AhlulBayt News Agency: Palestinian ex-prisoner Nael Barghouti, known as the dean of Palestinian prisoners and the longest-held prisoner in the world, described the “silent extermination” taking place inside Israeli prisons and outlined ways to confront it at legal, humanitarian, and political levels.
In an emotional speech during the second session of the “Covenant for Jerusalem” conference on Sunday, Barghouti stressed that “the Al-Aqsa Flood was not only for the prisoners or Al-Aqsa Mosque, but for the Palestinian cause, which is being erased day after day through waves of normalization with Israel.” He warned that prisoners are facing “a real extermination under the cover of the international community,” adding that “the Zionist danger will not stop at Palestinians but will extend to all peoples who support them.”
Having spent over 44 years in captivity, Barghouti revealed shocking details of systematic abuses and extermination methods, dividing them into three categories:
Physical
He described severe beatings, kicking, slamming prisoners’ heads against walls, unleashing attack dogs with metal tools fixed to their mouths to maximize injuries, tying prisoners for long hours, and denying medical care to the sick. Female prisoners, he added, suffer grave violations including harassment, rape, and forced removal of hijabs, carried out “with deliberate brutality.”
Psychological
This includes prolonged solitary confinement in darkness, complete isolation from the outside world, exposure to terrifying sounds, and sudden assaults while blindfolded, all designed to break prisoners’ will.
Starvation
Barghouti explained that systematic deprivation of food and extremely poor quality meals destroyed his body “beyond repair,” according to medical testimony.
Barghouti condemned the silence of international institutions, accusing Israel of falsifying or manipulating human rights reports. He urged the global community to act with vigilance and fairness, stressing that Arab and Islamic nations must assume responsibility in confronting the extermination of prisoners and the Palestinian people.
He highlighted that more than 3,500 administrative detainees face ongoing arrest, torture, and abuse, alongside cases of prisoners “without names or numbers,” whose conditions remain unknown. He also revealed that Israel mutilates the bodies of martyred prisoners and steals their organs before returning them to families after long delays, making identification nearly impossible.
Barghouti further discussed Israeli pressure on Arab countries to refuse released prisoners, while Western states have agreed to host them. He noted that some prisoners have been held for decades as bargaining chips for political concessions, and even after release, they face hardships such as denial of education for their children and exile abroad.
He concluded by affirming that the prisoners’ cause is “a humanitarian issue before it is a political one,” calling for urgent global action to stop what he described as “a full-fledged extermination.”
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