Abstract
This blog piece examines the systematic institutionalisation of torture within Israeli detention facilities and situates it within the broader framework of settler-colonial violence and international impunity. Drawing primarily on United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's report (Albanese, 2026) to the Human Rights Council, the blog argues that torture in the context of the occupied Palestinian territory is not incidental but constitutes deliberate state policy directed at the social and psychological destruction of the Palestinian people.
The blog traces the historical continuity of this violence from its colonial origins in British Mandate-era emergency regulations, through the Nakba, to the present detention architecture. It documents conditions faced by Palestinian detainees and analyses the legislative instruments that legally entrench this apparatus. Further, it is contended that despite international rulings against Israeli torture and occupation meaningful accountability remains absent.
Finally, the piece questions whether an international legal system designed within imperial structures is capable of delivering justice for colonised peoples and calls upon global civil society to fill the accountability vacuum.
I. Introduction
Torture forms a structural component of every genocide and settler-colonial apartheid, wherein cruelty becomes institutionalised, with the political objective of debilitating an existing community and establishing a new regime. It entails deliberate obliteration of the victim’s status as a human being by continuous exposure to inhumane conditions of custodial detention. Such violence is actively justified and normalised by state-sponsored machinery and sustained through enabling architecture of legislative backing, civil complicity, absent international response, and absence of accountability. Through these operational conditions, torture ceases to be an isolated act and is transformed into a collective enterprise.
It is precisely this ideological machinery that the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, was referring to when her report to the Human Rights Council concluded that torture has been systematically institutionalised as state policy in Israel, and that the collective failure of the international community has amounted to granting of what she termed a ‘licence to torture’ (Albanese, 2026).
II. Institutionalisation of Torture in Israeli Detention
Since October 2023, a substantial and growing body of documented evidence has emerged, indicating that the Israeli Prison System not only operates as a site of detention, but as a network of some of the most brutally institutionalised torture camps.
Approximately 9,200 Palestinians are being held across Israeli detention facilities. Out of these, 4,700 are estimated to be held under ‘administrative detention’, which is a mechanism allowing authorities to hold people in detention on vague grounds without any formal charge or trial. 351 children, more than half of whom are being held under ‘administrative detention’, have been effectively stripped of the protections enshrined under Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989). These detainees consistently report appalling and debilitating conditions upon release. For instance, the organisation B’Tselem published a report titled ‘Welcome to Hell’, encompassing testimonies of 55 Palestinians who were detained in Israeli prisons (B’Tselem, 2024). These testimonies enunciate frequent acts of violence that are continuously employed against Palestinian detainees such as severe physical beatings, deliberate starvation, sleep deprivation, sexual violence, denial of medical care, and confiscation of personal belongings. These are not singular incidents, rather they constitute a documented and recurring pattern.
This constitutes a contrivance of state-sponsored torture, championed by Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir and legally reinforced through the Knesset’s persistent formulation of laws that vest extensive powers in the military and executive. For instance, on 30 March 2026, the Knesset passed the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law which discriminatorily applies to Palestinian defendants convicted of terrorism and related offences, while no equivalent provision exists for Jewish citizens convicted of comparable acts.
These instruments are not merely legal tools; rather, they are part of broader political objectives that predate the existence of the Israeli state itself. To understand this detention machinery, the ideological foundation must be traced.
III. Colonial Inheritance of State Violence
The structures of apartheid that define Palestinian life today were built upon the colonial legacy of suppression, humiliation and control that governs the life between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Cahill’s (2009) study on Black and Tans in late Mandate Palestine reveals the direct institutional linkage through which British imperialist violence was transferred, refined and retained by the Zionist regime. In 1922, when the British Palestine Gendarmerie was formed, many of its officers were former members of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, already trained in the colonial suppression of civil populations (Cahill, 2009).
This inheritance was subsequently codified in law. The Defence Regulations enacted under the British Mandate entrenched warrantless imprisonment, collective punishment and administrative detention against the Palestinians (The Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945). The violence prevalent in Israeli detention centres thus carries within it a much older colonial architecture, wherein brutal violence and dehumanised torture were systematised as a regular administrative process.
In 1948 following the end of the British Mandate and the UN Partition Plan, Israel declared statehood, which was accompanied by forced displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians, in what is referred to as the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe’ (United Nations, no date). Following the large-scale displacement, Israel pursued the policy of territorial expansion, which initiated the process of ethnic cleansing and mass displacement of the indigenous Arab population in Palestine.
The Palestinians have endured an ongoing Nakba in service of the Zionist settler colonialism, sustained through discriminatory and humiliating laws and constitutional framework designed to erase. According to the UN Special Rapporteur’s report (Albanese, 2026), humiliation and other types of violence are employed in the occupied Palestinian territory to instil collective fear and drive mass displacement. Under international human rights law, humiliation, manipulation, enforced helplessness and the deliberate targeting of dignity and identity constitute psychological torture, which strips communities of autonomy and generates a torturous environment designed to break resilience, instil fear, and coerce populations into displacement (Melzer, 2020).
However, the persistence of the colonial order is not the product of only Israeli state power, it is consistently preserved through international silence and impunity.
IV. International Impunity and the License to Oppress
The UN Special Rapporteur argues that Israel has used torture at such a massive scale that it constitutes an ideological project of social destruction, with the aim of debilitating the Palestinian nation. According to the report, such systematic application may satisfy the threshold of ‘genocidal intent’ under Article II(b) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (United Nations, 1948), which prohibits causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group in furtherance of the destruction of the whole group. Against this backdrop, the performance of the international legal system demands legitimate scrutiny.
In a July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal under international law and must end (International Court of Justice, 2024). The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant — on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Moreover, the UN Human Rights Council has received multiple reports documenting starvation (Fakhri, 2024), torture (Albanese, 2026) and targeting of civilians (UN Special Committee on Israeli Practices, 2025).
Yet in practice, this machinery remains largely stalled. The United States has repeatedly exercised its Security Council veto to shield Israel from binding resolutions calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid access to Gaza, arrest warrants remain unexecuted, no Israeli soldier has been prosecuted for these acts of violence, and several states have moved to restrict peaceful assembly for Palestinian cause. The discriminatory death penalty law drew condemnation from the European Union and other UN bodies, yet it passed regardless.
This reflects the consistency with which the international bodies have failed Palestinian civilians, representing a hierarchy of a system that is designed to manage rather than dismantle colonial practices. The world, as the UN expert puts it, seems to have given Israel the licence to torture (Albanese, 2026).
V. Concluding Remarks
The international legal order that was constructed after decades of colonial rule was formed on the promise that the horrors of state violence and settler-colonial apartheid would never go unchecked. This promise has been belied in Palestine. Despite the rulings of the ICJ, along with the ICC issued warrants and the UN bodies having documented evidence of the atrocities, the violence persists. What is unfolding in Palestine is a failure of political will, together with inadequacy of the international legal order conceived at the height of imperial power.
This raises an issue that is not merely one of political will but of structural inadequacy: whether the international legal order built by colonial powers and sustained by their successors is capable of delivering justice for colonised peoples against a state that enjoys the patronage of that system’s dominant actors? If the answer is no, which the evidence increasingly suggests, then it is upon the international civil society to demand accountability, when the state actors choose impunity.
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