Haaretz newspaper, citing testimonies from lawyers who visited several Israeli prisons, including Ofer, Megiddo, Gilboa, Ganot, Shatta, and Ketziot, said that the court ruling issued last September has not been implemented, and that the food distribution situation has not changed, while some prisoners reported a decrease in the quantities allocated to them compared to before the decision.
Last September, the Supreme Court, by a majority of its judges, ruled that "there are indications that the Prison Service is violating its obligation to provide basic living conditions for security prisoners, including food in an appropriate quantity and composition to maintain their health."
This decision was issued following a petition filed last April by the Association for Civil Rights and the Gisha organization against the Prison Service, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Meara.
This petition was filed following changes made by Ben-Gvir to the conditions of detention of Palestinian prisoners after the outbreak of the Gaza war on October 7, 2023.
Ben-Gvir's decisions included "all security prisoners held in Israel, not just those captured during the fighting in the Gaza Strip, and therefore apply to security prisoners who are residents of the Gaza Strip, residents of the West Bank, as well as citizens and residents of the state (Arabs)" according to Haaretz.
Until October 7, 2023, prisoners were allowed to independently purchase food from prison food outlets and prepare most of their own food.
But with the outbreak of war, “prisons switched to emergency operations, security prisoners’ access to canteens (food outlets) and cooking utensils was completely cut off, and the prison service began providing all prisoners’ food itself,” according to the same source.
The statements attached to the new petition against Commissioner Kobi Yaakov included a description of critical humanitarian conditions, as detainees spoke of a constant feeling of hunger, receiving expired food, dirty vegetables, and a little tahini diluted with water. A lawyer who recently visited 53 prisoners quoted one of the detainees as saying that they "are dying of hunger and dreaming of food."
The testimonies showed a sharp loss of weight among the prisoners, as unnamed lawyers stated that some detainees had lost more than half their weight, with one prisoner's weight dropping from 130 kilograms to 60 kilograms, while other prisoners' weights reached less than 49 kilograms, without undergoing any medical examination since the verdict was issued.
In response to these accusations, the Israeli Prison Service claimed that the Commissioner had appointed a professional team to implement the decision, asserting its commitment to providing food "in the appropriate quantity" for all prisoners, and stressing that the implementation is being carried out "while ensuring the safety of prison fighters from the dangers posed by security prisoners."
More than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, including children and women, are held in Israeli prisons, where they suffer torture, starvation, and medical neglect. Many of them have been killed, according to Palestinian and Israeli human rights and media reports.
The ceasefire agreement halted an Israeli war of extermination on Gaza that began on October 7, 2023, and left more than 69,000 Palestinian martyrs and more than 170,000 wounded, most of them children and women, with reconstruction estimated by the United Nations to cost about $70 billion.
