The Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex‑Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society confirmed on Sunday the death of detainee Hamza Abdullah Abdul‑Hadi Adwan, 67, from the Gaza Strip, noting that his family had previously received an earlier notification regarding his death.
According to the latest response the two institutions received from the Israeli military, Adwan died on 9 September 2025, with no further details provided.
The Commission and the Prisoners’ Society said Adwan was abducted on November 12, 2024, at the Israeli military roadblock known as the “Civil Administration” roadblock.
He was married and a father of nine children, two of whom were killed by the Israeli army in Gaza before October 7, 2023.
His family said Israeli forces abducted him despite his serious health conditions, including heart disease, and despite his need for continuous medical care and monitoring.
The two institutions added that Adwan is among more than one hundred Palestinian detainees who have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the genocide in Gaza, with the identities of eighty-seven of them publicly confirmed.
These deaths, they said, resulted from widespread torture, starvation, medical neglect, sexual violence, and a series of deprivation and abuse practices conducted in degrading and inhumane detention conditions.
They noted that many detainees from Gaza remain forcibly disappeared, in addition to dozens who were executed in the field. Images of detainees’ bodies returned after the ceasefire, they said, provided unmistakable evidence of systematic executions conducted by Israeli forces.
With Adwan’s death, the number of Palestinian detainees whose identities have been confirmed since October 7, 2023, rises to eighty-seven, including fifty-one detainees from Gaza.
This brings the total number of Palestinian detainees who have died in Israeli custody since 1967 to 324, based solely on cases whose identities have been documented by Palestinian institutions.
The Commission and the Prisoners’ Society held Israeli authorities fully responsible for Adwan’s death and renewed their call on international human rights bodies to take effective measures to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes committed against detainees and the Palestinian people.
They said the longstanding absence of accountability granted to the Israeli system has reached its peak since October 7, 2023, despite what they described as overwhelming evidence of genocide in Gaza and crimes against humanity committed against detainees.
They stressed that the ongoing abuses inside Israeli prisons form an integral part of the broader war, amounting to what they described as “slow‑execution policies,” making this period the deadliest in the history of the Palestinian detainee movement.
The two institutions added that this comes as Israeli authorities advance legislation to legalize the execution of Palestinian detainees, effectively transforming extrajudicial killings into a formalized policy.
They noted that the vast majority of detainees are currently held without trial, either under arbitrary administrative detention or under the classification of “unlawful combatants.”
According to the latest available data, as of December/January, more than 9,300 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, including 3,385 Administrative Detainees and 1,237 classified as “unlawful combatants,” meaning the overwhelming majority are held without charges or trials.
