In occupied Palestine, Israel’s vast prison archipelago has turned into an engine of extermination. Since the Gaza genocide began over two years ago, thousands of Palestinians have been disappeared into cages, camps, and subterranean cells, denied sunlight, food, medical care and even their own names. The evidence is overwhelming: Israel is not detaining Palestinians — it is destroying them.
The record that now exposes Israel’s prison system as a site of organised mass murder has been assembled by Palestinian civil society working under extreme pressure. Organisations such as Addameer, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, Al-Haq, Al Mezan, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs have documented disappearances, torture, starvation, medical neglect, and deaths in custody.
Over 9,000 — and possibly more than 10,000 — prisoners and detainees are currently facing these dire conditions in Israeli dungeons.
In camps like Sde Teiman, detainees are held in cages, stripped, beaten, raped, mauled by dogs, deprived of food and sleep, and subjected to a policy of deliberate medical neglect. In the underground Rakefet complex, Palestinians are entombed in lightless cells for months on end — a practice so cruel that the prison was shut down decades ago, only to be proudly reopened after October 2023 by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. As Palestinian woman recently released from Israeli custody told investigators, after surviving rape, beating, and days chained naked to a metal bed: “I wished for death every moment.”
Many do not survive the treatment. It is probable that 200 to 400 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli custody since October 2023, according to human rights organisations, forensic investigators, and recently returned remains. Many were found blindfolded, handcuffed, bearing gunshot wounds at point-blank range, crushed limbs, signs of systematic torture. Others died slowly: starved, untreated, amputated without anaesthetic, left to rot in isolation cells where even daylight is forbidden. Israeli government ministers openly boast about the abuse they inflict.
The killing of Palestinian prisoners may soon become lawful under Israeli law. In November, a bill on the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners passed a second reading in the Israeli Knesset.
Neither empire’s carceral system nor resistance to it stop at the borders of historic Palestine.
Across the imperial core, the repression of Palestine solidarity has escalated just as the truth of Israel’s atrocities becomes undeniable. In Britain, that repression has produced political prisoners of its own.
This week, the Progressive International published a dispatch by Madeleine Norman, a political prisoner held in HMP Low Newton, where women imprisoned for direct action in solidarity with Palestinian liberation have begun a hunger strike — refusing food in recognition of, and in resistance to, the conditions that Palestinian detainees endure every day.
Inside Low Newton, they suffer medical neglect, psychological pressure, arbitrary punishment, forced isolation, and the grinding machinery of a prison system designed not for justice but for social control. Many emerge from this prison system with crippling disabilities. Some take their own lives. Like the Israeli prison system, Norman writes, UK prisons are designed to “sustain these populations in conditions of total immiseration and despair, such that they are too weak to fight back”.
Carceral regimes — from Britain to Palestine and beyond — operate according to the same fundamental logic, which seeks to break the spirit of resistance. This is why standing with political prisoners is a strategic imperative in the struggle against imperialism — and why movements around the world are organising in solidarity with them.
In South Africa, for example, former political detainees and prisoners have begun to organise around the worsening situation facing Palestinians in Israeli custody. At a rally in Cape Town on 29 November, Neil Coleman spoke about the continuity between the violence experienced under apartheid and the violence now documented in Israeli prisons.
“Exactly 40 years ago around 10,000 of us were detained under the apartheid state of emergency… As ex political prisoners and detainees, who received global support and solidarity, we have a moral obligation to defend our Palestinian brothers and sisters.”
For decades, a secretive Catholic organisation has operated in the shadows, infiltrating governments, banks, and elite institutions to advance its arch-conservative agenda.
Opus Dei, meaning “Work of God,” presents itself as a pious lay movement. But behind its veneer of holiness lies a network of power, exploitation, and political influence that spans the globe. Reactionary International Research Consortium has released a new investigation into Opus Dei, which you can read here.
In the early hours of Friday 5 December, dozens of protestors convened at 1A Colony Road in Jersey City, United States, to picket G&B Packing, whose warehouse is operated by Interglobal Forwarding Services—a company that works closely with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and U.S. federal contractors to ship military cargo to Israel and supply its genocidal assault on Gaza.
Over a thousand tons of military equipment was shipped every week from the warehouse through August 2025, as revealed in a Drop Site report based on research from the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Progressive International.
The Observatory of the Progressive International remains vigilant as the opposition-led electoral council show serious system failures that compromise the integrity of the electoral process in Honduras — the very risks our observer mission warned before election day.
Meanwhile, the campaign of US electoral interference continues apace, with US President Donald Trump granting a full pardon to the National Party's former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández despite a clear record and standing conviction on charges of narco-trafficking and corruption during his tenure in Tegucigalpa.
The Organization of American States’ observation mission’s silence in the face of these allegations is deeply troubling. All national and international electoral observers must take claims of interference with utmost seriousness, and the competent authorities must clarify these irregularities without delay to ensure that the sovereign will of the Honduran people is fully respected.
On Monday 1 December, known as Cyber Monday, global protests against Amazon continued under the banner of Make Amazon Pay. Cities across the United States saw protests outside Amazon-owned Wholefoods stores, with activists charging the company with complicity in ICE’s violent deportation machine, through providing cloud technology services for the agency.
In New York, warehouse workers from Amazon Labor Union rallied alongside tech workers organised through No Tech for Apartheid outside Amazon’s Manhattan headquarters to protest the company’s complicity in Israel's genocide and ICE's deportations.
Sliman Mansour’s Prison (1982) depicts five men, hands bound behind their back and heads covered.
Mansour was born in 1947 in Birzeit, Palestine. A graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, he emerged as a leading figure in the Palestinian art movement. His most iconic painting, "Jamal al-Mahamel" (Camel of Burdens, 1973), depicts a porter carrying Jerusalem on his back and has become an enduring symbol of Palestinian steadfastness.
