Currently, around 6,800 Palestinians are being held by Israel without standard trials, according to numbers provided by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) and Hamoked on Wednesday.
At times, the number probably even cracked the 7,000 level, with the current breakdown of those Palestinians being: 3,376 mostly from the West Bank being held in administrative detention and 3,436 being held as unlawful combatants captured in Gaza.
According to PCATI, around 500 of the Gazans have not yet even been defined specifically as "unlawful combatants" and are simply in Israeli detention with no specific status, awaiting evaluations for being declared unlawful combatants.
Neither administrative detainees nor unlawful combatants receive regular criminal proceedings and both are highly criticized globally.
But whereas administrative detainees have set rules, such as that their cases are reviewed by IDF judges usually every three to six months to potentially free them, unlawful combatants can potentially be held for longer and there are less clear procedures about handling them.
PCATI, which disclosed the latest unlawful combatant numbers, expressed particular concern that 1,315 new detained Palestinians from Gaza were taken into Israel since October 2024 and that this means that Sde Teiman and other non-standard detention areas which are controlled by the IDF, and not the Israel Prisons Service (IPS), are being filled up again despite prior scandals which were supposed to close them down.
Sde Teiman arrests
On July 29, a number of IDF soldiers were arrested by the military police for allegedly beating, torturing, or sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee. There have also been other less prominent charges of beatings of Palestinian detainees during that period.
Eventually, Sde Teiman was due to be closed down also due to pressure from the High Court of Justice which said that it was improper for the IDF to maintain large detention facilities for an extended period, when only the IPS had the proper training and transparency for doing so.
PCATI's criticism suggested that shutting down IDF detention facilities may have been temporary and they may have returned to heavy use once the military started a new campaign in northern Gaza in October.
Besides all of the above detainees, 2,400 Palestinians have been indicted for terror and other violent crimes since the war started, and some unspecified thousands have been returned to Gaza when it was decided that there was an insufficient basis for keeping them in detention.
It is also expected that over 1,000 Palestinian security prisoners will be released as part of the expected upcoming hostage exchange deal with Hamas.