Israel is keeping dozens of Palestinians from Gaza in isolation in an underground prison where they never see daylight, lack sufficient food, and are denied information about their families or the outside world.
The detainees have included at least two civilians held for months without a charge or trial: a nurse apprehended in his scrubs and a young food seller, according to lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) who represent both men.
The two men were transferred to the underground Rakefet complex in January, where they reported regular beatings and violence similar to well-documented torture in other Israeli detention centers.
Rakefet prison was opened in the early 1980s to house a handful of the most dangerous organized crime figures in Israel but was closed a few years later due to it being deemed inhumane. The far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, ordered it back into service after the 7 October attacks in 2023.
The cells, a tiny exercise “yard,” and a lawyers’ meeting room are all underground, so inmates live without any natural light.
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The jail was initially designed for a small number of high-security inmates in individual cells, holding 15 men when it closed in 1985. In recent months, about 100 detainees have been incarcerated there, according to official data obtained by PCATI.
Under the ceasefire agreement made in mid-October, Israel released 250 Palestinian prisoners convicted in Israeli courts, and 1,700 Palestinian detainees from Gaza who had been held indefinitely without charge or trial. The young trader held at Rakefet was among those released.
Nevertheless, the scale of the 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.
“Though the war is officially over, [Palestinians from Gaza] are still imprisoned under legally contested and harsh wartime conditions that violate international humanitarian law and amount to torture,” PCATI stated.
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.
“In the cases of the clients we visited, we are speaking about civilians,” said the PCATI lawyer Janan Abdu. “The man I spoke to was an 18-year-old who worked selling food. He was taken from a checkpoint on a road.”
Ben-Gvir informed Israeli media and a member of parliament that Rakefet was being rehabilitated to house Nukhba – meaning “elite” – Hamas fighters who led massacres inside Israel on October 7th, and Hezbollah special forces fighters captured in Lebanon.
Israeli officials indicated that no Palestinians involved in the 2023 attacks were released under the ceasefire deal that led to the teenage prisoner’s return to Gaza.end new
The Israeli Prison Service (IPS) did not respond to questions about the status and identity of other prisoners held at Rakefet, which means “cyclamen flower” in Hebrew.
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Classified Israeli data suggests that the majority of Palestinians taken prisoner in Gaza during the war were civilians. Israel’s supreme court ruled in 2019 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.
Unique abuse
Conditions for Palestinians were “horrific by intention” at all prisons, said Tal Steiner, the executive director of PCATI. Current and former detainees, and whistleblowers from the Israeli military, have all detailed systemic violations of international law.
However, Rakefet imposes a unique form of abuse. Holding people below ground without daylight for months at a time has “extreme implications” for psychological health, Steiner said. “It’s very hard to remain intact when you are held in such oppressive and difficult conditions.”
It also affects physical health, impairing basic biological functions from circadian rhythms needed for sleep to vitamin D production.
Despite being a human rights lawyer and visiting prisons at the complex in Ramla, southeast of Tel Aviv, where Rakefet is located, Steiner had not heard of the underground prison before Ben-Gvir ordered it back into service.
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 discover more about the jail.
“[Suissa] wrote that he understood being held below ground 24/7 is just too cruel, too inhumane for anyone to endure, regardless of what their actions have been,” Steiner explained.
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.
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 littered the floor. The toilet was so filthy it was practically unusable.
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’ families or the war in Gaza.
“I asked myself, if the conditions in the lawyers’ room are so humiliating – not just personally to us but also to the profession – then what is the situation for the prisoners?” Abdu said. “The answer came soon when we met them.”
The clients were brought in bent over, with guards forcing their heads to the ground, and remained shackled at their hands and feet, she noted.
Saja Misherqi Baransi, the second PCATI lawyer on the trip, shared that the two detainees had been in Rakefet for nine months, and the nurse began the meeting by asking: “Where am I and why am I here?” The guards had not informed him of the prison’s name.
Israeli judges who authorized the men's detention during very brief video hearings, during which the detainees had no lawyer and did not hear evidence against them, only stated that they would be there “until the war ends.”
The men described windowless cells with no ventilation, holding three or four detainees, often causing feelings of breathlessness and choking.
Prisoners told the lawyers they faced regular physical abuse such as beatings, dog attacks with iron muzzles, and guards stepping on them, in addition to being denied adequate medical care and provided with starvation-level rations. Israel’s high court ruled this month that the state was depriving Palestinian prisoners of adequate food.
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 around 4 a.m., and only returned late at night, leaving detainees on iron frames in otherwise empty cells.
Their descriptions aligned with images from a televised visit to the prison made by Ben-Gvir to publicize his decision to reopen the underground jail. “This is terrorists’ natural place, under the ground,” he declared.
He has frequently boasted about the mistreatment of Palestinian detainees, rhetoric that former hostages taken during the 7 October attacks say escalated Hamas abuse while they were in captivity.
This included holding hostages in underground tunnels for months, depriving them of food, isolating them from news of relatives and the outside world, and subjecting them to violence and psychological torture, including being ordered to dig a grave on camera.
Israel’s intelligence services have warned that the treatment of Palestinian prisoners endangers the country’s broader security interests.
Misherqi Baransi said the detained nurse last saw daylight on 21 January this year, when he was transferred to Rakefet, after spending a year in other jails, including the military’s notorious Sde Teiman center.
The nurse, a father of three, has received no news of his family since his detention. The only bit of personal information lawyers can share with detainees from Gaza is the name of the relative who authorized them to handle the case.
“When I told him: ‘I talked to your mother and she authorized me to meet you,’ then I am giving him this tiny thing, at least telling him that his mother is alive,” Misherqi Baransi said.
When the other detainee inquired if his pregnant wife had given birth safely, the guard immediately interrupted the conversation with a threat. As guards escorted the men away, she heard the sound of an elevator, hinting their cells were even deeper underground.
The teenager told her: “You are the first person I have seen since my arrest,” and his final request to her was: “Please come see me again.” His lawyers were later notified he was released to Gaza on 13 October.
The IPS stated in a statement that it “operates in accordance with the law and under the supervision of official comptrollers” and emphasized that it “is not responsible for the legal process, classification of detainees, arrest policy, or arrests.”
The justice ministry directed questions about Rakefet and detainees to the Israeli military. The military directed questions to the IPS.
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