Version imprimableThe genocide continues in occupied Palestine. The establishment of Phase 2 is simply another—less spectacular—way of colonizing Gaza. While it was provided for in the ceasefire agreements, the opening — for 4 days only and in dribs and drabs — of the crossing point at Rafah is a glaring example of this. Ethnic cleansing is also increasing in the West Bank, where the Israeli colonial state has decided to grant itself even more military power in Areas A and B fragmented by Oslo and normally under civilian control by the Palestinian Authority. This allows the army to arrest Palestinians on “non-security grounds.”
A gigantic prison policy
This new colonial advance will fuel Israel’s already gigantic prison policy: the Israeli colonial state arrests Palestinians on a daily basis. More than 10,000 of them are in detention today, illegally locked up and subjected to acts of violence and deprivation of care and so on.
The torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons has long been documented, including by the Addameer organization and many international observers, including the UN. But particularly unbearable accounts have reached us in the last two years with a generalization of the most barbaric practices, particularly in the Sde Teiman camp, in the Naqab, in the south of occupied Palestine.
Food deprivation, painful chains, deafening music, rape by animals, etc. Israel goes so far as to kill Palestinian prisoners and hold their bodies hostage. People abducted in Gaza by the army can disappear without ever being registered.
Intimidation without borders
The impunity that Israel enjoys in Europe allows it to lock up and kill Palestinians, but also to arrest internationals. These arrests are aimed at intimidating activists and giving settlers free rein to steal Palestinian farmland. Camille and Momo paid the price last week. While these two Frenchmen were in the West Bank, they were arrested by the Israeli colonial state on Sunday, 1 February.
Camille, a human rights activist, was arrested while working with a delegation from the International Solidarity Movement to form a non-violent intervention presence in the village of Mughayyer, near Ramallah in the West Bank. The settler attacks on Palestinian peasants are as violent as the resilience of the Palestinians is impressive. Both were eventually deported to France, a practice that is increasingly normalized for Israel, which enjoys the complicity of a large number of Western countries.
Complicity everywhere
This complicity makes it possible to subcontract, everywhere, the oppression of Palestinians. In the United States, Palestinians are subjected to Guantanamo-style treatment: racist ICE police arbitrarily arrest and detain Palestinians. It also allows itself to confiscate their personal documents and to deport them discreetly to the West Bank by private jet. About twenty Palestinians have been sent to the West Bank, sometimes after more than a year of detention, without any information to the families. In France, Ali, a Palestinian refugee, was searched and arrested in front of his wife and young children and remains locked up today on behalf of Israel.
Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that he was burying the idea of a Palestinian state for good without ever losing the support of his Western allies. Today, there is only one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. A colonial state that maintains itself through ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide. Torture in prisons is not a drift, it is the result of colonialism, anti-Palestinian racism and the dehumanization that results from it.
19 February 2026
Translated by International Viewpoint from l’Anticapitaliste.
