Mourning the living: Testimonies from the ‘graveyard’ of Palestinian female prisoners

“Yallah! You...under arrest!”

Architect Islam Al-Halabi was not surprised when those words were barked at her in broken Arabic by an Israeli soldier; she had been expecting them. Israeli night raids on Palestinians in the West Bank had become so routine and so frequent that, just a month earlier, her husband Ihab Shuli and her brother Mohammed had both been taken.

Yet Islam has not been able to shake the terror she felt that night. It was approaching three in the morning on 13 Feb. 2025 when Israeli occupation forces stormed her home in Asira Al-Shamaliya, a town in the Nablus governorate, demanding her arrest.

“My children—where will they go?” she asked them  with overwhelming anxiety for her three children—Ahmad, 10, Hoor, 8, and Hala, 3—particularly since she had been their sole caregiver since their father’s arrest.

“Fine, they’ll stay in the house and you’ll come with us,” the officer said after threating her.

In the end, the 35 years old Palestinian mother decided not to wake her children. “I left them in God’s hands,” she told Al Manassa, and went with the soldiers—into what would become one of the worst experiences of her life.

Roughly a month into her detention, Islam witnessed the most terrifying experience of her entire captivity. Israeli soldiers unleash trained attack dogs on three female prisoners inside one of the detention rooms.

Among those three women was her own mother, Dalal, 56, who had been arrested following a raid on her home and a field interrogation on 30 March 2025. “Their screams shattered me. I collapsed, helpless, consumed by an unbearable fear.”

Palestinian women in Israeli detention

Islam and her mother are far from isolated cases. By April 2026, 90 women were being held in Israeli jails—mostly in Damon Prison—among more than 9,600 Palestinians detained in total. They include two minors, a woman three months pregnant, three journalists, and two with cancer, according to a statement by the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club. Thirty-two are mothers, with around 130 children between them.

Only five of the detained women are serving formal sentences. Fifty are in pre-trial detention, some on charges of "incitement." The rest are held under administrative detention with no charge or trial,  Alaa Al-Saqqa, director of Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights told Al Manassa.

Arrests without mercy

In 2019, Palestinian lawyer Hassan Abbadi launched an initiative to visit male and female detainees, and has since documented testimonies from various prisons confirming a clear and systematic pattern of abuse—including the mass detention of entire families, severe restrictions on communication that extend to prohibiting inmates from greeting one another, and scenes in which a mother watches her daughter being tortured without being able to reach her.

Abbadi stressed to Al Manassa the importance of keeping detainees’ testimonies alive in the public sphere, describing them as essential for countering attempts to erase their suffering and prevent it from fading into silent statistics. He noted that the violations women endure begin at the moment of arrest and demand continuous documentation beyond detention, release, or symbolic occasions, extending to the details of daily prison life—much of which surfaces only through direct testimony and accumulated documentation.

Among the testimonies Abbadi collected was that of a young woman arrested while shopping for her wedding dress. “They tore part of it to use as a blindfold over her eyes.” Another woman was forced to cover herself with a jacket after soldiers raided her home and refused to allow her to dress properly. He also points to the case of detainee Hiyam Ghazzal, 54—the wife of Yahya Ayyash—who was subjected to humiliating and violent treatment after her identity was discovered.

What Hiyam endured from the very moment of her arrest was degrading treatment, humiliating photographs taken alongside an Israeli flag, sustained beatings by soldiers and prison guards, and mockery while she fell due to her shackles.

The horror of the first hours

As harrowing as the experience of detention is in its entirety, nothing compares to the brutality of the arrest itself and the first period of interrogation. Freed prisoner Israa Ja’abis detailed to Al Manassa that female detainees are subjected to intense pressure to extract information—through the exploitation of wounds, the deliberate infliction of pain, medical neglect, and the prolonged withholding of treatment.

