Israel is holding dozens of Palestinians from Gaza in an isolated underground prison, where they are denied daylight, given inadequate food, and cut off from any news about their families or the outside world.
Among those detained are at least two civilians who were held for months without charge or trial: a nurse seized at his workplace in a hospital, and a young food vendor. Both are represented by lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), who say their clients were subjected to regular beatings and abuse similar to documented cases of torture in other Israeli detention facilities.
The two men were transferred in January to the underground Raqqefet complex, built in the early 1980s to hold the most dangerous offenders but shut down a few years later as “inhumane”. After the attacks of 7 October 2023, the far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the prison back into operation.
Every part of Raqqefet—the cells, the tiny exercise yard, the room for meetings with lawyers—is located below ground, leaving prisoners with no access to natural light. The facility was originally designed for a small number of inmates held in single cells. When it closed in 1985, it housed 15 people. According to official figures obtained by PCATI, in recent months around 100 prisoners have been held there.
The Raqqefet prison, part of the penitentiary complex in Ramla, was reopened in 2023 on the orders of far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Under the terms of the ceasefire reached in mid-October, Israel released 250 Palestinian prisoners convicted by Israeli courts and 1,700 Gaza residents who had been held without charge or trial. The young vendor from Raqqefet was among those freed. Yet despite the mass release, at least another thousand Palestinians remain in the same conditions, including the nurse represented by PCATI.
“Although the war is officially over, Palestinians from Gaza continue to be held in conditions that are legally dubious and violent, in violation of international humanitarian law and tantamount to torture,” PCATI said in a statement.
The two men who met with PCATI lawyers in September are a 34-year-old nurse arrested at a hospital in December 2023 and an 18-year-old vendor detained at an Israeli checkpoint in October 2024. “In both cases, we are talking about civilians,” stressed PCATI attorney Janan Abdu. “My client is an eighteen-year-old who was selling food. He was seized right on the road at the checkpoint.”
Ben-Gvir has told Israeli media and the Knesset that Raqqefet is being reopened to hold Nukhba fighters—the Hamas “elite” units involved in the 7 October attacks—as well as members of Hezbollah special units captured in Lebanon.
Israeli authorities maintain that no Palestinian involved in the 2023 attacks was released under the terms of the ceasefire that allowed the young detainee to return to Gaza.
The Israel Prison Service (IPS) has not responded to requests regarding the status and identities of other inmates held in Raqqefet—Hebrew for “cyclamen”. Classified Israeli documents indicate that most Palestinians detained during the war in Gaza are civilians. In 2019, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the practice of withholding the bodies of Palestinians as a “bargaining chip” for future negotiations, and human-rights groups say the same logic is now being applied to living detainees.
Prisoners are held underground without light, ventilation, or medical care, in conditions that flout even the most basic norms of international humanitarian law
“Conditions for Palestinian detainees in all prisons were atrocious—and deliberately so,” says Tal Steiner, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI). According to her, current and former inmates, as well as informed sources within the Israeli military, describe systematic violations of international law.
Raqqefet, however, stands out for its particular cruelty. Prolonged confinement underground without daylight has “extremely destructive consequences” for prisoners’ mental health, Steiner warns. “It is almost impossible to emerge intact from such crushing, tormenting conditions,” she says.
Isolation also takes a toll on physical health—disrupting circadian sleep rhythms and preventing the production of vitamin D. Although Steiner has worked for many years as a human-rights lawyer and has visited prisons in the Ramla complex southeast of Tel Aviv, where Raqqefet is located, she says she first learned of the underground facility only after Ben-Gvir ordered it reopened.
Because the prison was shut down before PCATI was established, the lawyers turned to old newspaper reports and the memoirs of Rafael Suissa, who headed the Israel Prison Service in the mid-1980s. “He wrote that he had come to understand that holding a person underground around the clock is too cruel, too inhuman, no matter what they have done,” Steiner notes.
This summer, PCATI’s lawyers were asked to represent two men held in the underground prison. Attorneys Janan Abdu and Saja Misherki Baransi were able to visit Raqqefet for the first time. They were escorted by masked, armed guards down a grimy staircase into a room where dead insects littered the floor. The toilet, the lawyers said, was in such a state that it was unusable.
Surveillance cameras on the walls deprived lawyers and prisoners of the most basic right to confidential communication. Guards warned that the meeting would be cut short immediately if the conversation turned to the prisoners’ families or the war in Gaza. “I thought: if even the conditions in the lawyers’ room are this degrading, what must be happening to the prisoners themselves? We got our answer very quickly when they were brought in,” Abdu recalls.
The detainees were brought in bent over, their heads forced toward the floor, their hands and feet shackled. According to Misherki Baransi, both men had spent nine months in Raqqefet. The nurse, transferred there on 21 January, began the meeting by asking: “Where am I, and why am I here?”—the guards had never told them the name of the prison or the grounds for their detention.
Israeli judges authorized their detention in brief video hearings without lawyers and without any evidence being presented, ruling only that they were to remain imprisoned “until the end of the war”.
The men described windowless, unventilated cells built for three or four people, where they often struggled to breathe. They spoke of routine beatings, dog attacks using metal muzzles, guards trampling on prisoners, denial of medical care, and near-starvation rations. Earlier this month, Israel’s Supreme Court acknowledged that the state has indeed been depriving Palestinian prisoners of adequate food.
They were rarely allowed out of their cells—sometimes for as little as five minutes every other day—into a tiny underground courtyard. Mattresses were taken away at around four in the morning and returned only late in the evening, leaving prisoners to lie on bare metal frames.
These accounts match footage from Ben-Gvir’s visit to the prison, when he showed journalists the “restored” underground wing. “This is the natural place for terrorists—underground,” he declared. The minister has repeatedly boasted of tightening conditions for Palestinian detainees, and former hostages abducted on 7 October say his rhetoric helped trigger retaliatory brutality by Hamas towards Israeli captives.
The methods described include holding people for months in underground tunnels, cutting them off from news and family contact, starvation, beatings, and psychological torture, including orders to dig their own graves on camera. Israeli security services have warned that the treatment of Palestinian prisoners is undermining the country’s long-term security interests.
According to Misherki Baransi, the nurse last saw daylight on January 21, when he was transferred to Raqqefet after a year in other detention sites, including the notorious Sde Teiman military facility. A father of three, he has received no news from his family since his arrest. The only information lawyers can pass on to detainees from Gaza is the name of the relative who authorized them to take the case.
“When I told him, ‘I spoke with your mother, she allowed me to meet you,’ it was a sliver of hope—at least reassurance that his mother was alive,” Misherki Baransi recalls.
The other detainee asked Abdu whether his pregnant wife had given birth safely, and a guard immediately cut the conversation short, threatening punishment. As they were taken away, the lawyer heard the sound of an elevator—which, she believes, means the cells lie even deeper underground.
The eighteen-year-old told her, “You are the first person I’ve seen since my arrest,” and pleaded: “Please come again.” Later, the lawyers were informed that he had been released and sent back to Gaza on October 13.
The Israel Prison Service said it “operates in accordance with the law and under the supervision of official oversight bodies” and that it “is not responsible for judicial decisions, the classification of detainees, or arrest policy”. The Justice Ministry referred questions about Raqqefet to the Israeli army, which in turn redirected them back to the prison service.