coperates in accordance with the law and under the supervision of official comptrollers\u201d and added that it \u201cis not responsible for the legal process, classification of detainees, arrest policy, or arrests\u201d.<\/p>\n

The justice ministry referred questions about Rakefet and detainees to the Israeli military. The military referred questions to the IPS.<\/p>\n

This article was amended on 8 November 2025. Information provided to the Guardian meant an earlier version suggested both Rakefet detainees represented by PCATI were still in Israeli custody. PCATI provided new information after publication to say one of them had been released under the October ceasefire agreement.<\/em><\/p>\n