The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) reported that Israeli occupation forces abducted at least fifteen women overnight from Qalqilia in the northwestern West Bank, most of them wives of former political prisoners, wives of current detainees and mothers of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
The PPS stated that the mass abductions come at a time when Israel continues to bar legal teams from visiting detainees since the start of the ongoing war, while also preventing families from visiting their imprisoned relatives following the genocide.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has likewise been denied access to conduct its regular visits.
The Prisoners’ Society described the campaign as unprecedented in both scale and the specific group targeted, noting that it was carried out in a single night and within one district.
This escalation comes despite the already extensive arrest campaigns and field interrogations that have affected more than 700 Palestinian women across the West Bank since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza on October 7, 2023, in addition to dozens more from Gaza.
The organization stressed that this collective targeting is part of a broader pattern of retaliatory and systematic abductions that Israeli forces continue to carry out daily across the occupied West Bank at levels not previously recorded.
It added that the targeting of women has long been one of Israel’s historical policies, resurfacing at key moments over the decades, but has taken on a sharply intensified form since the genocide—both in the number of women abducted and in the severity of the violations accompanying the invasions.
The Prisoners’ Society noted that wives of detainees and Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, along with sisters of detainees and those killed, have been among the most heavily targeted groups.
It added that the majority of women abducted since the start of the genocide were either placed under arbitrary Administrative Detention orders, without charges or trial, or faced “charges” related to what Israel claims is “incitement” on social media.
According to monitoring by Palestinian institutions, the number of Palestinian women held in Israeli prisons reached seventy‑four as of Wednesday —before the latest wave of abductions.
They are subjected to harsh and degrading conditions similar to those faced by all Palestinian detainees, including torture, abuse, severe mistreatment during interrogation, daily humiliation, denial of basic rights such as medical care, and systematic starvation.
The women are also exposed to unprecedented levels of repression by special units and are subjected to repeated strip searches.
