UN expert warns torture has become ‘state doctrine’ in Israel, making prisons instruments of genocide and torture

GENEVA – Israel’s systematic torture of Palestinians, long shielded by decades of impunity and political cover, has become a defining instrument of ongoing genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, a UN expert warned today.

“Since the onset of the genocide, the Israeli prison system has degenerated into a laboratory of calculated cruelty,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, in her new report to the UN Human Rights Council.

“What once operated in the shadows is now practiced openly: a regime of organised humiliation, pain and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels.”

Albanese said policies imposed by senior officials, including the Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, have institutionalised torture, collective punishment and manifestly dehumanising conditions of detention.

“Those responsible for these heinous violations of human rights, from which no derogation is possible even in times of war, must face investigation and justice, including before the International Criminal Court,” the Special Rapporteur said.

Albanese’s report warns that since October 2023, more than 18,500 Palestinians have been detained across the occupied Palestinian territory, including at least 1,500 children. Thousands remain in detention without charge or trial. Many have been forcibly disappeared. Nearly 100 detainees have died in custody. Detainees have been abused in unfathomable ways, including rape with bottles, metal rods and knives, starvation, breaking of bones and teeth, burning, being spat upon, and being attacked and urinated upon by dogs.

In 2025, the UN Committee against Torture denounced “a de facto State policy of organized and widespread torture and ill-treatment … that has gravely intensified since 7 October 2023.”

“A system that has long been used to dominate, degrade and break Palestinians has evolved and hardened into state doctrine,” Albanese warned.

“It is defended by politicians, rationalised by legal institutions, sanitised by media narrative and tolerated by governments that continue to arm and shield Israel.”

The report by the Special Rapporteur finds that torture extends beyond prison walls. Through relentless bombardment, forced displacement, starvation, the destruction of homes, hospitals and infrastructure, pervasive surveillance, and terror inflicted by soldiers and settler terror militias, Israel has created what the report calls a “torturous environment” across the entire occupied Palestinian territory.

“In Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinians are subjected to a continuum of suffering,” Albanese said. “There is no refuge. No sanctuary. No safe place to exist.”

The report concludes that the systematic use of torture, combined with the wider campaign of destruction inflicted on Palestinians, forms an integral component of the ongoing genocide, inflicting severe bodily and mental harm on Palestinians as a group.

“Torture does to the individual what genocide does to a people,” she said. “It destroys the conditions of life and human dignity. It reduces human beings to objects of abuse,” the expert said.

Albanese urged Israel to immediately cease all acts of torture and ill-treatment, grant access to international investigators and humanitarian organizations, and ensure accountability for those responsible pending its urgently needed dismantlement of the occupation.

“Member states must meet their legal obligations to prevent and punish genocide, torture and other serious violations of international law,” she said, including by investigating and issuing arrest warrants for those responsible, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Israel Katz.

“International law is unequivocal: torture is absolutely prohibited, without exception,” Albanese said.

“Its increasing use as part of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people makes this violation all the more grave and indefensible,” she said. “If the international community continues to tolerate such acts when inflicted on Palestinians, then the law itself will be stripped of meaning.”