What happened to Israa—who was released in the prisoner exchange between Hamas and Israel on 25 Nov. 2023—reveals a particularly devastating dimension of this reality. The 42-year-old woman was arrested on 11 Oct. 2015 near the Za’im checkpoint while returning from Jericho to Jabal Al-Mukabbir in Jerusalem, following a breakdown of her vehicle. Israeli occupation forces rained down bullets on her car.

The disabled car thus caught fire, with Israa still inside. Israa suffered severe burns that permanently disfigured her face and large parts of her body, in addition to the amputation of her fingers. Despite her critical medical condition, she was transported by ambulance while under arrest—and remained in detention for ten years. For a decade, Israa was denied adequate medical treatment, and facing multiple charges including the alleged attempted execution of a hostile act.

Islam Al-Halabi also recalls the horrors of her first day in detention: “They shackled me and blindfolded me. They would dump cigarette ashes on me, demand I dance while they filmed it for TikTok, pull the chair out from under me. I stayed tied up for 24 hours without food or water.”

Islam endured extreme suffering in the cells of Israeli interrogation centers. “You can barely stretch out to sleep—maybe a meter and a half by two meters, and some of them are basically toilets.” Everything was forbidden. “One night I asked the guard for a blanket or a mat because the bed was iron and it was freezing cold. He refused and said: you people don’t deserve to sleep on a mattress.”

Female prisoners are monitored around the clock which drives some to remain in their clothing and headscarves at all times

After her interrogation concluded, Islam was transferred to HaSharon Prison, where worse awaited her. She was subjected to a strip search carried out by a female soldier who insulted her and deliberately humiliated her. “I was forbidden from walking or moving except with my head bowed in a kneeling position.” When the time came to transfer her to Damon Prison, it became even more degrading—strip searches were conducted collectively and in a humiliating manner, and any prisoner who objected was threatened with being searched by a male soldier.

Grave for the living

Damon Prison has been described as “the graveyard of living female prisoners.” Inside, women are denied even the most basic rights. Their day begins and ends with searches; they are forced to kneel facing the wall three times a day, prohibited from raising their heads under the pretext of being counted—as Islam describes in detail.

Yet none of this compares to what is known as “al-qam’at” (the crackdowns), a daily routine in the prison, as Islam explains. At any hour of the day or night, cells are raided without warning; prisoners are forcibly removed to the yard, sometimes using tear gas, dogs, or physical beatings, while their rooms are searched and their belongings destroyed, their beds soaked with water. Electric shocks are also used during the repeated interrogation sessions.

Throughout the eight months Islam spent in captivity, she was unable to change her clothes or comb her hair. Personal hygiene is curtailed by strict restrictions: a ban on combs, making it near impossible to manage one’s hair. The prison administration even banned the entry of forks lest they be used as a substitute for combs. Surveillance of female prisoners continues around the clock, with no safe time to sleep or rest.

In April, the Prisoners’ Media Office issued a statement on the conditions of female detainees inside Israeli prisons, confirming that the situation is worsening amid severe overcrowding, with many prisoners forced to sleep on the floor due to a shortage of beds and cramped quarters.

The office noted that food quantities remain deliberately limited and have not improved despite the rising number of female detainees, resulting in clear nutritional deficiencies, compounded by poor quality and inadequate portions.

“These are not random practices,” Abbadi says. “They are part of a systematic framework of pressure designed to exhaust female detainees and keep them in a permanent state of instability.” He noted that he holds testimonies from young female detainees revealing their suffering from the absence of even the most basic daily necessities.

Slow Death

Female detainees also face deliberate medical neglect that, according to the testimonies of both Israa and Islam and the accounts Abbadi has gathered from various prisons, amounts to what they describe as “slow killing.” Among those held are women with cancer and others suffering from severe psychological disorders, compounded by the violent psychological impact of incarceration itself.

The director of Al-Dameer noted that some female detainees with psychological conditions were placed in cages in the prison yards; a practice that was halted only after successful legal challenges.

