Red Cross to meet Israeli security officials at detention facility amid push to renew prison visits

Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross are expected to meet Israeli security officials at a detention facility this week as part of ongoing efforts to resume its visits to Palestinian security prisoners and detainees, an ICRC spokesperson tells The Times of Israel, following a Channel 12 report on the matter.

The spokesperson clarifies that the meeting will not itself constitute a renewal of the visits, after Channel 12 reported this evening that the ICRC is expected to begin visiting prisoners in Israeli jails this week for the first time since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack.

“We are continuing our dialogue with the authorities, and hope that visits — which, by definition, include meetings with detainees — will resume,” the spokesperson says.

Israel’s High Court of Justice in June unanimously ruled to annul the government’s blanket policy prohibiting the ICRC from visiting Palestinian security prisoners and halting the sharing of information about them following October 7. The government justified the ban in part by pointing to Hamas’s refusal to allow the Red Cross to visit Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

The justices did not specify when the visits had to resume.

According to Channel 12, the government has since made significant efforts to delay the implementation of that decision until after elections in late October, though those efforts appear to have failed.

A series of reports issued by the Public Defender’s Office and revealed in January found that Palestinian security detainees held in Israeli prisons suffer from severe and systematic violence from prison guards, deprivation of food and medical neglect, as well as unsanitary conditions that caused and exacerbated outbreaks of disease in the prisons.

The Israel Prison Service has denied allegations of systematic abuse, while National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has repeatedly boasted of imposing harsher conditions on security prisoners since October 7.

The Israel Prison Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.