TEL AVIV (Dispatches) -- The number of Palestinian children and minors held in so-called administrative detention in Israel “rose sharply” over a recent one-year period, according to newly obtained data from the Israel Prison Service (IPS).
Between January 2025 and March 2026, the number of children and minors in detention rose from 103 to 191, according to IPS data obtained by the organization Parents Against Child Detention.
Administrative detention is a procedure the Israeli military has used for decades to detain Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
The detention period lasts for six months but can be renewed indefinitely by a military judge. In many cases, Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons for years or even decades without a trial as a result.
The “detainee is not informed of the allegations against them, and any evidence is presented in court in classified proceedings,” the Times of Israel wrote.
Israeli guards often rape and torture Palestinians in detention.
At the beginning of 2025, roughly 30 percent of Palestinian minors held by Israel were in administrative detention. By March 2026, the proportion had risen to nearly 50 percent.
The data also showed that the number of minors held in administrative detention for more than a year rose drastically, from six in March 2025 to 50 in March 2026.
“While children in Israel and around the world are enjoying their summer vacation, a growing number of Palestinian children are being held in harsh conditions identical to those of adults,” stated Titi Carmel, executive director of Parents Against Child Detention.
“Particularly troubling is the sharp rise in the number of children held in administrative detention – imprisonment without charge or trial, based on secret evidence,” she added.
According to the IPS, a total of 3,198 Palestinians are being held in administrative detention. Most are from the occupied West Bank.
Another 1,358 Palestinians detained during Israel’s genocide in Gaza are classified as “unlawful combatants.” Many have been held at the notorious Sde Teiman torture center, where specially trained dogs at times rape detainees.
Israel holds an additional 4,767 Palestinians as “security detainees” and “security prisoners.”
In the past, administrative detention was occasionally used by the military against Jewish settlers attacking Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to drive them off their land.
However, terrorist war minster Israel Katz recently forbade the use of administrative detention orders against Jewish settlers, while expanding their use against Palestinians.
As a result, Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, has begun using “administrative restraining orders,” barring Jewish settlers accused of attacks from entering the occupied West Bank.
Such an order was issued earlier this year against Tal Yinon Dardik, a Jewish settler who attacked a Palestinian man, stripped him of his clothes, zip-tied his genitals, and paraded him around the village of Khirbet Humsa.
When Israeli General Avraham Bluth sought to extend the order barring Dardik from entering the West Bank, where he lives on an illegal settler outpost, Katz refused to sign off on it.
Katz then suggested on live Israeli TV that General Bluth would be replaced, even though Bluth himself is a staunch supporter of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, which is illegal under international law.
The Times of Israel writes that some in Israel’s security establishment argue that Katz’s ban on the use of administrative detention for Jewish settlers has “contributed to the massive uptick in settler violence over the past two years, as the government … is accused of tacitly backing the phenomenon.”