Since the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023, which triggered the Gaza war, UN agencies and Israeli rights groups have reported an increase in claims of abuse of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including routine beatings, sexual violence, starvation and severe medical negligence. Dozens of Palestinians are reported to have died in detention as a result.

The most prominent Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, was beaten unconscious by Israeli prison guards on 14 September, his family has said.

The 66-year-old – serving life for the murders of five Israelis – was allegedly attacked by eight guards during a transfer between Ganot and Megiddo prisons.

The Israel Prison Service told the BBC: “These are false claims (fake). The Israel Prison Service operates in accordance with the law, while ensuring the safety and health of all inmates”.

Barghouti’s son, Arab, told the BBC the family had received testimony from five separate detainees who were released this week who heard Barghouti’s account of the attack. He said the family was “horrified”.

Barghouti was allegedly handcuffed by the guards, put on the floor, kicked and beaten.

“They focused on the head area, they focused on the chest area and also on the legs,” he said. “He stayed unconscious for hours, he was bleeding, and he could hardly walk.”

Arab said he believed the attack took place as his father was transferred between the two prisons, which are in southern and northern Israel, because there were no surveillance cameras to capture it.

Barghouti is serving five life sentences plus 40 years after being convicted by an Israeli court in 2004 of planning attacks in which five civilians were killed.

The detainees who told the family of the attack had been released as part of Monday’s hostage and prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, Arab said.

Barghouti’s name was at the top of a list of seven high-profile prisoners whose release Hamas had sought in return for the 20 living Israeli hostages the group was holding in Gaza – but Israel refused to include him.

He is seen by many as the one man who could unite Palestinians – and the various Palestinian political factions – across both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Opinion polls have consistently indicated that he is the most popular Palestinian leader, and that Palestinians would vote for him in a presidential election ahead of the current Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas leaders.

Barghouti remains a senior figure in the Fatah faction that dominates the PA, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank not under Israeli control. He has been held in solitary confinement since October 2023.

Far-right Israeli National Security Minister, who is in charge of the prison service, denied Barghouti had been assaulted, but said he was “proud” Barghouti’s prison conditions had worsened.

In August, a video emerged showing Ben Gvir taunting Barghouti in his cell.

The 13-second-long video clip was the first time he had been publicly seen in years. He appeared aged and gaunt.

In the clip, Ben Gvir tells him: “You will not win. He who messes with the people of Israel, he who will murder our children, he who will murder our women, we will wipe him out”.

As Barghouti tries to interject, Ben Gvir adds: “You need to know this, throughout history.”

The PA condemned the video. Its Vice-President Hussein al-Sheikh described it as “the epitome of psychological, moral and physical terrorism.”

Hamas is pressing Israel to include prominent Palestinians in a prisoner-release list – part of a ceasefire deal that will also see hostages returned from Gaza.

Hamas’s insistence comes after the Israeli justice ministry published the names of 250 prisoners to be freed, but excluded seven high-profile prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat.

The men, who are serving sentences after being convicted of involvement in separate deadly attacks in Israel, have long been seen by Palestinians as symbols of resistance.

Twenty Israeli hostages are expected to be released before 12:00 (09:00 GMT) on Monday as part of the deal proposed by US President Donald Trump.

A senior Palestinian official familiar with the talks told the BBC that US envoy Steve Witkoff had promised to raise the exclusion of the Palestinian prisoners with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Israel has firmly refused to include them.

It is not clear whether this could be a sticking point, or impact the timeline for the release of hostages from the Gaza Strip and Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

The releases are due to take place in the first phase of Trump’s ceasefire and hostage return deal, approved this week to end the two-year war in Gaza.

It is unclear how the hostages will be released this time – on previous occasions Hamas paraded them in public, infuriating Israel and many of its Western allies.

The bodies of deceased hostages will also be returned. It is thought that at least 26 hostages are deceased, with the fate of two others unknown.

Israel will also release about 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in Israeli jails, and another 1,700 Palestinians from Gaza who have been detained.

Hamas had submitted a list of prisoners it wanted released that included Barghouti and Saadat.

Barghouti is serving five life sentences plus 40 years after being convicted in 2004 of planning attacks that led to five civilians being killed.

Opinion polls have consistently indicated that he remains the most popular Palestinian leader, and that Palestinians would vote for him in a presidential election ahead of the current Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas leaders.

Barghouti remains a senior figure in the Fatah faction that dominates the PA, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank not under Israeli control.

Saadat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted in 2008 of heading an “illegal terrorist organisation” and involvement in attacks, including the assassination of an Israeli minister in 2001.

Among the 250 prisoners set to be released is Iyad Abu al-Rub, an Islamic Jihad commander convicted of orchestrating suicide bombings in Israel that killed 13 people in the early 2000s.

According to the Israeli justice ministry, he will be released either to Gaza or deported abroad.

The BBC understands that Hamas is also pushing for some possible additional prisoner releases. These relate to Palestinian prisoners who were released years ago as part of an exchange for the hostage Gilad Shalit – and then were rearrested after 7 October.

Hamas argues that since they were part of a previous hostage exchange, they should not be included in the 250 figure.

In Israel, hospitals are preparing for the release of hostages as families await their return.

The first phase of the Israel-Hamas deal saw a ceasefire take effect on Friday and Israeli forces partially withdraw from parts of Gaza. Hundreds of aid trucks a day are now expected to enter. The next phases are still being negotiated.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have returned from southern Gaza to Gaza City, weeks after fleeing the Israeli offensive that destroyed much of the city.

Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence agency has said it is conducting recovery operations and pulling bodies from the rubble, with Palestinians still missing across the territory.

