Occupied West Bank (QNN)- Israeli occupation forces wrote identification numbers in marker on the faces and bodies of Palestinian detainees during a raid on the town of Qabatiya, south of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, in a scene of open dehumanization that survivors and rights groups say has become routine in Israel's treatment of Palestinian prisoners.
Occupation forces stormed around 100 buildings in Qabatiya on Monday. While the military claimed it arrested two suspects, Palestinian and local sources reported a far higher number of people detained, several of whom were beaten during the raid. Palestinians taken for questioning were released with numbers scrawled on their faces or bodies. One detainee said soldiers had marked those held with numbers, reducing them to figures to be processed, in what witnesses described as a deliberate act of humiliation.
Even the Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, condemned the images, writing that soldiers and officers had written identification numbers on the foreheads of Palestinians in Qabatiya before interrogating them. He called it what dehumanization looks like, the erasing of the person and their reduction to a number, and said the images recalled dark periods of history and should shock anyone who saw them.
Freed Palestinian detainee Ahmad Hethnawi from Qabatiya recounted the dehumanizing treatment he endured at the hands of the occupation forces, including being interrogated and having identification numbers written on his face and body, during what was his fifth detention. His account is one of a growing number from Palestinians who have described being stripped of their identity and treated as objects by Israeli occupation soldiers.
This is not an isolated abuse but a practice Israel has systematized over nearly three years of genocide in Gaza. Since October 2023, Israeli occupation forces have detained thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, herding them stripped to their underwear, blindfolded, and bound, and photographing them for circulation on soldiers' social media accounts. Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces published degrading images of detained Palestinians, including children, often stripped and handcuffed, amounting to inhumane treatment and war crimes. At the Sde Teiman military base in the Naqab, thousands of Gaza detainees have been held in conditions that whistleblowers, released prisoners, and rights groups have described as torture, with detainees beaten, strapped down, sexually abused, and, in the words of one Israeli whistleblower, stripped of anything that resembles human beings. At least dozens have died in Israeli custody.
The numbering seen in Qabatiya is part of this same architecture of dehumanization. Hundreds of Palestinians who survived Israel's detention camps have emerged with near-identical accounts: stripped, blindfolded, beaten, denied their names, and reduced to numbers. The practice of writing numbers on Palestinians' bodies has surfaced repeatedly in the occupied West Bank as well, including in April, when Israeli soldiers wrote numbers on the hands of dozens of Palestinian women entering the Jenin refugee camp. What survivors describe is not the excess of individual soldiers but a systematic method of stripping Palestinians of their humanity, one carried from the detention camps of the Gaza genocide into the towns of the occupied West Bank.
In 2024, Israeli soldiers also marked a group of Palestinians from Hebron with numbers on their foreheads. They were blindfolded, handcuffed, insulted and kept in inhumane conditions. Each man had a number written on his forehead.
