Every year on April 17, Palestinians commemorate the Palestinian Prisoner Day, which was first established in 1974 to commemorate the first prisoner exchange between Israel and Palestine and to honor every Palestinian who has been or is now imprisoned in Israel. This year, there is no shortage of people to honor. And this year the stakes are even higher than they have ever been.
As of April 17, 2025, there were 9,792 Palestinian detainees in Israeli occupation prisons, a figure that excludes the thousands of detainees in military camps amid ongoing forced disappearances. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has detained almost 30,000 Palestinians. During that time, the number of Palestinian political prisoners more than doubled, from 5,250 to around 10,000. For every person released through prisoner exchanges, 15 others were apprehended.
These are not abstract numbers. They are people. And what is being done to them is a disability justice issue.
Imprisonment as the production of disability
At CripJustice, we see incarceration as a system that causes disability through violence, isolation, medical neglect, and torture. What is happening within Israeli detention centers is no exception to this pattern. It is one of its most recorded and most ignored expressions.
B’Tselem has found that abuse of detainees is so institutionalized in Israeli prisons that the facilities should be called “torture camps.” Palestinians released in the prisoner exchanges in early 2026 appeared to have been emaciated and in poor health, having been denied access to medical care for months and years on end.
The case of Ahmad Manasra, which we recently covered, illustrates what this looks like up close. Arrested at 13, he was detained in solitary confinement for years and denied mental health care until a doctor diagnosed him with schizophrenia and linked it directly to the conditions of his detention. He was released in April 2025, after serving nine and a half years. He’s one of thousands.
Children Behind Bars
According to Defense for Children Palestine, between 500 and 700 Palestinian children are detained and prosecuted in Israeli military courts each year, with some as young as 12. Currently, 400 Palestinian children are held in Israeli prisons, the majority of whom are in pre-trial custody and have not yet been convicted of any offense. The most common offense is throwing stones, which is punished under military law by up to 20 years in prison.
In early 2025, Walid Ahmad, a 17-year-old Palestinian-Brazilian, died in Israeli custody. The autopsy results indicated starvation, malnutrition, and untreated disease. He was only a child. He died because the system that held him there refused to feed him or treat him.
Detained without charge for years
Administrative detainees, including women and children, can be held by the military for renewable six-month periods based on secret evidence that neither the detainees nor their lawyers have access to. As of April 2025, 3,498 Palestinians were kept in administrative detention, with 10,000 total administrative detention cases since October 7, including orders issued against children and women.
This is indefinite detention without trial, without charge, without the ability to mount a defense. It is a legal framework intended to imprison people indefinitely while giving the appearance of process. The same logic, scaled and systematized, kept Kalief Browder on Rikers Island for three years while he awaited a trial that never arrived.
A million detained since 1967
Since 1967, Israeli forces have detained an estimated one million Palestinians, approximately 20 percent of the Palestinian population. Statistics show that one in every five Palestinians have been imprisoned at some point in their lives
This constitutes collective punishment. The disability. trauma, and grief it has produced are immeasurable and almost entirely unsupported.
Since 1967, at least 252 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli prisons, with 16 having recently died due to torture and medical neglect. Israel refuses to release information about detainees who died after October 7. There are also 27 deceased detainees whose bodies Israel continues to refuse to release.
Now Israel wants to make killing Palestinians the law
Two weeks before Palestinian Prisoner Day, on March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed a new law expanding the death penalty. It is no longer an exaggeration to claim this law was intended specifically for Palestinians.
The Bill states that Palestinians in the West Bank who kill an Israeli with the intent to negate the existence of the State of Israel will be sentenced to death. The court may impose life imprisonment instead, only based on a special reason. The bill calls for the Israel Prisons Service to execute prisoners by hanging within 90 days of their sentences, with no right to appeal. The bill effectively established the death sentence as a punishment exclusively for Palestinians convicted of nationalistic crimes, while ignoring nationalistic murders carried out by Jewish Israelis settlers against Palestinians. The death penalty will be decided in military courts where only Palestinians are tried. These courts have a conviction rate of around 96%, which is largely based on confessions extracted under duress and torture during interrogation. The death penalty will be the default sentence, and judges will be able to commute it to life imprisonment only in special circumstances. Once the sentence is handed down, there will be no option of a pardon or reduction of the sentence.
One Senior Amnesty International official called the bill “yet another tool within Israel’s institutionalized system of apartheid against all Palestinians whose rights it controls.” Yuli Novak, executive director of B’Tselem, stated that, “Israel is already killing Palestinians regularly in detention facilities, and in the field, where lethal force is widely used by Israeli settlers and by the military with close to zero accountability. This law is another tool in this toolbox.”
The UN Human Rights Office called on Israel to immediately repeal the law, stating that, “The implementation of this new law would violate international law’s prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment. Additionally, this law further entrenches Israel’s violation of the prohibition of racial segregation and apartheid as it will exclusively apply to Palestinians.”
Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was photographed celebrating with champagne in the parliamentary chamber after the vote.
This is where we are on Palestinian Prisoner Day 2026. Nearly 10,000 Palestinians are imprisoned in institutions known as torture camps, detained without charge, denied medical care, their children convicted in military court, and now a law on the books that makes executing them by hanging the default punishment. The Palestinian Prisoners Media Office called it “a flagrant violation of all international laws and conventions” and “premeditated intentions to commit an organized crime against the prisoner movement.”
What Palestinian Prisoner Day asks of us
Palestinian Prisoner Day is not just a commemoration. It is a demand. A demand for the release of people held without charge. A call for accountability for torture and medical neglect. A demand that the international community stop treating the disability and death caused by these prisons as an unfortunate side effect rather than the point. And this year, a call on the world to reject normalizing a law designed to hang Palestinians.
At CripJustice, we name the systems that cause and produce disability and then abandon the people they have broken. The Israeli military detention system is one of those systems. The people inside it right now deserve more than a day of acknowledgment. They deserve freedom
Sources
Sources:
A nation behind bars: Why has Israel imprisoned 10,000 Palestinians? — Al Jazeera, April 17, 2025
Fact Sheet on Detainees and Prisoners in Israeli Occupation Prisons, April 17, 2025 — Solidarity-PS
Palestinian Prisoners’ Day: The call of freedom — Al-Awda, April 2025
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, April 17 — IMEMC News
Israel turning execution of Palestinians into official state policy — B’Tselem, March 30, 2026
Israel’s parliament votes to expand death penalty for Palestinians — CNN, March 30, 2026
Discriminatory Death Penalty Bill Passes — Human Rights Watch, March 31, 2026
Israel Fast-Tracks Death Penalty Bill Targeting Palestinians — Adalah, January 19, 2026
