Transparency & Accountability
Israel holds 3,198 Palestinians without charge or trial
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Israel was holding 3,198 Palestinians in administrative detention — imprisonment without charge, trial or disclosure of the evidence — at the start of August, according to Israel Prison Service figures supplied to the Israeli rights group HaMoked and reported by Haaretz on 13 August.
That is more than a third of all Palestinian "security" prisoners in Israeli jails.HaMoked's own tally, drawn from the same Prison Service data and updated on 2 August, puts the total number of "security" inmates held in prisons inside Israel at 7,965: 1,474 sentenced prisoners, 3,293 remand detainees and 3,198 administrative detainees, alongside 1,358 people held as "unlawful combatants".
Three separate legal instruments produce those numbers.
Addameer, the Palestinian prisoner support organisation, sets them out as Article 285 of Military Order 1651, which applies in the West Bank and empowers military commanders to detain a person for renewable six-month periods where there are "reasonable grounds to presume that the security of the area or public security requires the detention"; the 2002 Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law, used against Gaza residents since 2005; and the Emergency Powers (Detentions) Law, which applies to Israeli citizens.
Addameer notes that the military order defines neither "security of the area" nor "public security".
The order is open-ended by design. B'Tselem, which has tracked the practice since the First Intifada, records detentions running from six months to several years. Neither the military nor the Prison Service publishes an average length of administrative detention, and no current breakdown by duration for adults was found in the published record.
What has been published concerns children.
The number of Palestinian minors held in administrative detention rose from 103 in January 2025 to 191 in March 2026, according to Prison Service data obtained by the Israeli organisation Parents Against Child Detention, while the number of minors held for more than a year rose more than eightfold, from six in March 2025 to 50 in March 2026.
At the start of 2025 about a third of Palestinian minors in Israeli custody were administrative detainees; by March 2026 the share was close to half.
Israel says the practice is needed to meet urgent security threats; the detainee is not told what the allegations are, and the evidence is presented to the court in closed session.
The trajectory is steep. B'Tselem recorded 3,329 Palestinians in administrative detention at the end of December 2025, and HaMoked reported 3,577 in September 2025, a figure the Jerusalem Post noted was roughly three times the peak of the Second Intifada, when the number broke 1,000.
How the orders work in practice appeared in a case reported by Haaretz this month.
A military judge approved administrative detention for Thabet Maslam, 25, from Khirbet al-Marajim south of Duma, on the stated ground that he was "involved in violent friction events with settlers"; Maslam and his family had themselves been attacked several times by settlers living in nearby outposts.
He was arrested on 26 July, and for more than a day his whereabouts were unknown until a military judge ordered the army to tell his lawyer where he was; on 3 August an order was issued holding him until 25 January 2027, which the judge shortened by two months.
No indictment was filed, no evidence was presented, and neither the detainee nor his counsel knows the claims against him.
Deaths in custody are counted by several bodies, and the counts differ. B'Tselem documented 84 Palestinian prisoners who died from the start of the war through December 2025.
Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, in a report published last November, documented at least 94 deaths since October 2023, 52 in military facilities and 42 in Prison Service facilities.
+972 Magazine reported in February that the figure had reached at least 98, using data PHRI obtained from the army and the Prison Service, and that PHRI considers the number a significant undercount because rights groups cannot locate hundreds more people reported detained in Gaza.The Prison Service and the military have repeatedly denied abusing or mistreating Palestinian detainees.
One death has been tested in an Israeli court and closed.
Walid Ahmad, 17, collapsed in Megiddo prison in March 2025 after six months there and was, Palestinian officials said, the first Palestinian under 18 to die in Israeli detention; his autopsy established no single cause of death but named starvation as the likely leading cause.
The judge supervising the investigation halted it in December, writing that evidence of starvation did not prove cause of death and that the fact he was apparently starved "cannot be hidden and should not be hidden". His body is still held by Israel.
Independent monitoring remains cut off. The International Committee of the Red Cross says it has had no access to detainees in Israeli places of detention since October 2023 and has asked to be notified of the fate and whereabouts of all detainees.
On 3 June the Israeli Supreme Court, ruling on a petition by four Israeli organisations, found the blanket ban contravened Israeli and international law and could not continue.
Weeks later the Prison Service commissioner introduced rules permitting visits only once every three months and requiring an advance list of no more than five detainees, adopted without consultation with the attorney general; the ICRC told The New Arab that visits remain suspended.
Al Mezan reported that on 9 June the Knesset passed a bill banning ICRC prison visits in first reading.The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, said in May that over 9,000 Palestinians were then in Israeli detention, 40 percent of them held without trial, and that measures introduced after October 2023 exposed detainees to torture, potentially unlawful deaths, incommunicado detention and degrading conditions.
She asked Israel to explain the Military Advocate's decision of 12 March to drop charges in a case involving the alleged rape of a Palestinian detainee.
Whether the Red Cross regains meaningful access now turns on the Knesset bill and on talks the ICRC says are continuing. The whereabouts of hundreds of Palestinians reported detained in Gaza remain unknown to the organisations counting them.
