In July 2025, over 620 days after the onset of the Gaza genocide, the Zionist entity’s war minister Israel Katz announced plans to concentrate Gaza’s people in a “humanitarian city” – a euphemism for a concentration camp – to be constructed on the ruins of the city of Rafah. The IGF (Israel Genocide Forces), he said, would initially “move” 600,000 currently displaced Gaza civilians into the area, and control the perimeter of the site. People would go through a “security screening” before entering, and once inside would not be allowed to leave. According to Haaretz, the Zionist entity intends to carry out its “migration,” read expulsion, plan for all of Gaza’s population.
Before I argue that the Zionist entity had been imprisoning the Palestinians ever since its inception, let me first say something about terminology. According to Stephen Salaita terms such as “from the River to the Sea,” “Zionist entity,” “Intifada,” and particularly “genocide,” often criticised as antisemitic, reflect clear political choices. Just as crucial as using the term genocide to define the Zionist assault on Gaza, shifting from using “Israel” to calling my former country “the Zionist entity” implies that “Israel” is only temporary, and is a gesture of refusal that keeps the idea of Palestine alive. Employing “Zionist entity” – long used in Arabic – reminds us that the linguistic terrain is never neutral, and that Zionist settler colonialism has always been about eliminating the Palestinian natives.
The most prominent response to the Zionist concentration camp plan was a facile and obvious comparison with the Nazi camps. Just as focusing on the Palestinian 7 October 2023 act of resistance as victimising Zionist Jews and not as rejecting the colonisation of Palestine, Zionist references to the Nazi genocide focus on the Zionist entity’s Jewish citizens as victims rather than perpetrators. If admitted at all, Zionists consider the Gaza genocide only as a threat to their reputation as (self) defenders of their racial colony. Furthermore, employing the Nazi genocide to ground our race analysis of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine without giving credence to its colonial antecedents has been robustly criticised inter alia by race scholar Alexander Weheliye; using the Nazi camps to explicate Zionism as race theory and practice is both Eurocentric and theoretically flawed.
Read more: The Zionist entity as prison, Tufan Al Aqsa as a strategy of abolitionAndrea Pitzer reminds us that concentration camps were not a Nazi invention; they existed when Spanish and British colonisers in the Americas interned colonised populations in camps and reservations, instituting technologies of barbed wire and automatic weapons to enable mass detention. In early twentieth century Southern Africa the British interned more than 200,000 civilians, mostly women and children, and more people died of polluted water, lack of food and infectious diseases than in combat. In 1904 in the German colony of Namibia the rebellious Herero and Nama people were interned in concentration camps where forced labour, meagre rations and lethal diseases killed some 700,000 Namibians, nearly exterminating the Herero. Concentration camps were a racialising technology of eliminating undesirable colonised populations, clearing colonised areas, and punishing rebels and guerrilla fighters, turning civilians into proxies to get at combatants and insurgents. Colonising and warring states employed concentration camps long before the Nazis: by the end of WWI, more than 800,000 civilians had been held in them with hundreds of thousands more forced into exile in remote areas.
The incarceration of Palestinian people is also not a recent technology of colonial control. The Zionist project of eliminating the colonised native population that according to Patrick Wolfe is the aim of settler colonialism, had always involved colonial surveillance, of which the imprisonment of the Palestinian natives was and remains a key strategy. In The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, Ilan Pappe argues that after the 1967 war the Zionist entity created a mega prison as “a practical response to the ideological prerequisites of Zionism: the need to control as much as possible of historical Palestine and create an absolute – if possible, exclusive – Jewish majority in it.” But the mega prison was not just a post-1967 thing, and as Pappe reminds us, the Zionist entity had imposed a military government on the Palestinians it did not expel during the 1947-8 Nakba. The decision to impose a military government on the Galilee, the Triangle, the Naqab and the cities of Ramleh, Lydda, Jaffa and Majdal-‘Asqalan, in which a substantial Palestinian population remained after the Nakba, was taken already during the war, as detailed by Sabri Jiryis. While not actually involving concentration camps, Yair Bäuml writes that the Military Government confined Palestinian citizens to their towns and villages, curtailed their freedom of movement, and forced them to request permission from the military governor when they wanted to do any kind of work or activity beyond the borders of their villages. This included engaging in paid work, commerce, shopping, education, and health care. Military personnel dictated Palestinian citizens’ livelihoods and every aspect of their lives, and even intervened in their relationships, including marriage and divorce. According to Areej Sabagh-Khoury, the military government facilitated dispossession through laws of appropriation, combining state violence, fines for violations of military orders, imprisonment, and the forceful prohibition of return for internally displaced Palestinians.
