Detainees held below ground and cut off from the world

Those imprisoned without charge include nurse deprived of daylight since January and teenager held for nine months

- Emma Graham-Harrison

Israel is holding dozens of Palestinians from Gaza isolated in an underground jail where they never see daylight, are deprived of adequate food and barred from receiving news of their families or the outside world.

The detainees have included at least two civilians held for months without charge or trial: a nurse detained in his scrubs, and a young food seller, according to lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) who represent both men.

The two men were transferred to the subterranean Rakefet complex in January, and described regular beatings and violence consistent with well-documented torture in other Israeli detention centres.

Rakefet prison was opened in the early 1980s to house organised crime figures in Israel but closed a few years later on the grounds it was inhumane. The far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, ordered it back into service after the 7 October attacks in 2023.

The cells, a tiny exercise "yard" and a lawyers' meeting room are all underground, so inmates live without any natural light. The jail was designed for a small number of high-security inmates occupying individual cells, holding 15 men when it shut in 1985.

In recent months, about 100 detainees have been incarcerated there, official data obtained by PCATI shows.

Under the ceasefire agreed in mid-October, Israel released 250 convicted Palestinian prisoners, and 1,700 Palestinian detainees from Gaza who had been held indefinitely without charge or trial. The young trader held at Rakefet was among them.

However, the scale of detentions has been so vast that even after that mass release, at least 1,000 others are still held by Israel under the same conditions, including the nurse represented by PCATI.