Conclusions
94. Under Israeli occupation, generations of Palestinians have endured widespread and systematic arbitrary deprivation of liberty, often for the simplest acts of life. Since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinians, including children, have been detained based on an array of authoritarian rules enacted, enforced and adjudicated by the Israeli military. Palestinians are often presumed guilty without evidence, arrested without warrants, and detained without charge or trial. Physical and psychological abuse are distressingly common. Without condoning crimes that Palestinians have committed during decades of illegal occupation, most criminal convictions of Palestinians have been the result of a litany of violations of international law, including due process violations, that taint the legitimacy of the administration of justice by the occupying power. Many such convictions concern legitimate expressions of civil and political rights, and the right to resist an illegal foreign occupier.
95. By depriving Palestinians of the protections afforded by international law, the occupation reduces them to a ‘de-civilianized’ population, stripped of their status of protected persons and fundamental rights. Treating the Palestinians as a collective, incarcerable threat erodes their protection as ‘civilians’ under international law, deprivesthemoftheirfundamental
96. Mass incarceration reinforces the power imbalance between the Palestinians and Israeli institutions and settlers, facilitating settler-colonial encroachment. By shifting from ‘the security of the occupying power’ to ‘the security of the occupation itself’, Israel has disguised ‘security’ as the permanent control over the territory it occupies and tries to annex. Law enforcement has served as a tool to ensure the imposition of Israel’s occupation and racial domination and the furtherance of its settler-colonial project. This has entrenched segregation, subjugation, fragmentation and, ultimately, the dispossession of Palestinian lands and Palestinians’ forced displacement. Intended primarily to secure colonies’ establishment and expansion, this system suffocates Palestinian life and undermines Palestinians’ collective existence.
97. Through an array of physical, bureaucratic, and digital mechanisms, the Israeli regime has turned the occupied territory into a ‘panopticon’, where Palestinians are constantly surveilled and disciplined. Within this system, typical of settler-colonial regimes, widespread and systematic arbitrary deprivation of liberty and cruel and degrading treatment on a large scale, appear to form part of Israel’s state policy of domination of the Palestinians as-a-people enforced also through beyond-prison confinement.
98. Thewidespreadandsystematicarbi