Derived from the 1945 British Mandate Emergency Defence Regulations, enacted to subdue the Palestinian population after the 1936 Arab Revolt, and adopted by the Zionist parliament, the Knesset, the military government was only lifted after 18 years. It was replaced by another form of inspection of Palestinian lives in the newly occupied territory, where a regime of road blocks, check points, fences, separation walls and mass imprisonment amounts to apartheid, according to human rights organisations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. In The Palestine Laboratory Antony Loewenstein details the high level of surveillance, including security cameras, turnstiles, fences and walls to which the Zionist entity subjects occupied West Bank and Jerusalem Palestinian civilians.
In addition, between 1948 and 1955 the Zionist entity interned several thousands of Palestinian citizens in twenty-twoofficial and unofficial labour and concentration camps. According to Salman Abu Sitta, apart from the dire day-to-day treatment of the internees, as reported by the International Committee of the Red Cross, internees were reduced to forced labour to support the Zionist entity’s war efforts, in conditions that the Red Cross described as “slavery.” Most internees were later expelled from the Zionist entity.
Pappe describes the Gaza Strip as the “ultimate maximum security prison model.” Having been under a total blockade since the Zionist entity’s military unilateral withdrawal from the Strip in 2005, Gaza has experienced momentous de-development, fuel and energy shortages, mass unemployment, shortages in foodstuffs and other necessities, all of which severely impacting normal daily life for all residents and posing severe restrictions of their basic human rights. In 2012 UNRWA reported high percentages of people who had been confined to the Strip since 2005 living below the poverty level and being food insecure and lacking safe drinking water sources. In “Gaza in 2020 – A liveable place?” UNRWA predicted that by 2020 the Gaza Strip would have been “unliveable”. What we have been witnessing as the Zionist genocide in Gaza rages on as I write – mass expulsions of Gaza’s civilian populations from one destroyed area to another, severe shortages of food and drinkable water, infectious diseases, the destruction of hospitals, universities, schools and other facilities, as the IGF continues to massacre thousands of people on a daily basis – confirms UNRWA’s prediction.
Beyond the dire situation in the Gaza Strip, I want to go further and argue that from its very inception, the Zionist entity – interning Palestinian civilians and former combatants in labour and concentration camps immediately after the 1948 Nakba, curtailing Palestinian citizens’ freedoms during the Military Government period, occupying the Palestinian West Bank, the Syrian Golan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula (since returned to Egypt), and constructing Jewish settlements in the occupied territory, constructing a widespread network of security cameras, walls, fences, checkpoints, and segregated roads in the occupied Palestinian territory – has turned colonised Palestine itself into a Zionist-run mega prison.
