75% of Palestinians taken from Gaza by Israel are civilians: Leaked Israeli records
Nearly 75 percent of Palestinians captured from the besieged Gaza Strip are civilians, classified Israeli military data reveals.
Israeli military records, uncovered by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call, revealed that only one in four Palestinians detained by Israeli forces from Gaza were actually identified as combatants.
According to the records, as of May, Israel had detained more than 6,000 Palestinians under its “unlawful combatants” law, which allows indefinite detention without charge or trial.
The majority of those held are civilians – including professionals such as doctors, teachers, writers, and civil servants – as well as children and individuals suffering from chronic illnesses or disabilities, the documents showed.
Some of the cases highlight the extreme conditions of this policy, such as the shocking case of an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s being jailed for six weeks and a single mother kept from her children for 53 days, only to find them begging on the streets upon her release.
Senior Hamas official Abdul-Karim Hanini says Israel has killed six Palestinians who were recently freed from Israeli prison in an attack on the besieged Gaza Strip.
A soldier stationed at the notorious Sde Teiman military base, where reports of torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners have surfaced, also described how the facility once confined so many elderly, disabled, and sick detainees that they were placed together in a hangar grimly nicknamed “the geriatric pen.”
The United Nations has since condemned as “unacceptable” Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in these detention camps.
Dozens of Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 2023.
