As of April 2024 Israel holds 2,071 sentenced prisoners, 2,731 remand detainees and 3,661 administrative detainees held without trial.
Israel also holds 849 people as "unlawful combatants"
While imprisonment inherently restricts a person's liberty, prisoners and detainees retain all their fundamental rights. The conditions of "security" inmates differ from "regular" inmates. Israel's treatment of security inmates violates their rights to equality, dignity, family life, education, and more, in contravention of international law.
The overwhelming majority of security inmates are Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Holding prisoners and detainees from the OPT inside Israel constitutes a blatant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, prohibiting the transfer of prisoners and detainees outside the occupied territory, and also violates basic human rights enshrined, inter alia, in Israeli law.
The data was provided by the Israel Prison Service (IPS), and includes all "security inmates" in prisons under the IPS jurisdiction, including the Ofer Prison, situated in the West Bank.
* As of November 2023, the data also includes Palestinians who are residents of the Gaza Strip and are held pursuant to Israel’s Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, 5762-2002. Unlawful combatant – a category which does not exist in international law – is defined in Israeli law as “a person who has participated either directly or indirectly in hostile acts against the State of Israel or is a member of a force perpetrating hostile acts against the State of Israel, where the conditions prescribed in Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention of 12th August 1949 with respect to prisoners-of-war and granting prisoner-of-war status in international humanitarian law, do not apply to them”.
These figures do not include detainees from the Gaza Strip held by the Israeli military.
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