Palestinians know what it means to live with the fear that someone you love can be taken in the middle of the night. Across Palestine, Israeli soldiers regularly enter homes around 2 a.m., wake entire families, and take people away without explanation. Across the United States, ICE agents raid homes and workplaces, separate families, and detain people for months in abusive conditions. These systems are not identical, but they rely on the same logic: that certain people can be disappeared, stripped of their rights, and treated as less than human.
In Palestine, many of those taken are held under what Israel calls “administrative detention” imprisonment without charge or trial. A person can be held for six months and then held again and again without ever seeing a courtroom. Before October 2023, about 1,300 Palestinians were being held this way. By early 2024, that number had risen to more than 3,200, while the total number of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel grew to over 10,000.
Many of those imprisoned are children. By the end of 2024, Israel was holding around 300 Palestinian children, including more than 100 in administrative detention. Human rights groups have documented that Palestinian children are often taken from their homes at night, blindfolded, handcuffed, interrogated without their families, and subjected to abuse.
Former prisoners have described starvation, beatings, humiliation, denial of medical care, and torture in Israeli prisons and detention camps such as Sde Teiman. Amnesty International and other organizations have documented these abuses since October 2023.
For Palestinians, this violence is not only physical. It is meant to send a message: do not resist, do not speak, do not organize. Nearly every Palestinian knows someone who has been imprisoned or taken without charges. As a Palestinian myself, I do too.
We are seeing echoes of this here in the United States. ICE detention centers have repeatedly been investigated for overcrowding, abuse, denial of medical care, and deaths in custody. For years, U.S. police departments and immigration agencies have also participated in exchanges and trainings with Israeli military and security forces, spreading tactics of militarized policing and repression.
Now the danger is growing. Israel recently passed a law allowing the death penalty for Palestinians convicted in Israeli military courts. Human rights groups condemned it because, in practice, it applies only to Palestinians. For many of us, it feels like a return to the darkest parts of our history.
That is why we are rallying on April 17. We are rallying because Palestinian prisoners are not forgotten. We are rallying because immigrants should not live in fear of ICE. We are rallying because no one should be disappeared, detained without charges, tortured, or silenced.
Join us Friday, April 17 at 6:30 p.m. at the Goodale Park Gazebo in Columbus.
Free them all.
ICE Out.
Free Palestine.