“Israel contends that it has the right to circumvent certain international obligations in the West Bank, saying that it’s not part of Israel’s sovereign territory and therefore subject to military laws that can restrict people’s civil rights. But watchdog groups, including the United Nations Human Rights Committee, argue that as the occupying power, Israel must respect human rights in Palestinian territories — especially as the occupation grows older and more entrenched.
And before the war, Israel was not, by and large, deploying this tool lawfully. “Amnesty has found that Israel’s systematic use of administrative detention against Palestinians indicates that it’s used to persecute Palestinians rather than as an extraordinary and selectively used preventative measure,” Rghebi said.
Israel maintains that it detains people because of legitimate security concerns, such as potential participation in violent attacks. But while there is a thin veneer of due process — Palestinians can appeal their detention orders, for example — the reality is that a stunningly low number of appeals succeed, in no small part because as both local and international human rights groups have documented, neither the detainees nor their lawyers are told what evidence Israel has against them. (According to B’Tselem, Israeli military courts only nullified 1.2 percent of detention orders issued between 2015 and 2017, and an investigation by Haaretz found that as of August, not a single detention order had been canceled this year.)”