Palestinian Prisoners' Club says Israel has detained over 2,000 children since October 2023

The Palestinian Prisoners' Club says Israeli authorities have detained more than 2,000 Palestinian children since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, with at least 350 still in custody, according to a statement the group issued Wednesday.

The organization, which has tracked Palestinian detentions for decades, said six more children were seized overnight in the West Bank, primarily in the towns of Sa'ir and Al-Shuyukh in the Hebron Governorate. It described the arrests as part of what it called an ongoing campaign targeting Palestinian minors. Occupation Watch has not independently verified the overnight arrest figures or the identities of those detained.

The group alleged that children held in Israeli custody face torture, food deprivation, isolation and denial of medical care. It did not name individual detainees or cite specific incidents to document those conditions in the statement as reported.

"The organisation accused Israeli courts of facilitating these practices and criticized what it described as a lack of meaningful accountability for abuses against detained minors."

The Prisoners' Club also raised the practice of administrative detention, under which Palestinians, including minors, can be held without formal charges or a release date. The group said the practice strips children of family contact and schooling while leaving them without a clear timeline for release. Administrative detention has been a fixture of Israeli military law in the West Bank for decades and has drawn criticism from international rights bodies, though Israeli officials maintain it is a necessary security tool subject to judicial review.

The group said its count of detained children understates the true toll, noting that an unknown number of minors from Gaza remain unaccounted for amid what it described as enforced disappearances and missing-persons cases since the war began. Israeli authorities have not issued a comprehensive public accounting of Palestinian minors held from Gaza during the same period.

The Palestinian Prisoners' Club is an independent Palestinian organization that has monitored detention conditions and compiled prisoner data since the 1990s. Its figures are widely cited by Palestinian officials and international rights groups, though they are not independently audited by a neutral third party. Occupation Watch is treating the specific numbers in this statement, the 2,000 figure, the 350 current detainees, and the overnight Hebron arrests, as claims attributed to the Prisoners' Club pending independent corroboration.