العربية
HE
العربية
HE
On February 12, 2025, human rights organizations – Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, HaMoked, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel – filed a petition to the High Court of Justice (HCJ), demanding that the military be required to provide detainees held at Ofer military facility with food that meets the nutritional requirements of an adult, as mandated also by the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law. The petition further demands that the military provide a special dietary menu to detainees with specific nutritional needs.
The petition concerns hundreds of Palestinian detainees, out of the thousands arrested in the Gaza Strip since the outbreak of the war in October 2023 and still being held by the military. These detainees are held, as a rule, under the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which was amended in the wake of the war to allow prolonged administrative detention without oversight. Initially, these detainees were held in military custody at the Sde Teiman facility, under inhuman and unbearably cruel conditions which amounted to torture. Numerous deaths of detainees held there have been reported. Following a petition by human rights organizations, including HaMoked, demanding the removal of detainees from Sde Teiman, the State transferred several hundred detainees to Ofer military facility, also under military custody, claiming that the facility had been prepared to accommodate approximately 700 detainees.
However, although the stated purpose of the transfer to Ofer was to ensure detainees would be held under appropriate and lawful conditions, it soon became clear that the actual conditions at Ofer are also severely unsuitable, including the provision of meager and non-varied food, insufficient for human consumption, particularly over prolonged periods, given that Ofer is a permanent holding facility, not a temporary screening or intake site like Sde Teiman.
In the petition, the organizations claimed that the declared food menu at Ofer provides less than 1,000 calories per day and approximately 40 grams of protein – an amount not only far below the basic nutritional requirements of a human being but also discriminatory, as it does not compare with the food provided by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) to criminal inmates. It even falls short of the food provided to security inmates in the IPS, whose prison nutrition is also inadequate, but still significantly better than that provided at Ofer. (It should be noted that on April 4, 2024, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Gisha filed a principled petition to the HCJ demanding an end to the starvation policy toward security detainees in IPS custody, and calling for them to be provided with food in quantity and composition sufficient to maintain health and equal to that provided to other prisoners – HCJ 4268/24. This petition was filed alongside individual petitions submitted by HaMoked on behalf of prisoners.)
The petitioners argued that, based on information from released detainees and attorneys who visited the facility – as well as an expert opinion by a dietitian who reviewed the declared food menu – the inadequate nutrition provided at Ofer amounts to starvation, harms detainees’ health, and causes suffering. This, they argued, constitutes a violation of the detainees’ rights to health and dignity, as the right to food and the right to health are inherently interconnected. The petition further emphasized that ensuring appropriate detention conditions is a fundamental obligation of the State; failure to uphold this obligation may be a relevant consideration in reviewing the legality of a person’s continued detention and constitutes a form of unlawful punishment without trial.
The petition stressed that the State is obligated to uphold all the conditions set forth in the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law and its associated regulations, as affirmed by the HCJ in its ruling regarding Sde Teiman. The state may not choose to selectively comply with only parts of its legal obligations. The petitioners clarified that the State’s duties toward detainees remain binding regardless of the inhumane treatment to which Israeli hostages are subjected by Hamas or other actors in Gaza. The petition also underscored that in the case of detainees held at Ofer, judicial oversight is particularly critical due to the lack of visits by independent external bodies and the relative isolation in which the detainees are held.
A hearing date for the petition has not yet been scheduled.
* On September 7, 2025, the HCJ accepted the petition regarding detention conditions in IPS facilities, ruling that security detainees must be provided with basic living conditions, including food in quantity and composition sufficient to maintain their health. The judgment concluded as follows: it must be ensured that “the minimum standards the state is obligated to uphold toward any person in its custody, however contemptible and abject that person may be, be maintained even in these difficult times – not only because this is required by law, but also in order to preserve the human dignity within us all”.
