Judicial Ratification Without Review: Occupation Courts and the Administrative Detention File

The occupation’s security services and its courts work in tandem to keep as many Palestinian prisoners as possible in detention

Occupation courts reject 99% of the appeals that lawyers file to block the renewal of administrative detention orders against Palestinian prisoners, the Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies says. The rejections are flat and unexplained. They come at the direction of the security establishment, which runs the administrative detention file through the Shin Bet.

The security services and the courts divide the labor between them, and thousands of Palestinians stay in prison without charge as a result.

Riyad al-Ashqar, who heads the center, says every appeal that reaches an occupation court, up to and including the Supreme Court, goes before the Shin Bet first. That undermines the basic guarantees of a fair trial. It breaks the rules of independent, professional judicial practice. And it turns the courts into an instrument of the security establishment, which controls the file outright.

Al-Ashqar accuses the occupation’s courts and its security services of working to keep the largest possible number of Palestinian prisoners behind bars, in harsh conditions and for as long as possible, with no indictment and no clear evidence of guilt. That violates the most basic international conventions, which cap how long a person can be held and require that a detainee be told what he is accused of.

An administrative detainee rarely wins an appeal in the courts that handle these cases, and the few who do have already spent at least two years in prison without a clear charge. More often, judges avoid ruling on the substance and renew the detention for a further term. They reject the appeals on instructions from the occupation’s security agencies, citing the “secret file.” Al-Ashqar says their role goes beyond that, to the point of a crime.

Prisoners stay in custody after the terms the courts themselves imposed have run out. Some have already spent years inside. The occupation refuses to release them, and the courts legalize their continued detention under the administrative detention law.

The occupation has sharply stepped up administrative detention since the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip began, issuing more than 22,000 orders since October 7, 2023. None of those detainees received an indictment or a conviction that would justify continued arbitrary detention.

Before the genocidal war, the number of administrative detainees stood at 1,300. By August 2026 it had passed 3,300, a level unseen in decades.

Administrative detention is a tool of collective punishment, al-Ashqar says. The occupation uses it against the Palestinian people, removing its leaders and influential figures and draining their lives away behind bars. It does so with no legal basis and no regard for the restrictions international law places on the practice, which permit it only in narrow circumstances and under set conditions.

The center called on the international bodies that wrote those standards to step in, stop the occupation from taking this arbitrary policy any further, and press it to release administrative detainees held without charge or justification.