Statistics from Addameer – Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association – indicate that approximately one million Palestinians have been subjected to arrest, detention, or interrogation. According to the Prisoners’ Club, there have been over 17,000 recorded Palestinian female prisoners since 1967. In 2022, the Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs recorded over 50,000 cases of children arrested and approximately 372 martyrs’ bodies have still not been returned from prisons and detention centres. According to a 2023 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, Francesca Albanese, between 1967 and 2006 over 800,000 Palestinians including children as young as 12, were arrested and detained under authoritarian rules enacted, enforced and adjudicated by the Zionist entity’s security forces. Palestinian detainees are routinely presumed guilty without evidence, arrested without warrants, detained without charge or trial, and brutalised in custody. Evidence abounds about widespread torture inflicted on Palestinian prisoners in notorious prison camps such as Sde Teiman, where countless reports attest to torture and abuse, including sexual abuse, of Palestinian prisoners with the full knowledge of IGF commanders and despite details being reported by the Zionist press. According to Albanese, “mass incarceration serves the purpose of quelling peaceful opposition against the occupation, protecting Zionist military and settlers and facilitating settler colonial encroachment”. Many Palestinian prisoners are kept in administrative detention without charge or trial – at the end of 2024 the Israel Prison Service was holding 3,327 administrative detainees, not counting administrative detainees held by the IGF. All Palestinian prisoners are considered “security prisoners” and not political prisoners. Their imprisonment is used as a tool of subjugating an entire population, “depriving them of self-determination, enforcing racial domination and advancing territorial acquisition by force.” Albanese argues that the Zionist entity’s “carceral regime” haunts Palestinian life even outside prisons. Quite apart from imprisoning civilians in the Gaza enclave, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank live with blockades, walls, segregated infrastructure, checkpoints, settlements encircling Palestinian towns and villages, hundreds of bureaucratic permits, and a web of digital surveillance, all of which “entrap Palestinians in a continuous carceral continuum across strictly controlled enclaves.”
Furthermore, prisons in the Zionist entity, as in other settler colonies and racial states, are also sites of economic exploitation. The link made by Ruth Wilson Gilmore between the prison industrial complex and racial capitalism aids our understanding of the Zionist carceral system in which Palestinians and Jews are judged and incarcerates separately. Racism, Gimore argues, means “organized abandonment” by both state and capitalism, working together to raise racial barriers that create group-differentiated vulnerabilities. The term “prison industrial complex” refers to the profits involved in imprisoning large numbers of people by providing buildings, goods and services that benefit large sectors of society engaged by the security and prison industries. More specifically, as I argued elsewhere, economic exploitation is key to entrenching the Zionist entity’s military occupation and administering its colonial regime to control, exploit, and quell rebellion. Palestinians are made to finance their own subjugation not only by paying the occupiers to demolish their homes or have an executed relative’s body returned for burial, but also by paying heavy fines imposed by the military courts on Palestinian prisoners. In 2016 alone, fines averaged half a million shekels ($145,000) per prisoner. Zionist prisons are essential building blocks of the systematic racialisation and economic exploitation of the Palestinians.
Beyond facts and figures detailing the shocking realities of blockading and imprisoning the people of Gaza, the surveillance of the Palestinian population in the occupied territory, and the subjugation of Palestinian prisoners in the Zionist carceral regime, prisons, as theorised by Orisanmi Burton, are war: “They are state strategies of race war, class war, colonization and counterinsurgency.” Discussing the Long Attica prison rebellion, Burton writes that prison as war is “fundamentally asymmetrical, not only in terms of each side’s capacity and methods, but also in terms of their goals.” Burton quotes from the Pan African revolutionary Queen Mother Audley Moore’s 1973 address at Green Haven Prison where she argued that Black people are a doubly “captive nation,” but that it is not the captives, but the White Man who is “the real criminal.” Moore reminded her audience that, unlike their captors, none of them had ever stolen entire countries, cultures or peoples, or sold human beings in slavery for profit. The aim of what she called “the White Man’s science” is to denature African people, crush their spirits, destroy their cognitive autonomy and transform them into obedient “negroes” with no knowledge of their history or will to resist.
Burton uses the term “prison pacification” – the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls – to argue that in incarcerating thousands of doubly captive negatively racialised people state actors wage a war of conquest on a subject population as part of a broader effort to accumulate capital and preserve the dominance of the White Man. In our case, prison pacification aims to sustain White Jewish supremacy that employs prison as a mode of combat that combines siege warfare and counterinsurgency warfare in an attempt to starve the imprisoned population into submission.
