Meanwhile, in the West Bank, most of which is under Israel’s military administration, Israeli authorities have detained roughly as many Palestinians as have been released in the past few days. A post-Oct. 7 crackdown saw the Palestinian population in Israeli custody almost double, by some measures: According to Palestinian rights groups, more than 3,000 Palestinians, mostly in the West Bank, were swept up by Israeli security forces. The majority appear to be held in administrative detention — that is, a form of incarceration without charge or trial that authorities can renew indefinitely.

Israel’s critics contend that even those charged with specific crimes face a skewed, unfair justice system. Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military courts, unlike the half-million Jewish settlers who live in their midst. These courts have in some years churned out convictions at a 99 percent rate, a state of affairs that raises questions about the due process afforded to Palestinians.

“Palestinians are routinely denied counsel, for example, and faced with language barriers and mistranslations that taint testimonies and confessions used in court,” explained Vox’s Abdallah Fayyad. “But it’s not only a lack of due process that plagues this legal system. Oftentimes, these cases are based on specious and far-reaching charges.”

The dynamics of the Israeli carceral system for Palestinians have long undergirded anger over the broader nature of Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories. “The power to incarcerate people who have not been convicted or even charged with anything for lengthy periods of time, based on secret ‘evidence’ that they cannot challenge, is an extreme power,” noted Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “Israel uses it continuously and extensively, routinely holding hundreds of Palestinians at any given moment.”

The deepening crisis that followed Hamas’s bloody rampage on Oct. 7 has only exacerbated tensions. “Administrative detention is one of the key tools through which Israel has enforced its system of apartheid against Palestinians,” Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement this month, citing numerous reports of abuses suffered by Palestinian detainees in recent weeks. “Testimonies and video evidence also point to numerous incidents of torture and other ill-treatment by Israeli forces including severe beatings and deliberate humiliation of Palestinians who are detained in dire conditions.”

Israeli authorities have argued over the years that their practice of administrative detention is in line with policies in other democracies and constitutes a necessary preventive measure, given the security conditions that shape the West Bank. The feeble Palestinian Authority, which has long worked hand-in-glove with Israeli security agencies, has struggled to tamp down rising anger and militancy among Palestinians in the West Bank. In recent weeks, Israeli government officials have lashed out at censure from U.N. officials and organizations like Amnesty International, which an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson describedas “antisemitic” and “biased.”

But Israel’s widespread use of the practice has been long criticized by international observers. A 2012 European parliamentary report described administrative detention as a tactic employed “principally to constrain Palestinian political activism.” In 2020, Michael Lynk, then the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, called on Israel to abolish the practice.

“Administrative detention is an anathema in any democratic society that follows the rule of law,” Lynk said. “When the democratic state arrests and detains someone, it is required to charge the person, present its evidence in an open trial, allow for a full defense and try to persuade an impartial judiciary of its allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.”