On the evening of February 13, 2026, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir led a raid on Section 26 of Ofer Prison near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. He brought the media with him.

The Palestinian Prisoner Society, whose lawyers visited the section afterward, collected testimony from detainees. What they described was not a security operation. It was a performance of cruelty designed for broadcast. Prison guards forced prisoners to keep their faces pressed to the ground. Dogs and stun grenades were deployed. Ben-Gvir, according to multiple prisoner accounts relayed to the organization’s lawyers, stomped on prisoners’ heads and filmed the humiliation. He remained in the section for approximately an hour, delivering what the Prisoner Society described as provocative and degrading remarks. Anadolu Agency and TRT World both reported the incident based on the Prisoner Society’s documentation.

The point was never security. Ben-Gvir is simultaneously pushing legislation to impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners — a bill that passed its first Knesset reading in November 2025. He uses footage of beaten, prone, degraded prisoners as promotional material for that campaign. The Prisoner Society described the pattern as “a race to achieve higher levels of brutality to gain more support within Israeli society without regard for humanitarian laws and norms.”

The broader context is staggering. More than 9,300 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons, including approximately 350 children. Since October 2023, more than 100 prisoners have died in custody — 88 identified. Rights groups and international bodies have documented systematic torture, starvation, denial of medical care, and conditions that amount to slow elimination. The Prisoner Society called Israeli detention facilities “one of the most prominent arenas of the genocide.” B’Tselem and other Israeli human rights organizations have used the phrase “network of torture camps.”

Ben-Gvir has done this before. He has published videos of prisoner abuse, threatened detainees with death, and made personal visits to deliver those threats — including to Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Fatah leader. Since taking office in late 2022, prisoner conditions have deteriorated sharply, with documented weight loss across the detained population as a direct result of punitive food restriction policies. He has warned prisoners not to undertake protest movements during Ramadan, threatening to “intensify penalties to the maximum extent.”

The Prisoner Society called for immediate international intervention, access for monitoring organizations, and restoration of family visits. None of those calls have been answered.

Ben-Gvir knows the cameras are on. That is the point.