HAIFA / OCCUPIED WEST BANK — When Imad Sarhan was finally lowered into the earth of his city, the 48-year-old had been absent from its alleys for a generation. Arrested on 20 January 2002, the young man from Wadi Nisnas was sentenced to life plus ten years. He would spend the next two-and-a-half decades moving through Israel’s carceral grid, a sprawling network of concrete boxes, military camps, and interrogation wings that today holds more than 10,500 Palestinians. He died on a Sunday inside Gilbou Prison, a facility notorious for its isolation wings, his body returned to a neighbourhood that remembered the teenager with the quick smile, but not the greyed, gaunt man the state had produced.

“My brother was buried in the prison before they ever put him in the ground,” said Umm Hassan, a Haifa resident who grew up with Sarhan and visited his family after the death. “For four years, they locked him alone. No sky, no touch, no voice except guards. What killed him began long before his heart stopped.”

The Black Box Of Solitary Confinement:

Sarhan’s trajectory tracks a deliberate form of attrition. Palestinian prisoner advocacy groups, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) and Addameer, document that the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) repeatedly renewed a solitary confinement order against him over four uninterrupted years. Under Israel’s prison regulations, isolation can be imposed on vaguely defined “security” grounds and extended almost indefinitely. International human rights bodies, including the UN Committee Against Torture, have repeatedly found that prolonged solitary confinement exceeding fifteen days can amount to torture.

“Sarhan’s case is not an outlier. It is the rule for those designated as high-security,” said Amani Sarahneh, a spokesperson for the PPS. “We have scores of prisoners held in isolation for a decade or more. The IPS uses isolation as a weapon of psychological destruction, deliberately inflicting severe mental suffering that accelerates physical decline.”

The Tally Of The Dead:

Sarhan’s death punctuates an accelerating fatality rate inside Israeli custody. A new report by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), released on 5 June 2026 and based on data extracted through repeated freedom-of-information petitions from the Israeli army and IPS, now documents more than 114 Palestinian deaths in Israeli prisons and military detention centres since 7 October 2023. That number, already the highest in any comparable period since 1967, is rising by the week. At least 62 of the deceased were seized from Gaza; according to PHRI, fewer than one-third of Gaza detainees who died were classified by the army itself as militants.

“Israel is killing civilians in custody at a pace and scale unprecedented in the occupation’s history,” said Dr. Guy Shalev, executive director of PHRI, during a press conference in Tel Aviv on 6 June. “When you strip away the euphemisms, what you find is a system of intentional medical neglect, savage beatings, starvation, and grotesque abuse that the state labels ‘security measures.’”

The numbers carry a deeper silence. The identities of dozens of those who died remain concealed. “Israel is hiding the dead,” said Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “We know from fragments, a torn family notification, a leaked morgue photograph, that the military is burying detainees in unmarked graves or retaining bodies as bargaining chips. This is the vocabulary of atrocity.”

Sde Teiman, The Dog Rape Videos, And The Amnesty For Torturers:

No single facility has come to symbolise the post-October 2023 descent more than Sde Teiman, a military camp in the Negev desert originally built to hold migrant labourers. It was repurposed as a holding pen for Gazans swept up during ground operations. The testimonies that seeped out, through Euro-Med Monitor, The New York Times, the UN, and PHRI, painted a chamber of horrors: prisoners bound naked to metal tables, gang-raped by masked soldiers, urinated on by dogs trained to penetrate them, filmed throughout while guards laughed. One 42-year-old Gazan woman told Euro-Med she “wished for death” as soldiers took turns raping her over two days, leaving her shackled and bleeding through the night.

In a decision that reverberated from Jerusalem to The Hague, Israel’s Military Advocate General dropped all charges in March 2025 against the five soldiers caught on video sexually assaulting a detainee at Sde Teiman. The footage, leaked in 2024, showed the man screaming as he was assaulted. Far-right ministers and settler activists had stormed military bases in their defence, framing the soldiers as heroes. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly welcomed the decision to close the case.

Erika Guevara Rosas, Senior Director for Research, Advocacy and Policy at Amnesty International, responded in a statement issued 27 March 2025: “This decision marks yet another unconscionable chapter in the Israeli legal system’s long-standing history of granting impunity to perpetrators of grave crimes against Palestinians. When the prime minister applauds the whitewashing of rape, it is a declaration that the state’s ‘investigations’ are a charade.”

The whitewash was subsequently codified. In November 2025, the Knesset passed the “Security Forces Operational Immunity Law”, which grants retroactive immunity from prosecution to soldiers and prison personnel for acts committed “during and in connection with operational activity”, unless the Military Advocate General personally certifies “criminal intent of an extreme nature.” Practically, human rights lawyers say, the law insulates every Sde Teiman guard.

“We now have a legislative amnesty for torture and sexual violence,” said Sahar Francis, director of the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq. “Combined with the government’s stranglehold on independent monitors, Israel has built a perfect architecture of deniability and impunity. The only soldier sentenced so far for torturing a Palestinian detainee received a community-service term—and that was before the immunity law.”