And starve is the key word here. As I write, nearly two years since the onset of the Zionist genocide, the Gaza population is in the late stages of being starved to death. Being starved, as Burton argues in relation to Black prisoners in the US, must be understood as the calculated denial of the material, social, cultural and political nutrients necessary for reproducing defiant Palestinian life and consciousness across generations. Incarceration is central to counterinsurgency, which, according to the US Army, is a style of warfare that involves “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” Counterinsurgency aims to crush the revolt by employing a variety of techniques, including – in the case of Palestine – armed warfare, extrajudicial executions, demolition of homes, villages and urban neighbourhoods, and mass incarceration – all of which have been deployed against the Palestinians by the Zionist entity since its very establishment.
Yet, despite the horrific carceral archipelago that has been the Gaza Strip at least since the 2005 Zionist withdrawal, prison as war constitutes two asymmetrical wars. Burton insists that the Long Attica Rebellion was not a war of conquest and accumulation like the settler colonial state’s carceral war project. Against carceral siege, revolting captives waged a people’s war, a counter-war, a “guerrilla war of self-defence.” Tufan Al Asqa, the 7 October 2023 act of resistance launched by the Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement – Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, Hamas – and its partners in the Popular Resistance Committees was such guerrilla warfare, a ”war of the weak against the strong” that aims to disrupt the social order, raise the cost of business-as-usual to a level that is unsustainable for the colonial power, forcing it to relinquish power or – as was the case with the Zionist settler colony – commit all its military arsenal to perpetrate a genocide on the besieged Gaza enclave.
Burton argues that prison rebellions are less likely to emerge as spontaneous outbursts of anger and more likely to be “organized, calculated movements of massive resistance supported and assisted by outside groups and led by intelligent inmates using revolutionary tactics.” As Toufiq Haddad writes about Tufan Al Aqsa, “The operation was a strategic gambit in an effort to change the rules of the game, both in the long term as well as the short.”
Burton further argues that it was not only rebels but also the state that understood that caeceral struggle was about much more than prison conditions and prison reform. According to Ekundayo Igeleke, Burton shows that the Attica Prison rebels “enacted an insurgent counter-humanism” and he returns to Frantz Fanon’s theory that anticolonial struggle leads to a death of the colonized being and opens up a new human horizon. Following Burton’s argumentthat prisons are war, the Gaza resistance movement attack on the Zionist entity must be understood as an abolitionist strategy of reasserting the humanity of the people of Gaza. Contrary to most academic analyses of prison rebellions being about reform and improvement of carceral conditions, the Attica Prison rebellion as well as Tufan Al Aqsa were themselves a demand, not for reform but for abolition: “The content of this maximum demand was the abolition of prisons, the abolition of war, the abolition of racial capitalism, the abolition of White Man, and the emergence of new modes of social life not predicated on enclosure, extraction, domination, or dehumanization.”
Writing in January 2024, the Palestinian feminist political activist and famed prisoner Khalida Jarrar reminds us that like the mass imprisonment of Palestinians by the Zionist entity – which I have argued constitutes the Zionist entity itself as a mega prison for Palestinian people – so also Palestinian resistance against mass incarceration is not new. Prisoners in solitary confinement, otherwise known as the siege of Gaza, she writes, have always rebelled, and after 7 October 2023 their demand has shifted from the “liberation of prisoners” to the abolitionist demand of “emptying the prisons.” Jarrar argues that “Palestine, and Gaza in particular, has become a paradigm in which colonial capitalism has developed its brutal oppressive tools, and attempts to annihilate an entire people.” Because the Gaza resistance movement has not been defeated by the Zionist entity, and despite the genocide and the destruction of the Gaza Strip, the demand of “emptying the prisons”, she writes, has become a reality since October 2023. Jarrar insists that dismantling the oppressive colonial system, of which prisons are but one technology, can be achieved: “dismantling colonial and settler servitude is a crucial stage for humanity and for those who have suffered from its effects for decades, and who continue to reject and resist it till this day.”
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