Israeli military intelligence believes that only a quarter of the Palestinian detainees from Gaza held by Israel are fighters, according to a joint investigation released on Thursday by the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972, the Hebrew-language magazine Local Call, and the British newspaper The Guardian.

Among those detained are thousands arrested under Israel’s 2002 Unlawful Combatants legislation, which allows authorities to seize individuals if they believe they are linked to organisations deemed ‘unlawful’, such as Hamas, even if they cannot tie the individual to a specific act.

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The joint investigation revealed that one of those detained was an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s who was jailed for six weeks, and a single mother separated from her young children, who she later found begging on the streets.

Let’s take a closer look:

What did the investigation find?

Investigators reviewed a confidential Israeli military database, said to be regarded by commanders as the most accurate information on Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters in Gaza. The database contains the names of more than 47,000 individuals believed by Israeli intelligence to be members of the armed groups.

However, out of those 47,000, only 1,450 were listed as arrested in May, meaning that other Palestinians detained – three-quarters of the 6,000 Palestinians held by Israel at the time – had not been classified as Hamas or PIJ fighters.

The database excludes members of other armed groups in Gaza, who are reported by the Israeli Prison Service to make up less than 2 percent of all “unlawful combatant” detainees.

What about those in criminal detention?

In addition to those being held as “unlawful combatants”, there are up to 300 Palestinians being held in Israel on charges related to the October 7 attacks.

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They are classified as criminal detainees as Israel claims to have enough evidence to prosecute them, but has yet to do so.

Throughout its war on Gaza, Israel has been consistently accused of deliberately mislabelling civilians as “terrorists”, including many journalists.

A March report by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz carried accounts from both Israeli defence officials and soldiers admitting that, of the 9,000 fighters Israel claimed to have killed at that time, most were, in fact, civilians.

An earlier report released in late August by +972, Local Call, and The Guardian, based on the same leaked database, showed that Israel was aware that 83 percent of those killed in Gaza during the war were likely to have been civilians.

Who has Israel accused of being an unlawful combatant?

A wide cross-section of Palestinians has been accused, including young and old.

One soldier who had been stationed at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in southern Israel was quoted in the investigation as saying that one section of the prison was referred to as “the geriatric pen”, because it housed only elderly or gravely injured detainees.

“From the Indonesian Hospital [in Beit Lahiya, Gaza] they would just take masses of people,” the soldier said. “They brought men in wheelchairs, people without legs, or with legs that were basically useless. I remember one man, aged 75, with badly infected stumps. I always assumed the supposed excuse for arresting patients was that maybe they had seen the hostages or something.”

Among those prisoners was Fahamiya al-Khalidi, an 82-year-old Alzheimer’s patient, who was taken from Gaza City in December 2023 alongside her female caregiver and held as an unlawful combatant for six weeks, according to prison records.

A military medic at Anatot detention centre reported that she was confused, unable to recall her age, and believed she was still in Gaza after injuring herself on a fence.

The same medic who saw Khalidi also said he treated a woman experiencing severe bleeding after a miscarriage, as well as a breastfeeding mother who had been separated from her infant and requested a pump to prevent her milk from drying up.

What are conditions like in Israeli prisons?

Terrible.

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In February, 183 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom had been held without charge, emerged gaunt, frail and stained in dirt as part of a prisoner exchange with Israel. After their release, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said that evidence of torture was visible on the bodies of Palestinians released by Israel.

Whistleblower testimony and video evidence have documented the rape of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli guards, and at least 75 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli custody since October 2023.

A United Nations report from last July said that testimonies gathered “indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees, amongst other acts, in flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law”.

What is Israeli government policy towards Palestinian prisoners?

To make life as difficult as possible, and boast of it.

Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is in charge of the prison service. He has said that “one of the highest goals” he has set for himself since assuming the position was “to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law”.

“Everything published about the abominable conditions” for Palestinians in Israeli jails “was true”, Ben-Gvir said, bragging of how he had reduced food and shower times and removed electrical devices.

In early August, as well as filming himself taunting the visibly frail Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouti, who has remained in prison since 2002, Ben-Gvir also made a point of being filmed during a separate visit, pointing to a poster of a ruined Gaza, which he claimed prisoners were forced to look at daily.