Prisoners & Detainees
Israel holds 3,198 Palestinians in administrative detention without charge
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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Israel is holding 3,198 Palestinians in administrative detention — imprisonment without charge or trial — according to figures published by the Israeli rights group HaMoked for August 2026. That is more than a third of the 7,965 Palestinians its count records in Israel Prison Service custody as security inmates.
This report opens the Prisoners & Detainees section: the file every Palestinian family knows, laid out from the numbers up.
How the mechanism works#
An administrative detention order is signed by an Israeli military commander, not a court. It rests on secret evidence the detainee and their lawyer are never shown, runs for months at a time, and can be renewed indefinitely — release dates arrive and pass, and a new order is waiting at the prison gate.
The practice descends from the British Mandate's emergency regulations. International law permits administrative detention only as an exceptional, imperative security measure, case by case. What the numbers describe is not an exception. It is a system.
What the counts say#
HaMoked's August breakdown records 1,474 sentenced prisoners, 3,293 held on remand and 3,198 administrative detainees, plus close to 1,300 Gazans held as "unlawful combatants" — an Israeli legal category, absent from international law, that allows detention without charge or judicial review. Its count excludes Gaza detainees held by the army in military facilities.
The Palestinian prisoners' institutions — the Commission of Detainees' Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoner's Club and Addameer — put the fuller total at about 9,400 prisoners and detainees at the start of July, among them 86 women, 25 of them held administratively, and more than 350 children, most in Megiddo and Ofer prisons.
In March, the commission and the Prisoner's Club said administrative detention had passed 3,400 — above 36 percent of all prisoners — and called the escalation historic. In July alone, the institutions recorded 630 arrests across the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem.
The file this week#
The numbers moved through this paper's wire all day. The Palestinian Prisoner's Club documented torture and the denial of medical care in its latest testimony report. An Israeli court extended prisoner Maher Shahrour's solitary confinement by a further year. Walid al-Basha of Qalqilya went home after two and a half years.
And on Monday, Al Jazeera reported that Israel had confirmed the death of a Palestinian detainee nearly two years after it happened. Sixty detainees released to Gaza in late July described beatings and deprivation in their accounts to the network.
Every figure in this file carries a name, a family and a renewal date. The section will follow all three.
