Since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Israeli authorities have made widespread
use of administrative detention to imprison thousands of Palestinians, including children without charge
or trial under renewable detention orders. The military judicial system in the OPT has used these orders to
lock away thousands of Palestinians, including children, for months and at times years. Israel regularly uses
administrative detention against political opponents of the occupation. By contrast, administrative detention
has rarely been used to detain Jewish citizens of Israel.
While administrative detention may be lawful in certain circumstances, Israel’s systematic use of it against
Palestinians indicates that it is used to persecute Palestinians, rather than as an extraordinary and selective
security measure. Consequently, Amnesty International has considered many administrative detainees to be
prisoners of conscience detained as punishment for their views challenging the policies of the occupation.
Also, for decades, the Israel Security Agency, Israel Prison Service and Israeli military forces have tortured
or otherwise ill-treated Palestinian detainees, including children, during arrest, transfer and interrogation.
The Israel Security Agency uses particularly harsh methods to obtain information and “confessions”. Among
the methods regularly reported by Palestinian detainees are painful shackling and binding, immobilization
in stress positions, sleep deprivation, threats, sexual harassment, prolonged solitary confinement and verbal
abuse.
Israeli courts have admitted evidence obtained through torture of Palestinians, accepting the justification
of “necessity”. Prompt, thorough and impartial investigations by Israeli authorities into allegations by
Palestinians that they have been tortured are extremely rare, effectively giving state endorsement to the
crime of torture.
Israel’s widespread and systematic use of arbitrary arrest, administrative detention and torture on a large
scale against Palestinians, in flagrant violation of fundamental rules and peremptory norms of international
law, forms part of the state’s policy of domination and control over the Palestinian population. It forms part of
the state’s widespread as well as systematic attack on the Palestinian population and constitutes the crimes
against humanity of “imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty” and “torture” under the
Rome Statute and the Apartheid Convention.
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