Torture in Israeli jails rose sharply during war, says Palestinian author

A celebrated Palestinian author who was freed last month after more than 32 years in Israeli prisons has said the use of torture increased dramatically during his last two years of captivity as Israel came to treat its jails as another front in the Gaza war.

- Julian Borger

Nasser Abu Srour, whose prison memoir has been translated into seven languages and is tipped to win a major international literary prize this month, was among more than 150 Palestinians serving life sentences who were freed as part of the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire and then immediately exiled to Egypt, where most remain in limbo.

Abu Srour, 56, recounted a sharp increase in the use of beatings and the deprivation of food and warmth after the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023.

He said: "The prison guards' uniform changed, with a tag on the chest [that had] written on it the word 'fighters', or 'warriors', and they started acting like they were in a war and this was another front, and they started beating, torturing, killing like warriors."

A UN commission listed 75 deaths of Palestinians in Israeli custody between 7 October 2023 and 31 August 2025. The Israeli prison service has repeatedly denied the use of torture in its jails.

Speaking by phone from Egypt, Abu Srour also described the "dizzying shock" of being driven straight from the brutal conditions of Israeli incarceration to a five-star hotel in Cairo as guests of the Egyptian authorities.

As a young man, Abu Srour took part in the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising between 1987 and 1993, when he was charged as an accomplice in the death of an Israeli Shin Bet security police officer who had been trying to press Abu Srour's cousin into becoming a collaborator.

On the basis of a confession he made under torture, Abu Srour was sentenced in 1993 to life in prison without parole. During decades marked by extended periods of solitary confinement, he gained a bachelor's degree and then a master's in political science and began to publish poetry and other writings that were smuggled out of prison.