Imagine this: the incarceration of an entire people — thousands behind bars; millions more hemmed in by barbed wire, towering walls, and a seamless hi-tech surveillance system; their movements strictly monitored, mapped, controlled and restricted; millions of facial images, phone numbers, family and community networks, and past carceral history fed into the most sophisticated network of biometric, increasingly AI-based algorithms.
This is the situation in Apartheid Israel.
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Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, back in 1967, the apartheid regime has spirited over a million Palestinians into prisons, most of them inside Israel ‘proper’, in flagrant breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention; tens of thousands without charge, including children, under periodically extended rounds of preventive detention
Palestinian political prisoners and hostages are routinely subjected to what experts define as torture.
In a July 2023 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Italian legal scholar Francesca Albanese laid out Israel’s carceral system in graphic detail, a system she says has turned occupied Palestine into a “carceral continuum,” and “constantly surveilled open-air panopticon.”
In her most recent report, released in February 2026, Albanese says that “torture has become integral” to Israel’s system of domination and oppression.
A “continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror,” is how Albanese describes Apartheid Israel’s system, “designed to break bodies, deprive a people of their dignity, and force them from their land.”
Francesca Albanese is Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine. The GPM has spoken with her on a couple of occasions. Here’s a conversation we had back in 2023. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Here’s a more recent conversation with Francesca, following Israel’s assault on Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank, in early 2025, replicating its then-well advanced genocidal assault on Gaza:
Of the ten-thousand Palestinians currently held in Israeli dungeons, none are more prominent than Marwan Barghouti.
Marwan Barghouti is a veteran member of Palestine’s Fatah movement and political party.
In 2002, the Second Intifada just underway, Barghouti was convicted by a military court for his alleged involvement in attacks in which five Israelis dies. Barghouti denied the charges, and refused to recognize the court. The Inter-Parliamentary Union declared, at the time, that Barghouti was denied a fair trial.
Barghouti, now 66 years-old, is serving a life sentence. He’s widely considered Palestine’s most popular leader – far more so than Israel-USA’s collaborative man in Ramallah, Mahmoud Abbas. Should he ever be liberated, Barghouti is considered the most likely figure to replace Abbas, uniting Palestinians across political factions, and advancing the so-called Two-State Solution.
For this reason, the apartheid regime has no intention of releasing him.
The Palestinian Mandela, Marwan Barghouti is commonly called. The comparison isn’t quite apt. Nelson Mandela was liberated, after 27 years in jail. A similar figure, native American leader Leonard Peltier, spent almost fifty years in jail, before Joe Biden pardoned him.
Will the Israelis ever liberate Marwan Barghouti? Not unless they’re forced to — and no one is going to do that.
Of late, Barghouti has been starved, beaten, denied access to health services, and set upon by dogs. Apartheid Israel’s fascist security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has gone to the bother of visiting Barghouti in jail, just to taunt him!
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For the latest news about Marwan Barghouti, the GPM reached out to his lawyer, Ben Marmorelli.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Watch our conversation here. Ben’s audio isn’t that good. Listen closely.
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