The Entrenchment of Administrative Detention: More Than 5,000 Orders Since the Start of 2026

The occupation’s courts have issued more than 5,000 administrative detention orders since the start of 2026, new orders and renewals combined, the Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies said.

Before October 7, 2023, administrative detainees numbered 1,300. By August 2026 the figure had passed 3,300, a rise of 260 percent. Riyad al-Ashqar, a researcher and the Center’s director, said the occupation sharply stepped up its use of the policy once the genocidal war on Gaza began.

That figure is a dangerous sign that an arbitrary policy is firmly entrenched, one built to keep as many Palestinians as possible behind bars with no legal basis and no regard for the limits international law places on its use.

Administrative detention, in the Center’s words, is a sword hanging over Palestinians. It drains their years and upends ordinary life. No charge, no legal basis.

The occupation is deliberately wrecking Palestinian lives and futures, al-Ashqar said. It arrests thousands again and again over the years, with little time in between, and never charges them. More than 80 percent of administrative detainees have been held before. Hundreds have spent more of their lives inside the occupation’s prisons than outside.

What the occupation goes after is a prisoner’s whole life, down to the smallest detail. His freedom is only part of it. So is his will. That is why the occupation re-arrests released prisoners so often and so fast: to deny them any chance to build a stable life or plan a future without interference. Some prisoners have been held in administrative detention more than 10 times. Some have spent over 15 years under it. Never charged.

Since 1967, occupation authorities have issued more than 80,000 administrative detention orders against Palestinians. More than half of them were renewals, stretching out detentions already under way. That marks the policy as a tool of revenge and collective punishment, al-Ashqar said, one the occupation uses to keep the Palestinian people’s elite, leaders, and most influential figures locked away for years.

The occupation treats administrative detention as a security file and nothing else, handing it over wholesale to the Shin Bet. The Shin Bet builds its cases on secret allegations no one is allowed to see. Detainees are never handed an indictment. No court convicts them of anything that would justify holding them. They sit for years on nothing but suspicion and security reports. They cannot defend themselves, and they get none of the minimum guarantees of a fair trial.

Al-Ashqar welcomed the joint statement by international diplomatic missions calling for an end to administrative detention and the release of everyone held without charge. That is an important step against the policy, he said.

The statement now has to translate into concrete positions and open the way to international legal and diplomatic action that ends administrative detention or sharply cuts it back.