Wahaj Bani Mfleh
Palestinian journalist Mahajed Bani Mfleh holds up a photo of himself before enduring a period of administrative detention that left him partially paralyzed.
In Room 318 of Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin, a city in the northern West Bank, words fell short in the face of a terrible crime, as thirty-four-year-old Majahed Bani Mfleh lay in a hospital bed, paralyzed on the left side of his body. Just two days after his release from Israeli administrative detention in January 2026, Mfleh collapsed from an acute brain hemorrhage, falling into a coma that lasted nearly two months. For more than four months, he has been fighting to regain his ability to speak, and depends on a nasogastric feeding tube for sustenance.
Mfleh, who spoke to The Progressive via instant messaging, only recently uttered his first words following the brain hemorrhage. When speech fails him, he extends his right hand—the only limb he can currently control—to grab his phone or a white notepad resting beside his hospital bed. On it, with fragmented letters, he drafts testimonies of the torture he says he endured during his recent six-month administrative detention—one of multiple he’s endured in the West Bank town of Beita since 2015, totalling fourteen months of incarceration.
Prior to his incarceration, Mfleh spent fifteen years as a journalist covering the West Bank for “Ultra Palestine,” a Qatar-based digital media network. He was held without charges or an official trial.
In reflections written on his personal social media accounts and jotted down from his hospital bed, he describes the darkness of his time in prison. He describes the darkness of the experience through harsh philosophical reflections, some written on his personal accounts and others jotted down from his hospital bed, posting on Instagram in June that “fourteen months in prison and the long treatment journey that followed were enough to change me forever. I understood the true meaning of hunger; when you wait for a morsel that is never enough, go to sleep with your stomach aching, and wake up to the exact same sensation.”
Mfleh’s stroke and the brain hemorrhage, which required doctors to remove a portion of his skull bones to save his life, were the direct result of the physical torture, starvation, and deliberate medical neglect he describes enduring from the moment he was transferred to the “Menashe” prison to the “Salem” military camp at the end of June 2025.
Documentation from prisoners’ human rights organizations reveals that Mfleh’s case is part of a noticeable pattern of violence and neglect. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli authorities have introduced new systems for inflicting torture, deprivation, and systematic starvation that led to detainees losing tens of kilograms of their weight; Mfleh alone lost nearly twenty-five kilograms inside the detention center, emerging from the prison gaunt and scarred.
Mfleh says that authorities in the prison attempted to crush his spirit through interrogations and psychological torture; interrogators, he writes, deliberately fed him false news, at one point convincing him that his brother had been tortured and killed. For weeks after his release from detention, Mfleh refused to believe the possibility that his brother was still alive—the truth, he writes, didn’t settle in until his brother visited him in the hospital.
Despite its well-documented use of near-constant physical and psychological torture of detainees, the Israeli judicial and legislative systems have given cover to these atrocities, aiming primarily to circumvent the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which sets international standards against “torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” Though many of the alleged abuses taking place inside these Israeli detention centers—including sexual abuse, medical negligence, and severe beatings—are clear violations of the Convention Against Torture, Israel has previously enacted “emergency laws” that give interrogators and prison authorities complete immunity from international oversight and prosecution. Currently, more than 9,500 Palestinians are being held in Israeli detention facilities, including 3,500 administrative detainees being held without charges or an official trial—including dozens of journalists and media workers like Mfleh.
Alaa Skafi, director of the Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights in headquartered in Gaza, has documented the implementation of new, systemic “methodologies” of torture being used inside Israeli prisons and detention centers. Skafi tells The Progressive that these practices, which have been documented by the association’s lawyers, include acts such as complete strip-searches and collective humiliation, and intense physical and psychological torture, with some detainees testifying that they were held inside sealed wooden coffins for days to convince them they were being buried alive before being returned to interrogation.
Al-Dameer’s documentation also includes confirmed cases of released prisoners requiring limb amputations after being bound with plastic zip ties for weeks or months. Mfleh’s injuries, he says, are “the inevitable outcome of a systematic policy of medical negligence and a compound crime perpetrated against prisoners, rather than merely accidental circumstances.”
Abdullah Al-Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, says this radical shift in torture methods in tandem with the ongoing war is part of a systematic policy practiced under direct guidance from the highest political and security levels in Israel. Al-Zaghari says the use of severe starvation, sleep deprivation, sexual assault, and medical neglect as forms of punishment transcend the bounds of more isolated human rights violations into the realm of atrocities that defy all international covenants and ethical frameworks prohibiting torture.
Six months after his release from detention, Mfleh’s entire family has had to bear the profound cost of his torture. His wife, Noha Al-Shurafa, was forced to uproot their three young children from their community and rent a cramped apartment in the city of Jenin, where she could be near the hospital at all times. The emergency lodging and medical costs have been exorbitant, and their relocation has opened the family up to the risks posed by military checkpoints and settler violence that have become frequent on roads in the West Bank. For Mfleh and his family—as for many families impacted by incarceration and torture in the West Bank—punishment extends far beyond the prison walls.
“They stripped me of my freedom for fourteen months,” Mfleh tells The Progressive. “and they stripped me of half my body and my ability to speak following my release, but they failed to silence the memory. My right hand is still alive, and the journalist’s eye has not been paralyzed . . . . I am not merely a survivor of the administrative detention guillotine; I am the witness who returned from the coma to narrate the crime with the shattered bones of his skull.”