Here is the English translation of the article, faithful in tone and structure:
Israel Does Not Only Imprison: It Administers Torture
Ben Marmarelli is a civil rights lawyer in Israel and one of the few legal advocates who has dedicated his practice to defending Palestinian political prisoners. Trained alongside Avigdor Feldman, a historic figure in Israeli human rights law, Marmarelli now represents some of the most emblematic detainees in the Israeli prison system, including Marwan Barghouti. His testimony does not describe isolated excesses or occasional abuses. It describes, with legal precision, a regime of systematic torture administered by the state itself.
In the interview, Marmarelli argues that since October 7, the detention conditions of Palestinian political prisoners have deteriorated to the point of becoming a regime of near-total isolation. With no family visits, no access to media, and no meaningful contact with the outside world, detainees are reduced to a single channel of communication: the lawyer. But even that channel, he explains, has been turned into a mechanism of punishment. Legal visits are delayed, blocked, or directly used as a pretext for new sessions of torture.
The most serious part of his account is that the violence is not exceptional, but structural. Marmarelli reports beatings, prolonged stress positions, humiliation, sexual torture, and rape with objects during transfers inside the prison system. In one case, one of his clients asked him to stop visiting because every visit triggered new abuse.
The accusation is devastating: the system does not merely imprison; it administers pain, silence, and degradation as policy. And it does so, according to Marmarelli, under the gaze of courts that know what is happening and do not intervene. His testimony turns the prison into something more than a place of punishment: into an infrastructure of dehumanization sustained by the state.
