Gaza City, Gaza – When Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was heckled on Tuesday and called a "war criminal" during a visit to New York, some in the international media called the exchange extraordinary. 

But for Palestinians, especially those of us in Gaza, it was hardly surprising. In fact, one could ask why it took this long. 

Ben-Gvir’s racist record is long, his provocations numerous. But what has angered me most personally, as a Palestinian and a journalist in Gaza, is his war on the imprisoned, his obsession with turning incarceration into a theatre of cruelty. What many in the world saw on that Manhattan sidewalk, we have lived. And worse.

In the bleak architecture of occupation, Israeli prisons have long been hidden chambers of cruelty. But of late, they have been exposed in full, brutal clarity by none other than Ben-Gvir himself.

Once a fringe extremist, he now presides over a system in which dehumanisation is not a consequence of policy, it is the policy. 

In June 2024, he declared: “We should shoot prisoners in the head, instead of giving them more food.” This was not a rhetorical slip. It was a candid window into a regime of state-sponsored torment, one that has only escalated under his leadership.

Earlier this year, in February, Ben-Gvir proudly shared a video of Palestinian detainees kneeling under the barrels of rifles, forced to repaint prison walls they had once marked with defiant slogans: “Jerusalem is Arab”, “We will not forget, we will not forgive.” Then, in April, he publicly celebrated a report detailing the creation of new underground detention sites, dark, airless, soundless cells designed for the thousands arrested after October 7. These are not metaphorical dungeons. They are literal.

Inside the machinery of dehumanisation

The lives of nearly 10,000 known Palestinian prisoners, and thousands more "disappeared" detainees from Gaza, unfold in these grim cells.

Their bodies shackled. Their screams swallowed by thick concrete. Their humanity systematically stripped away, revealed a joint statement issued by organisations specialising in prisoners’ affairs, including the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club and the Commission for Detainees’ Affairs.

Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, over 16,400 Palestinians have been arrested, including 510 women and 1,300 children. The figures from Gaza remain uncertain, clouded by enforced disappearances, but the faces of suffering are unmistakable.

Their conditions are not remnants of war; they are systems perfected over decades and intensified under this government. In recent conversations with former detainees, a singular pattern emerges: isolation, physical abuse, psychological destruction, and a complete denial of legal and human rights.

One former detainee, arrested in Gaza’s Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in February 2024, described being shackled hand and foot for two days in a pitch-black room where he could not even see his fingers. His crime? Being related to someone allegedly involved in resistance.

“For a while,” he said, “I thought I had died.” He was beaten in the head until he saw white flashes. Later, he was bound with metal-pinned ropes that dug into his wrists. Food was a stale scrap tossed on the floor. The experience, he said, felt like a horror film — one in which reality itself collapsed.

Another, a woman arrested in January while staying in a displacement camp, recalled the moment soldiers poured freezing water over her body before loading her onto a truck. Blindfolded, shivering, and pressed between strangers, she stood for a full day without rest. The threats of sexual violence didn’t come during interrogation — they came during transport, layered into the background noise of her captivity.

“The trauma didn’t stop when I left,” she said. “It still hasn’t.”

And from Rafah, a man detained for months without charge told me about the moment interrogators presented him with a photograph of his wife and children, wrapped in white shrouds, claiming they had been killed in an airstrike. The pain overwhelmed him — he collapsed. Later, he discovered it was all a lie, a tactic designed to break him. “They weren’t looking for information,” he said. “They were testing how much I could lose without dying.”

These stories are not isolated. They form a structure, a regime of violence dressed as incarceration. Sleep is withheld, access to lawyers is nonexistent, medical care is denied, and even basic movement is conditional on obedience. Detainees are no longer told why they’re being held. In many cases, they’re not told anything at all.

Codified erasure 

Ben-Gvir has not hidden this. He has codified it. His tenure is not about improving security — it’s about erasing the very idea of Palestinian humanity. His prison system is not malfunctioning. It is working exactly as intended: to degrade, erase, and destroy.

And yet, against all odds, Palestinian prisoners resist, often in the smallest, quietest ways. 

Some count the hours by the footsteps of guards. Others memorise verses of the Quran, scratch names into walls, or simply refuse to forget who they are. In these acts, there is not only resistance, there is testimony.

That testimony, now reaching the outside world, demands more than sympathy. It demands political recognition. It demands accountability. These are not isolated abuses or excesses of war. They are the logical consequence of a state that openly announces, and international backers that quietly condone, the erasure of an entire people’s right to exist with dignity.

Ben-Gvir believes in the utility of cruelty. That fear, humiliation, and starvation will force Palestinians into submission. But the stories emerging from these prisons speak to a different truth: that even buried beneath concrete and silence, a people can still remember, and still endure.

So when protesters in New York called him a war criminal, they were not heckling. They were telling the truth. The only tragedy is that it took so long for anyone outside to say it out loud.

We are far past the point of plausible deniability. The question is no longer whether the international community knows what is happening. It does.

The question now is: will it finally act?