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| Arwa Mahdawi |
Ben-Gvir posts Palestinians on conveyor belts to detention camps. The world is silent
Thu 3 Sep 2026 06.00 EDT
Let me introduce you to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Israel’s far-right Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party, the minister of national security, and an almost cartoonishly evil man. You’ll have heard his name before: he made international news when he filmed himself taunting bound activists who had been detained trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. But you might not be familiar with many of his recent shocking comments, because they haven’t been widely covered by much of the US media.
Let’s start with an AI-generated video that Ben-Gvir posted on Twitter/X on Sunday and then deleted. It shows portly Palestinian prisoners being loaded on to a conveyor belt and going into a detention camp, then emerging emaciated. The caption is “we promised – we delivered!” which seems to be a reference to the national security minister’s promise to worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners. An ambitious goal, considering conditions are already hellish: Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has likened the prisons where Palestinians are kept to “torture camps”.
I’m being diplomatic with my summary of this latest video, by the way. I suggest you go watch it yourself to fully take in how awful it is. (It may have been deleted, but it lives on online). If the podcaster Hasan Piker had tweeted something similar, with Israelis as the subject rather than Palestinians, it would be front-page news. US lawmakers, all of whom seem to be obsessed with Piker, would be demanding that the podcaster be punished.
Ben-Gvir, by the way, has some imaginative ideas for punishment. One of his sick fantasies is to put crocodiles in moats around prisons where Palestinians are held to stop prison breaks. The plan is now on hold because Israeli rights groups have said it is cruel to crocodiles.
I can’t stress enough that, in any discussion of Palestinian “prisoners”, it’s important to remember that many of these people have not gone through any sort of due process. Thousands of prisoners, including about 200 children, are held under “administrative detention”: a technocratic name for a dystopian practice.
To quote the B’Tselem definition: “In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit. The person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them.”
In other words: if you are Palestinian, heavily armed Israeli soldiers can come into your house in the middle of the night, drag you into a de facto torture chamber despite the fact that you haven’t committed a crime, and hold you there indefinitely without telling you why you’re being held or informing your family where you are.
When you hear the word “prisoner”, people like Ben-Gvir want you to think of dangerous terrorists who deserve everything they get. In reality, many are people like Layan Nasir: a 23-year-old woman who was taken away at gunpoint from her parents’ home for no clear reason and only made international news because she is a Christian... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/03/ben-gvir-palestinian-comments