The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) sent a 75-page submission to the Committee Against Torture ahead of its review of Israel during its upcoming 86th session, scheduled to take place on 10 November 2025.

The Committee is a treaty body composed of ten independent human rights experts that monitors the implementation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment by its States. In line with its mandate, the Committee will examine the report presented by the Israeli government as well as submissions and reports presented by civil society organisations to examine Israel’s compliance with the Convention.

 The last time the Committee formally reviewed Israel’s periodic report was in May 2016 during its 57th session. The Committee then issued a list of concerns and recommendations that largely echoed those from previous reviews, noting Israel’s apparent failure to implement many of them. The torture and ill-treatment in Israeli detention facilities against Palestinian detainees have not only continued but significantly worsened, especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on the Gaza Strip.  

PCHR’s submission, which is based on 330 testimonies collected by PCHR’s field researchers and lawyers, presents strong evidence on unprecedented, widespread torture and ill-treatment methods as well as the inhumane detention conditions that former Palestinian detainees from Gaza have been subjected to in Israeli prisons and military camps since 7 October 2023, including the use of Palestinian detainees as human shields, rape, and other acts of sexual violence.

In its submission, PCHR called on the Committee to publicly condemn the torture acts committed against Palestinian civilians and recognize that the scale and patterns of abuse amount to systematic torture in violation of Articles 1, 2, 11, 12 and 16 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Moreover, PCHR called on the Committee to demand Israel to end all forms of detention and ill-treatment, release all those arbitrarily detained under the Unlawful Combatants Law without delay, allow immediate and unhindered access to the International Committee of the Red Cross and lawyers, and disclose the fate and whereabouts of Palestinians forcibly disappeared by the Israeli authorities.

While the submission focused on the systematic ill-treatment and torture of 330 Palestinian former detainees arrested from Gaza over the last two years, PCHR stressed to the Committee that not only detainees and former detainees are victims of torture, but all Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, who have been subjected for two years to constant bombardment, relentless attacks, starvation, forcible displacement, and deprivation of the minimum requirements for survival, have been and continue to be victims of acts of torture as defined by the Convention.