When Palestinian photojournalist and former prisoner Muath Amarneh saw Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s videos gloating over the decrepit conditions endured by imprisoned Palestinians, he thought of what happened before and after the cameras started rolling. What they do show is only certain video clips where the arrogance of that figure comes through,” Amarneh told Al Jazeera. That whole hour of humiliation, they show half a minute of it, or a minute, or two minutes.” Ben-Gvir, who oversees Israel’s prison system in his role, has spent recent weeks broadcasting what he views as his accomplishments in office.
An AI-generated video posted to his social media in August showed well-fed Palestinian men on a conveyor belt entering a detention facility, then emerging emaciated, weeping – captioned “We promised, we delivered”. He deleted it as comparisons to Nazi concentration camps mounted. Days later, he posted footage of himself confronting female prisoners.
One told him she had not showered in three days and was not receiving medical treatment. I am pleased with these conditions.” Detainees’ testimonies and data from Palestinian rights groups offer a glimpse of what that policy has meant inside Israeli prisons. Amarneh, 39, who now lives in the Dheisheh refugee camp south of Bethlehem, has been arrested twice since the genocidal war on Gaza began, both times under administrative detention.
There are now roughly 3,200 administrative detainees – more than double the approximately 1,300 held before October 7, 2023, according to Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ advocacy group. Israel and the United States accuse Addameer of supporting “terrorism”, a charge the group denies, and Amarneh’s numerous run-ins with Israeli forces started when he began work as a photojournalist. In 2019, Israeli forces shot him with a rubber-coated metal bullet while he was covering Israeli attacks near Hebron and wearing a press vest.
A bullet took out his left eye and left shrapnel lodged near his skull. Amarneh was first taken into administrative detention in October 2023, a week after Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began, and was held for nine months in Megiddo and Nafha prisons. After his release, he deliberately moved away from news work towards documentary work, hoping to reduce his risk of being imprisoned again.
Nevertheless, he was arrested again in August 2025 and held for eight months at Ofer prison, still without charge. Sahar Francis, a lawyer who was the executive director of Addameer, said Ben-Gvir’s nearly four-year tenure as minister responsible for the prison authority did not create the system’s cruelty so much as intensify it. Family visits and Red Cross access were suspended, while lawyers were barred for the first four or five months.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
