Israel is trying to murder resistance icon Abdullah Barghouti in its dungeons
The Prisoners’ Media Office has rung the alarm bells over the harrowing treatment being meted out to Abdullah Barghouti in Israeli dungeons. His life is in imminent danger.
Unusually, my story from Tuesday — Inside Israeli dungeons: Torture, murder, and the spirit of resistance — appears to have been delivered only to a fraction of my subscribers for some reason. I hope this email reaches everyone’s inbox and that you are able to read the article if you missed it yesterday.
Inside Israeli dungeons: Torture, murder, and the spirit of resistance
Stripped of their cloak of invincibility once and for all following the successful Al-Aqsa Flood operation, carried out by the Palestinian resistance on October 7, 2023, the Israelis have been committing genocide in Gaza in broad daylight uninterrupted for over 18 months. They have laid complete siege to nearly two million residents of the tiny strip of…
In the article, I mentioned the horrific torture to which resistance icon Abdullah Barghouti is being subjected in the notorious Gilboa prison.
Incidentally, there has been an update on his condition.
The Prisoners’ Media Office issued an urgent appeal on Tuesday, detailing the abuse Barghouti is being subjected to in a concerted effort to kill him inside the Israeli torture facility. The statement detailed the harrowing treatment of Barghouti and stated that “his health condition has reached a very critical stage that directly threatens his life.”
Here is the Prisoners’ Media Office statement in full:
Regarding the dangerous situation of prisoner leader Abdullah Al-Barghouti in occupation prisons
The Prisoners’ Media Office confirms that prisoner leader Abdullah Al-Barghouti is facing a systematic liquidation attempt inside the Israeli Gilboa prison, where his health condition has reached a very critical stage that directly threatens his life.
The latest information from the prisons indicates the following:
1. Prisoner Abdullah Al-Barghouti is subjected to severe beatings, to the extent that his body is covered with blue spots, his head is filled with blood clots, with swelling in his eyes and fractures in his ribs, causing him to lose the ability to sleep.
2. Suppression units raid his cell, led by an officer called “Amir,” where he is assaulted with beatings until approximately half a litre of blood flows from his body each time.
3. After the beating ends, dogs are brought in to maul his blood-soaked body, with the officer issuing the order: “Bring in the dogs to have fun with him.”
4. After each round of torture, the suppression forces pour hot dishwashing liquid on his emaciated body to increase the pain.
5. Al-Barghouti is subjected to verbal humiliation, with the officer telling him: “You were a former leader, today you are zero... you must die.”
6. As a result of the torture, Al-Barghouti repeatedly falls into a coma, with his hand wrapped in a garbage bag and toilet cardboard due to the absence of any means of protection.
7. Al-Barghouti is unable to sleep normally and is forced to sit on the ground with his head bent forward due to severe pain.
8. Al-Barghouti has not been able to shower for 12 days and has to soak bread in water and drink it due to his inability to chew.
Based on the above, we at the Prisoners’ Media Office emphasise the following:
What prisoner leader Abdullah Al-Barghouti is subjected to is a deliberate slow assassination crime, constituting a flagrant violation of all international norms and conventions.
We affirm that the occupation’s continuous attempts to eliminate leaders of the prisoner movement inside prisons will only bring it more anger and popular explosion.
We emphasise that the continued international silence has encouraged the occupation to persist in committing these crimes, which represent a stigma on the forehead of those who claim to defend human rights.
We call on international human rights organisations, especially the International Committee of the Red Cross, to intervene urgently to visit prisoner Al-Barghouti and check on his condition.
We demand an international investigation and holding the occupation accountable for these crimes before the International Criminal Court.
We call on our people’s masses and free people of the world to come out in anger marches in support of prisoners in jails, considering their cause sacred and any harm to them a red line.
Prisoners’ Media Office
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Barghouti’s resistance
Barghouti, who was detained in March 2003, has been serving 67 life sentences plus an additional 5,200 years — the longest sentence in Israeli history — for the deaths of 67 Israeli squatters the illegal occupation’s illegitimate kangaroo courts attributed to him and his activities as an engineer for Al-Qassam Brigades (the military arm of Hamas) in the West Bank.
The Kuwait-born engineer, with a Jordanian passport and a history of employment in South Korea, spent just three years in the resistance before being detained, however, those three years changed the face of the resistance in the West Bank with his ability to fashion high-intensity explosive devices with easily available ingredients.
It’s a skill, he said, he learned on the internet.
Known as the Prince of Shadows, for his ability to evade detection and capture, Barghouti was a nightmare for the Zionists in the three years he was active in the West Bank. It took a Zionist agent to inform on him to the occupation, which detained him while he was taking his daughter Tala to a doctor for treatment. In his more than two decades in the Zionist dungeons, Barghouti has endured long stretches in solitary confinement and has been allowed visitors a mere handful of times.
Despite the hardships, Barghouti has written 12 books from his prison cell, including the autobiographical novel, The Prince of Shadows. In an interview via a smuggled phone in 2015, he told his comrades in Hamas, “We are patient and will continue to be so even if we’d be released in a thousand years. The prisoners are ready to be patient. Steadfast. Steadfast.”
International abandonment of the Palestinians
Among its appeals for protecting Barghouti, the Prisoners’ Media Office has urged the ICRC to intervene urgently in a bid to alleviate the murderous Israeli campaign against Barghouti.
Khaled Mahajna, attorney for the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainee Affairs, has revealed that the Red Cross has completely abandoned the Palestinian detainees. “The Red Cross has not visited a single Palestinian detainee since October 7,” Mahajna said in an interview in which he detailed horrific sexual abuse and rape of the detainees at the hands of the occupation:
The Red Cross’s complete abandonment of the Palestinians shows yet another way in which international organisations have failed them and, in effect, handed complete impunity to the Israelis to act as they please.
Israel is getting away with literal genocide in Gaza and has already murdered 65 Palestinians, including minors, in its dungeons since October 7. If its relentless and murderous treatment of Palestinian hostages continues, that number will only rise.
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Israel and rape
The resistance to the ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign in Gaza by the Palestinian groups in the enclave and by Hezbollah in northern occupied Palestine has forced hundreds of thousands of Israelis to flee from the homes they stole from the Palestinians in the so-called Gaza envelope (the areas bordering Gaza) and northern historic Palestine. Those who…
Hatred for these Israeli Zionists knows no bounds. They are the most despicable vermin ever to walk the face of the earth. They are well beyond any dehumanizing treatment the Nazis delivered in WWII. May they be damned to receive the boomerang effect of all they have wrought for the last 7 decades…they and all who have made this possible.
Unimaginable… The poor man. As the Prisoners’ Media Office says here what is described constitutes, "a flagrant violation of all international norms and conventions,” AND most unforgivably: "the continued international silence has encouraged the occupation to persist in committing these crimes, which represent a stigma on the forehead of those who claim to defend human rights.” This is far worse than historical war crimes because in the 21st century we all KNOW what they are doing. In the past, people could plead ignorance. Not any more. It is more than a “stigma", because in failing to react they might as well be in there alongside prison guards and the IDF raping and beating prisoners - setting dogs on them. I begin to ask of the so-called progressive and liberal West, what are we, truly? All our so-called enlightened, humanitarian values are hollow and empty. We are immoral barbarians and we will not be forgiven.