UN Blacklisting And A Forensic Trail Of Broken Ribs:

On 26 May 2025, the United Nations formally added the Israel Prison Service and associated military units to its annual “blacklist” of parties that commit sexual violence in armed conflict. The listing, appearing in the Secretary-General’s report on conflict-related sexual violence, cited “credible information of systematic rape, forced nudity, invasive body searches, and sexual humiliation of Palestinian detainees, including through the use of dogs to facilitate rape.” Israel’s UN ambassador shredded a copy of the report on the General Assembly rostrum, calling it a “blood libel”, but did not dispute the underlying forensic evidence.

Much of that evidence was compiled by Alice Jill Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture, whose mandate ended in mid-2025. In a final communiqué to the Human Rights Council in June 2025, she catalogued 89 cases she had personally verified of torture or ill-treatment that had resulted in death, including autopsies showing “multiple rib fractures, extensive skin haemorrhages, rupture of internal organs, and signs of electrocution.” She noted that in twelve cases, “the pattern of injuries was consistent with fatal kicking and stomping while the victim was restrained.” Edwards called on Israel to immediately release full medical records and autopsies. The request was ignored.

Her successor, Dr. Mónica Pinto, released an addendum on 2 June 2026 noting that “the number of deaths in custody continues to rise, with credible allegations that at least 15 detainees died from treatable conditions after being denied insulin, heart medication, or cancer therapy, in a policy of deliberate medical neglect that violates the absolute prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”

“Another Genocide Behind Walls”

Testimonies gathered from survivors released under ceasefire deals paint a coherent picture of an institutionalised programme. Mahmoud (name changed), a 35-year-old former detainee from Jabalia, spent eight months in Sde Teiman and Ofer Prison in 2024–2025 before being deported to Egypt. Speaking via video link from Cairo in April 2026, he described: “They stripped me, cuffed my hands and feet behind my back to a metal chair, and beat me with batons and cables for hours. Then they brought a dog. They forced me to kneel, pulled down my trousers, and the dog mounted me while six soldiers filmed. I was bleeding internally for days. No doctor came. I saw three men die in my tent from untreated infections.”

Mahmoud’s narrative aligns with hundreds of others documented by Euro-Med Monitor, whose March 2025 report titled “State-Sanctioned Sexual Torture” concluded that “sexual violence against Palestinian detainees is not incidental, it is an organised state policy designed to degrade, terrorise, and extract coerced confessions.” The report detailed 47 separate allegations of rape using objects and animals, and 31 cases of filmed sexual humiliation.

“The filming is central,” said Dr. Orly Noy, an Israeli journalist with Local Call who has investigated prison abuses. “It’s not just trophy collection. Soldiers use the footage to threaten detainees: ‘Cooperate or we’ll send this to your family, your village.’ In a conservative society, the threat of sexual exposure is a weapon of social death.”

The Closing Circle: ICC And The Door To International Justice.

The cascade of evidence has pushed the International Criminal Court (ICC) toward a seminal expansion. Already investigating war crimes in the occupied territories since 2021, the Office of the Prosecutor signalled in December 2025 that it was broadening its inquiry to examine “allegations of systematic torture, sexual violence, and deaths of detainees” as possible crimes against humanity. On 10 June 2026, Pre-Trial Chamber I issued sealed arrest warrants that, according to multiple diplomats briefed on the contents, name four senior Israeli prison officials and the commander of the Sde Teiman facility. The Israeli government announced it would not cooperate and dismissed the ICC as a “political tool of antisemites.”

“For the families of those who died in custody, the ICC warrants are a sliver of recognition that the world has seen what Israel did to their sons,” said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, speaking from Cairo. “But we have learned not to expect enforcement. The real test is whether states, especially European states that fund and arm Israel, are willing to impose costs for the systematic destruction of human beings in cells.”

Back in Haifa, Imad Sarhan’s family were still waiting on 14 June for the full medical report and for permission to conduct an independent autopsy, a demand the Israeli authorities have refused. “They killed him piece by piece over twenty-four years, and now they want to tell us how he died,” said his cousin, Samir. “We know how he died. He died in Israel.” A small crowd marched from Wadi Nisnas to the sea, carrying his photograph. The chants mixed grief with a demand that has grown sharper as the morgue tally climbs: release the living, return the dead, and tear down the archipelago of torture.

Context And Resources:

• The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) and Addameer maintain a running list of those who have died in Israeli custody; as of 14 June 2026, PPS has registered 114 deaths since October 2023, with at least 50 bodies withheld. The total number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons now stands at approximately 10,600, including more than 3,200 administrative detainees held without charge or trial.
• Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI) published its biannual monitoring report on deaths in custody on 5 June 2026. The full dataset is available at phr.org.il.
• The UN Secretary-General’s 2026 annual report on children and armed conflict has again listed Israeli forces; the 2025 report on conflict-related sexual violence is available at the UN Office of the SRSG-SVC.
• The full testimony archive by Euro-Med Monitor is accessible at euromedmonitor.org. Amnesty International’s dossier on Israel’s military justice system, updated April 2026, can be found at amnesty.org.

Source: Veritas Press C.I.C. | Multi News Agencies