The Palestinian Civil Affairs Authority informed the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society of the death of detainee Abdul-Rahman Sofian Mohammad Sabatin, 21, from the town of Husan west of Bethlehem, at Israel’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center late Tuesday night.
According to the statement issued Wednesday, Sabatin had been held since June 24, 2025. A court session was convened for him on November 25, 2025, during which his family, present at the hearing, reported no signs of serious health complications.
He had previously suffered a severe abdominal injury a year before soldiers abducted him, but his condition had stabilized.
The two institutions stressed that Sabatin’s death adds to the record of systematic slow-kill policies pursued by Israeli authorities against prisoners, alongside field executions that form part of the ongoing campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people.
With his death, rights groups — including Israeli organizations — report that fatalities among Palestinian prisoners since the start of the genocide on October 7, 2023, have surpassed one hundred, though the figure is not final.
The identities of 85 have been confirmed, while dozens of detainees from Gaza remain forcibly disappeared, and many others have been executed in the field.
This period marks the deadliest chapter in the history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, bringing the total number of confirmed fatalities in custody since 1967 to 322.
The Commission and the Prisoners’ Society noted that Sabatin’s death comes amid Israel’s accelerated push to enact a law permitting the execution of prisoners, and in the context of shocking data revealed by human rights organizations regarding the number of detainees killed inside prisons and military camps since the war began.
Admissions from Israeli institutions themselves show a sharp rise in prisoner deaths since far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir assumed control of the so-called Ministry of National Security. He has openly targeted prisoners, stripping them of basic rights and intensifying lethal policies even before October 7, 2023.
The statement described conditions inside prisons as beyond description, with the entire system, including the judiciary, institutionalizing a new reality aimed at destroying prisoners physically and psychologically.
Methods include torture, starvation, denial of medical treatment, sexual assaults including rape, and the use of basic rights as tools of repression. Outbreaks of diseases, particularly scabies, have become another weapon of abuse and death.
The institutions emphasized that the unprecedented pace of prisoner deaths proves that the prison system is carrying out a deliberate policy of slow execution, with scarcely a month passing without one or more fatalities.
Israel continues to withhold the bodies of deceased prisoners, compounding the crime through sham investigations that entrench policies of killing detainees inside prisons and camps.
With thousands of detainees held in conditions lacking the minimum requirements of life, the number of fatalities is expected to rise.
Palestinian political Prisoners face systematic violations including torture, starvation, physical and sexual assaults, medical neglect, and the spread of infectious diseases.
The statement added that field executions of dozens of detainees further expose the criminal nature of Israel’s system. Images of prisoners’ bodies returned after the ceasefire revealed horrific evidence of extrajudicial killings, alongside undisclosed data on the number of those executed.
The Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society held Israel fully responsible for Sabatin’s death and renewed calls on the international human rights system to take effective measures to hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes against prisoners and the Palestinian people.
They urged the imposition of clear international sanctions that isolate Israel, restore the credibility of the global rights system, and end the idleness that has marked its response during the genocide.
The statement also called for an end to the impunity Israel continues to enjoy through the protection of international powers that treat it as a state above law and accountability.
Currently, more than 9,300 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, in addition to hundreds detained in military camps. Among them are over 50 women and approximately 350 children.
