DaysofPal– Behind locked cell doors and inside undisclosed detention sites, Israeli occupation is holding thousands of Palestinians, many from the Gaza Strip, in conditions that amount to enforced disappearance, with no formal notification of their whereabouts and no access to lawyers or family members.
Amid a troubling international silence and limited access for human rights organizations, the fate of these disappeared detainees has become one of the most urgent and opaque issues on the file of ongoing violations, prompting renewed calls for urgent action to clarify their status and hold those responsible to account.
Marking Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, observed annually on 17 April, the news agency Sanad has documented measures it says Israel is using to conceal the fate of detainees from Gaza since the start of the war on 7 October 2023.
Abdel Nasser Farwana, a specialist in prisoners’ affairs, told Sanad that since the beginning of the war on Gaza, the number of Palestinians subjected to enforced disappearance is estimated at around 1,250.
He said they are being held under the Israeli Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows prolonged detention with minimal judicial oversight and very limited disclosure.
According to Farwana, this group includes people seized during raids and mass arrests across the Gaza Strip, taken from streets, homes, hospitals, displacement shelters, safe corridors and areas of clashes, whose names and locations have not been officially disclosed.
“Israeli occupation has denied these detentions and imposed a total media blackout around them,” he said, adding that Israeli occupation refuses to provide information on the identities of the detainees, where they are being held, or their conditions and “insists on deliberately isolating and hiding them.”
Farwana said Israeli occupation has imposed a tight cordon around both officially declared prisons and secret detention facilities, keeping their doors closed to international media, regional and international human rights delegations, and oversight bodies, despite repeated appeals.
According to Farwana, the Israeli Prison Service has ignored international calls to reveal the fate of Gaza detainees, publish their names and places of detention, and allow visits.
He recalled a series of orders issued by senior Israeli officials since the start of the war, which he said have deepened the secrecy surrounding Gaza prisoners.
On the first day of the war, then-defense minister Yoav Gallant announced that anyone arrested from Gaza would be classified as an unlawful combatant, regardless of age or whether they were armed fighters or unarmed civilians.
Israel has refused to release any information on Hamas detainees, their names, locations or legal status, while other Gazans detained since October have been held in military installations and secret prisons, including the Sde Teiman facility in the southern desert, which was opened specifically after the war began.
Ben Gvir also ordered a halt to all family visits for Palestinian prisoners from all areas, cutting them off from the outside world.
Farwana said Israeli forces have barred representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the body mandated under international humanitarian law to visit detainees and monitor their treatment, from seeing the prisoners, obtaining lists of their names or locations, or assessing their conditions.
Severe restrictions have also been imposed on lawyers, he added, making prison visits extremely difficult and infrequent.
Farwana described the recent passage by the Israeli Knesset of a law allowing the execution of Palestinian prisoners as one of the most extreme steps to date and a “dangerous turning point” in how the prisoner issue is being handled.
The policy of concealment has left families in a state of constant anxiety and “endless waiting,” Farwana said, with many living for months without a single piece of verified information about detained relatives.
Former prisoner Abdullah Farhan, from Khan Younis in southern Gaza, told Sanad he spent a year in Israeli detention in inhuman conditions, completely cut off from the outside world.
Farhan said Gaza detainees were treated in the most degrading way, starting with their incarceration in secret sites and the systematic withholding of information from their families, alongside harsh and humiliating methods of interrogation and torture.
He added that the psychological pressure extended inside the cells themselves.
“Prison forces would deliberately give prisoners false information about their families in Gaza, claiming that their homes had been bombed or that relatives had been killed, in an attempt to break their morale and torture them psychologically,” he said.
His sister, Samaher, said the family “left no avenue unexplored” in trying to learn anything about Abdullah’s fate.
“We turned to the Red Cross, but even those organizations were barred from contacting the prisoners. The unknown was always in control,” she said.
The family would rush to meet released detainees from Gaza, she recalled, “racing to ask for any detail about Abdullah, whether he was alive or not.”
They only discovered he had survived when he was suddenly released and transferred to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis after a full year of complete silence.
According to figures released by the Palestine Center for Prisoners’ Studies and shared with Sanad, there were 9,600 Palestinians in Israeli prisons as of 17 April, including 83 women and 350 children.
The center said prisoners are spread across more than 27 prisons, detention centers, and interrogation facilities, and that Israeli occupation has established additional sites to absorb the rising number of detainees, especially from Gaza.
Since 7 October 2023, Israeli occupation has opened or expanded several facilities, the center said, including the Menashe interrogation center; the Sde Teiman camp in the Negev desert; the underground Rakevet facility in Ramla; Anatot camp; and Naftali camp.
The center stressed that its figure of 9,600 inmates does not fully reflect those detained during the current war on Gaza.
It estimates that of roughly 14,000 Palestinians arrested since October 2023, around 1,850 remain in custody, with about 1,700 released under the “Al-Aqsa Flood” prisoner exchange agreement in October 2025.
Rights groups say the lack of transparent records, the denial of ICRC access and the expansion of secret or military detention sites together amount to a systematic policy of enforced disappearance for a significant number of Gaza detainees,a practice they argue violates international humanitarian and human rights law and demands urgent international investigation.
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