Palestine prisoners day: The demands of their struggle

London — As it stands, today on Palestine Prisoners Day, approximately ten thousand Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons today. Since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinians have passed through Israeli detention - nearly one in five since the early 2000s. There is no Palestinian family that has not felt the impacts of this. Imprisonment under the Zionist project was never designed as an exceptional measure, but an essential component in the destruction of the Palestinian people.

What is done inside those prisons deserves to be said plainly, so that we can recognise the severity of this reality. Palestinian detainees are stripped naked, beaten on their genitals, raped, subjected to electric shocks, kept in stress positions until their bodies give way. Mock executions are staged. Threats are made against their children and families. Sleep deprivation is deployed with clinical precision. Solitary confinement stretches into years. Medical treatment is denied until people die of conditions that could have been treated in an afternoon. Some detainees have been returned to their families in states of physical devastation that left those families struggling to recognise them. The Israeli military has, in several instances, photographed and publicised this treatment itself with pride. The dehumanisation is part and parcel of the system within which it exists.

Now Israel has gone even further. A new execution law permits the death penalty - death by hanging - for Palestinian prisoners convicted of killing an Israeli Jew. No equivalent law protects Palestinians killed by Israelis. Palestinians in the West Bank already face military courts operating under martial law, with conviction rates approaching 99%, relying on secret evidence and confessions extracted through the very torture described above. The execution law is the latest point on a line that has been moving in one direction intentionally for decades.

Palestine long predates the war on terror. Israel has spent decades perfecting its apparatus of detention and brutalisation - testing methods, exporting expertise, and helping construct the global narrative of Muslim threat that now gives political cover to states far beyond its borders. Guantanamo, rendition flights, black sites, the systematic degradation of Muslim men across Iraq and Afghanistan - all bear the hallmarks of a logic Israel helped pioneer. When the architecture of "security" requires a body to demonstrate its power, that body has been Muslim. Palestinian prisoners sit at the sharpest edge of this, but they are not its only victims.

Closer to home, the British state has applied the same framework. Muslim men have been imprisoned on secret evidence, held on intelligence that cannot be scrutinised. The Filton24 - activists who disrupted Israeli arms manufacturing at Elbit's Filton facility - were arrested under counter-terror powers despite no terrorism charges, held on remand for over a year beyond standard custody limits, subjected to dawn raids, solitary confinement, and dehumanising conditions. The first six were acquitted and yet the state pushed for retrial. The legislation was always the point; the prosecution is its demonstration.

Palestinian prisoners have understood this for longer than most. They have met a system designed to erase them by organising within it - hunger strikes, collective mobilisation, political education, factional coordination. Resistance leaders have directed movements from behind bars. Prisoner exchanges have been among the most significant acts of the liberation struggle. These people are agents of their own cause, and of ours, who have always represented the very best of us.

On Palestine Prisoners Day, we remember who they are: students, journalists, doctors, parliamentarians, community organisers, and resistance figures - strategically targeted because their presence threatens a project that depends on Palestinian erasure. We remember what is done to them. We remember the execution law waiting in the wings. And we remember that the same architecture operates here.

They have not been forgotten. Their struggle makes demands of us. We intend to continue the pursuit of meeting them.