At Least 94 Palestinians Died in Israeli Detention During Genocide—Where’s the Outrage?

This essay appeared in the Nov. 20, 2025 edition of UNFTR’s premium newsletter. Become a UNFTR member to receive our bonus newsletter each week and for other perks.

Impunity.

Israel last Wednesday killed nearly three dozen Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority women and children, despite ostensibly being party to a supposed “ceasefire” that went into effect on Oct. 10. Since that time, Israel, whose prime minister is an international fugitive wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes, has consistently violated the agreement, killing more than 240 Palestinians.

Such ironclad impunity has enabled the far-right Israeli government to prosecute its genocide for the better part of two years, all thanks to blanket protection from the United States, its chief diplomatic and financial supporter and arms dealer.

With such sweeping protections, Israel effectively can do as it pleases, which became cartoonishly apparent during the Biden administration, when official after official provided cover for Netanyahu’s war of annihilation on a daily basis (with some of these abhorrent and cowardly figures only calling out Israel for committing war crimes after exiting public life).

To be sure, we’ve never experienced such world-class levels of mental gymnastics as we have during this live-streamed genocide, which apparently is only a manifestation of social media algorithms and a splintered media environment (we’ll get to that later).

The normalization of violence against Palestinians is so embedded in our media and culture that a recent report documenting nearly 100 deaths of Palestinians in Israeli detention has come and gone with barely a whimper. The bastardization of international law aside, the report, released by Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHRI), documents how Israel allegedly committed domestic crimes related to detainee treatment—none of which seems to matter to corporate media.

Let’s break it down.

PHRI this month released the findings from its own investigation, which it said confirms that at least 94 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank died in Israeli custody from Oct. 7, 2023 to Aug. 31, 2025 “both in the hands of the military and the Israel Prison Service (IPS), including the young and elderly, the healthy and the sick alike.”

Of the 94 confirmed deaths, 42 died in IPS custody and 52 died in Israeli military custody. For context, PHRI noted that 30 Palestinians died in Israeli custody in the preceding 10 years (that’s still very bad). To further emphasize how horrific such deaths are, there were 98 reported deaths of U.S. detainees during the early years of the so-called “war on terror” (2002-2006). If you’ll recall, the images from Abu Ghraib shocked the country and to this day remain a stain on the U.S. By contrast, the genocide in Gaza has produced mounds of horrific images and videos, with objectively outrageously minuscule levels of shock or outrage from those in power.

“The data presented above, together with additional information in the appendix, shows that on average, two Palestinians died every month in IPS detention facilities, with the number of deaths steadily increasing over time, among detained Palestinians from both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” PHRI wrote. “The occurrence of deaths across nearly all IPS facilities where Palestinians are held further underscores the systematic and ongoing nature of these killings in Israeli custody.”

As the group noted, domestic law stipulates that authorities ensure detained individuals are held “in safe and humane conditions, with their dignity preserved and their basic needs met throughout their detention.”

PHRI cautioned that as a result of a culture of secrecy established after the genocide began and policies enacted to limit transparency—preventing loved ones from even knowing if their family members had been detained—the number of people who’ve died in custody is likely higher.

As for secrecy, PHRI said that Israel previously had a system for informing families if a relative was detained, following international law. But that all changed after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel began refusing to confirm whether anyone was being detained or not. When families petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, their requests were dismissed.

As a result, the court “effectively legitimized the authorities’ withholding of information about the detained persons’ fate,” PHRI wrote in its report. Even as families were in crisis searching for their loved ones, the court began imposing costs on families for seeking answers, PHRI said.

Israel, per the report, eventually created a system by which families could inquire about a loved one’s whereabouts via email, but even that caused more heartache, as some were provided visitation dates that were months out or, more commonly, were told “there is no indication of the individual’s arrest or detention.”

That’s not all: Authorities violated the law by not disclosing detainee deaths to relatives who were then “unable to request an investigation or post-mortem examination,” PHRI said.

“This conduct by the detention authorities has served as a key tool for covering up and concealing the cause of death of dozens of Palestinians since October 2023, thereby preventing those responsible for the systematic killings described in the previous chapter from being brought to justice and for shielding those responsible for these systematic killings from any form of accountability,” the group wrote. 

This comes as Israel, perhaps aware of growing discontent from the American public, is reportedly seeking a 20-year security pact from the U.S. as its third consecutive decade-long agreement expires in 2028. Indeed, the hundreds of millions in American taxpayer funds dedicated to the genocide in Gaza is on top of the $4 billion the U.S. provides Israel each year.

With polls consistently showing American support for Israel diminishing, its most ardent defenders appear desperate to find new and creative ways to justify its unfathomable destruction of Gaza and its people. The latest attempt came from Sarah Hurwitz, the former head speechwriter for Michelle Obama and a senior speechwriter to President Obama. Hurwitz went viral this week when she effectively claimed Holocaust education did too good of a job teaching people to stand up for brutalized populations and blamed algorithms and the fractured media landscape (aka people having more freedom to pick their own news sources) for widespread condemnations of Israeli’s actions in Gaza.

It’s a lot.

No accountability for prosecuting a war of annihilation.

No accountability for the deaths of detainees.

Meanwhile, plenty of fanatical excuses as to why Israel has done what it’s done.

It all leads to a culture of impunity with little modern precedent.

As Milena Ansari of Human Rights Watch told News Beat in an episode about Israeli torture camps: “[A]s long as the structural repression is not really addressed, or is properly tackled, bloodshed, unfortunately, will continue.”

Image Source

• Barcex, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.