Once you picture schoolgirls, university students, mothers, aunts and grandmothers lying on their stomachs in prison pyjamas - their hands tied behind their backs, and soldiers looming over them, beating them if they move even slightly - you cannot forget the image.
When you hear a female prisoner say she has "nothing but her heart", you immediately grasp how prison can dismantle lives.
Palestinian Prisoners’ Day is marked every year on 17 April to spotlight ongoing human rights violations - and today, conditions are worse than ever. Since the launch of the Gaza genocide, starvation, isolation, humiliation, strip searches, torture and overwhelming fear have become constant realities for Palestinian women in Israeli prisons.
More than 700 Palestinian women have been arrested in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since the genocide began in late 2023, according to rights groups. Enduring night raids on their homes or detention at military checkpoints, most have been subjected to physical and psychological abuse both during and after their arrest.
“Everything is different from the prisons of the 1990s. All changed with the genocide,” Ramallah-based lawyer Sahar Francis, who is also the former director of the prisoners’ rights group Addameer, told a recent webinar entitled Women, Prison Sumoud.
Human Rights Glance
A 68-year-old Palestinian woman was beaten to death by Israeli soldiers during a raid on her home in the town of Jayyous, in the northern occupied West Bank.
The firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who received widespread criticism for her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, was celebrated Thursday by the sexual predator’s surviving victims, who have long felt Bondi could be more transparent about their cases.
An Israeli court has drawn criticism after closing an investigation into the death of a Palestinian teenager in custody, despite finding indications he had been starved prior to his death.
Dear Leqaa,
A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.
Arab and Islamic countries jointly condemned remarks by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who suggested Israel had a biblical right to a vast swath of the Middle East.





