In addition to shortages of water and hygiene products and a ban on pain relief medication, the transfer of critical cases to hospitals is systematically delayed. “All of these factors have contributed to the spread of diseases such as scabies and lice, particularly given the restriction of bathroom access to once a day,” Abbadi told Al Manassa.

The prisoners’ most basic needs are also weaponized against them. Islam describes an acute shortage of clothing and hygiene products, particularly sanitary pads, forcing detainees to use harsh substitutes or share clothing among themselves.

She recounts a scene that remains seared in her memory: one female prisoner writhing in pain from severe menstrual cramps, “she lay on the floor crying and pleading for any kind of painkiller. The section commander came, laughed and mocked her in front of the soldiers, saying: ‘What, are you pregnant with garlic?’ He then ordered that she be given no medication whatsoever.”

Islam recalls another incident: a prisoner who went into labor at dawn. “After her water broke, they bound her hands and feet, blindfolded her, and dragged her along the floor all the way to the prison hospital for her to give birth. Her screams were deafening.”

Rape, and the constant threat of it

Despite Islam Al-Halabi’s confirmation that neither she nor any of the female prisoners she encountered was raped, she stressed that the threat of sexual violence was ever-present and constant throughout her entire period of detention.

This is consistent with what lawyer Hassan Abbadi documented in similar testimonies. Meanwhile, Alaa Al-Saqqa of Al-Dameer revealed documented accounts indicating that rape has occurred against a number of female detainees, noting that many victims refrain from coming forward due to social pressures.

The documentation of violations, according to Al-Saqqa, extends to male detainees held in Sde Teiman and Ofer prisons, where cases of sexual assault and abuse have been recorded—reinforcing the conclusion that sexual violence is being used as a systematic tool of torture inside Israeli detention facilities.

UN reports have also expressed serious concern over rape and sexual violence against Palestinian detainees, confirming a sharp deterioration in detention conditions.

Despite everything recorded in detainee testimonies and human rights reports about conditions in Israeli prisons prior to 7 Oct. 2023, what followed cannot be compared. Al-Saqqa describes the events following “Al-Aqsa Flood” as having marked “a critical turning point,” after which the treatment of prisoners became characterized by greater “brutality, cruelty, systematic vengeful sadism, and the deliberate degradation of human dignity.”

He points to documented testimonies from Gaza indicating that women were subjected to severe mistreatment during arrest at checkpoints—including assaults and sexual violence, sexually charged verbal abuse, being forced to remove their clothing in open areas, and being left for hours without food or water.

He further notes that female detainees were subjected to harassment and assault during transfers and while held inside Israeli military camps, bound and blindfolded, including deliberate touching of intimate areas, alongside further acts of humiliation.

Support networks against oppression

Those who have endured conditions such as those in Israeli prisons require extensive psychological recovery and support—and this is precisely what the female detainees provide for one another. Israa confirms that this mutual solidarity is an essential means of surviving the hardships and upheavals of prison life. What she describes as “give and take” helps them adapt to psychological pressures and navigate the crises that the reality of captivity imposes.

Lawyer Hassan Abadi commends this support mechanism among female detainees, explaining that the older and more experienced prisoners—such as Hanan Al-Barghouti—possess an accumulated wisdom that drives them to maintain psychological equilibrium inside the prison and to support the younger detainees. He notes that many have memorized the Quran and pursued learning despite the harshness of their conditions, in a continuous effort to remain steadfast.

Life after captivity

Israa and Islam agree that their lives after imprisonment are nothing like what they were before. Islam describes her release from prison as feeling “like someone emerging from a grave,” and says she continues to bear its scars. Israa reveals that she has separated from her husband, and speaks of what she calls the social ostracism that freed prisoners face—both internally and externally. “Our lives afterwards are suspended—no work, no stability, no clear identity, not even a true sense of freedom. Just one title: freed prisoner.”

Despite the absence of an Israeli decision to deport her from Palestine, Israa has chosen to exile herself—out of fear for her family and herself, and the ever-present threat of re-arrest.