Jails running out of room due to war, prison service warns
Prison population rose by 3,000 since outbreak of war, with 200 more being incarcerated every week
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
The dramatic rise in the prison population since the outbreak of war with Hamas has strained the system’s capacity to house them all, the Israel Prison Service warned lawmakers on Monday.
“We are very close to using up all the places for prisoners,” Lt. Col. Elyasaf Zakai, head of the IPS’s Planning and Incarceration Branch, told members of the Knesset National Security Committee, adding that “it is impossible to overcrowd prisoners indefinitely.”
As of last week, the number of prisoners in Israeli jails numbered some 19,372, an increase of over 3,000 since October and significantly more than the maximum prison population of 14,500 mandated by law.
Eighty-four percent of those classified as security prisoners are currently living in an area of under three square meters in size, less than the legal limit, and 3,000 prisoners are now sleeping on mattresses on the floor rather than in beds.
This situation is potentially dangerous and “my biggest fear is that we will lose control over the prisoners in the prisons,” committee chairman MK Zvika Fogel (Otzma Yehudit) warned.
Despite this, “it is very important to provide creative solutions within the limits of the law in order to allow us to increase the number of inmates in the prisons,” he argued, explaining that “security prisoners provide a lot of operational information.”
Last month, in the wake of Hamas’s devastating assault on southern Israel, lawmakers passed a bill allowing the government to declare an “incarceration emergency,” paving the way for the temporary lifting of restrictions on housing conditions for prisoners.
Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza after thousands of Hamas fighters invaded the south of the country on October 7, rampaging through communities and killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking another estimated 240 people hostage.
Israel was subjected to international criticism earlier this month when images of Palestinian men in Gaza being rounded up by troops and stripped to their underwear emerged online.
