On Palestinian Prisoner’s Day, the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society, reaffirms our unwavering solidarity with all Palestinian political prisoners in apartheid Israel’s prisons and detention centers and their families.
We call on our supporters to take meaningful action today by escalating all BDS campaigns to isolate apartheid Israel’s regime of oppression and to pressure corporations that are deeply involved in Israel’s horrific violations of Palestinian and other Arab prisoners’ human rights. We are particularly targeting Microsoft, HP and Cisco for their complicity in Israeli crimes against our prisoners.
Death Penalty Law
On Monday, 30 March, genocidal Israel approved a bill that would make it legal to enact the death penalty only against Palestinian and other Arab prisoners. This bill enacts the death penalty based on race, further extending Israel’s genocidal policies to the entirety of the Palestinian people. In a grotesque display of genocidal intent, Israeli parliamentarians wore gold noose pins to vote for this racist legislation, openly celebrating Israel’s escalation of the already long standing practice of extrajudicial killings against Palestinians and other Arabs.
The enactment of this legislation, which had been rejected several times previously, marks a dangerous turning point in the legal codification of colonial violence against Palestinians. Israeli authorities have for decades been subjecting Palestinian prisoners to both slow and direct forms of execution through torture, including sexual abuse, and systematic medical neglect in Israel’s notorious prisons and detention centers. The death penalty bill was supported by Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Torture as Systematic Annihilation
According to the latest report from the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, torture has become a “state doctrine” for Israel. Israel’s systematic torture of Palestinians, exacerbated since October 2023, encompasses “practices that meet the threshold for genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” She adds, “torture is a structural feature of the ongoing [Israeli] genocide and broader settler-colonial apartheid.”
The report states that the international silence and complicity regarding Israeli violations have granted Israel an open mandate to practice torture, not only against prisoners, but against the Palestinian people as a whole. “A continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror is being imposed, designed to break bodies, deprive a people of their dignity and force them from their land.”
“This is not incidental violence,” the report states, “It is the architecture of settler-colonialism, built on a foundation of dehumanization and maintained by a policy of cruelty and collective torture.”
Escalating Violence Against Palestinian Prisoners
Since the beginning of Israel’s ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023 Israel has intensified its arrests. The current total number of known prisoners is over 9,600 — including over 3,500 administrative detainees held without charge or trial and 350 Palestinian children. Additionally, thousands of prisoners abducted from Gaza remain missing, subjected to enforced disappearance.
From the moment of arrest until release, Palestinian prisoners face brutal conditions in Israeli detention facilities. Most are subjected to systematic torture and medical neglect as part of Israel’s deliberate policy of trying to “break” the will of Palestinian prisoners by escalating criminal physical and psychological violence against them.
Field Executions and Extrajudicial Killings
For over two years, the Israeli military has carried out field executions, extrajudicial killings during arrests, and beatings that have led to deaths of Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Qasim Shuqairat, 21, was shot dead by Israel’s occupation forces when they raided his home in Jabal al-Mukaber in occupied Jerusalem. Over 100 Palestinian prisoners have now been murdered inside Israeli jails since October 2023. The latest victim was journalist Marwan Fathi Hurzallah from Nablus, whose death was announced on March 28, 2026.
Take action now:
The Palestinian BDS National Committee, the broadest coalition in Palestinian civil society and leadership of the global BDS movement, renews its call to escalate pressure on your government to: end all complicity with Israel by imposing immediate and comprehensive lawful sanctions, including military, energy and trade embargos.
Israel’s prison system also relies on the complicity of corporations such as Microsoft, HP and Cisco.
- Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Microsoft has provided cloud services that help streamline Israel’s prison system built on arbitrary detention without due process and conditions that in many cases amount to torture. Microsoft directly profits from Israel’s incarceration and torture of Palestinian men, women and children. In 2016, Microsoft proudly declared: “Digital transformation makes it possible to consider prison as a business.”
- HP equipment is installed in the Israeli Prison Service’s central server farm, and the company has also supplied Israeli police with technology and support used to enforce its repression against the Palestinian people.
- Cisco provides phone-tapping services using the voice biometric data of Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are held without charge or trial in conditions so inhumane they have been described by a leading Israeli human rights group as “human chicken coops.”
What you can do:
The Palestinian-led BDS movement calls for mass boycotts, where feasible, as well as pressure and divestment campaigns, to hold these companies accountable. Boycott HP consumer products including HP printers, laptops and other hardware. Boycott Microsoft’s Xbox and gaming, sign the No Games for Genocide Xbox Boycott pledge and boycott Microsoft products and software whenever possible. Organize within your institutions and trade unions to exclude Microsoft, HP and Cisco from contracts and to divest from them. Pressure your organizations and institutions to exclude these companies from sponsorships and university recruitment fairs.
Together we can end Israel’s 77-year-old regime of settler colonialism, occupation, apartheid and genocide.
Together we can save humanity from the descent into unhinged brutality and might-makes-right.
Free them all.
If your organization or Palestine solidarity group wants to lead a local or regional campaign against Microsoft, HP or Cisco please reach out to [email protected].
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