Israel’s war on Gaza was triggered by the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

Since then, 67,682 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

Additional reporting by Mallory Moench

Egypt’s president has pardoned prominent British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, who has been imprisoned for six years, state media and his lawyer say.

Abdel Fattah is one of six people whose sentences President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi commuted following a request from the National Council for Human Rights, according to Al-Qahera News. His lawyer confirmed the news and wrote on X: “Praise be to God.”

The 43-year-old blogger and pro-democracy activist is one of Egypt’s best known political prisoners.

He was arrested in 2019, months after finishing a previous five-year sentence, and convicted in 2021 of “spreading false news” for sharing a Facebook post about torture in Egypt.

He should have been released in September 2024. However, Egyptian authorities refused to count the more than two years he spent in pre-trial detention towards his time served.

He and his mother, Laila Soueif, staged hunger strikes to protest against his imprisonment.

New footage shared on social media shows the far-right Israeli minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, taunting the most prominent Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, in his cell.

The Palestinian Authority has condemned the video. Its Vice-President Hussein al-Sheikh described it as “the epitome of psychological, moral and physical terrorism.”

The 13-second-long video clip is the first time that Barghouti has been publicly seen in years. He appears aged and gaunt.

Israel’s national security minister, Ben Gvir, tells him: “You will not win. He who messes with the people of Israel, he who will murder our children, he who will murder our women, we will wipe him out”.

As Barghouti tries to interject, Ben Gvir adds: “You need to know this, throughout history.”

Marwan Barghouti, 66, was jailed by Israel more than 20 years ago after he was convicted of planning attacks that led to five civilians being killed. He is serving five life sentences plus 40 years.

Opinion polls have consistently indicated that he remains the most popular Palestinian leader, and that Palestinians would vote for him in a presidential election ahead of the current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas leaders.

He remains a senior figure in the Fatah faction, which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA). He was targeted by Israel due to his leading role in the Second Palestinian Intifada or uprising from 2000-05.

The video originally surfaced on messaging groups for Ben Gvir’s supporters on Thursday but has now been reposted on his X account.

The minister says that having read how “all sorts of “senior officials”” in the PA did not like what he said, he will “repeat it again and again without apologising”.

Palestinian prisoner rights organisations say that Barghouti has been placed in solitary confinement since the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023. Last year they accused guards of “brutally assaulting” him in his cell which the Israeli prison service denied.

In response to the new video, the head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, Abdullah al-Zaghari accused Israel of seeking “to eliminate him and assassinate the leaders languishing in its prisons”.

Barghouti is one of the prisoners whose release Hamas is believed to have sought as part of an exchange deal for the remaining hostages it is holding. However, it is thought very unlikely that Israel would free him.

In the video, as Ben Gvir speaks, Barghouti – who is fluent in Hebrew – can be seen nodding and trying to break in, but the short clip ends before he does.

His wife, Fadwa, recommended to her husband’s followers that only one still be used from the video which she believed showed his strength.

Palestinians widely see Barghouti as the leader who could best unify different political factions and negotiate peace with Israel.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate has condemned the arrest of a prominent local journalist by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank.

Ali al-Samoudi, who has worked extensively with Western media, was detained during a raid on his son’s home in the northern city of Jenin early on Tuesday.

The 58-year-old was interrogated for half an hour at an unknown location and was later transferred to an Israeli hospital due to a deterioration in his health, his son Mohammed said.

The Israeli military said Samoudi was “identified with the [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation” and “suspected in the transfer of funds” to it, without giving any evidence.

His family strongly denied his involvement and said that in his long career he had never previously faced such an accusation.

They said Israeli authorities had not told them the name of the hospital where he was being treated or any other details.

He is expected to be brought before a military court next Tuesday.

The Israeli military separately announced on Tuesday that security forces had detained a total of 24 wanted individuals “involved in the transfer of funds to terrorist organisations”, including three from Jenin, during raids across the West Bank.

In May 2022, Samoudi was working with the Palestinian-American Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Aqla when she was shot dead by an Israeli sniper at the entrance to Jenin refugee camp. He was shot and wounded in the back.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Israeli forces have arrested at least 79 journalists in the West Bank and Gaza since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, while Palestinian authorities have arrested five others.

Another 176 journalists, almost all of them Palestinian, have been killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon during the war, the organisation says.

Prominent figures, including several Jewish leaders, have stayed away from an international conference on antisemitism held in Jerusalem, in protest at the inclusion of politicians from across Europe associated with the far right.

Those who declined to attend included Israel’s own president and the chief rabbi of the UK, Sir Ephraim Mirvis.

At the conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a warning about the rise in antisemitism.

He said Europe was at risk of allowing antisemitism to go unchecked in a similar way to the years leading up to the Nazi Holocaust.

“Racial antisemitism is inciting a global war against the existence of the Jews as a race that poisons human societies,” his own father had written in 1933, Netanyahu said.

“Today,” he said, “we issue a similar warning. The fate of free societies is tied to the willingness to fight the scourge of antisemitism.”

But the inclusion at the event of representatives of European far-right parties, like France’s National Rally, Spain’s Vox and the Sweden Democrats, had proven controversial.

The UK government’s antisemitism advisor Lord Mann turned down his invitation, saying: “There is nothing for the UK to learn about tackling antisemitism from some of these characters.”

Chief Rabbi Mirvis declined to participate “having been made aware of the attendance of a number of far-right populist politicians”, his office said in a statement issued last week.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog did not attend either. He hosted his own separate event with Jewish leaders instead in what was seen as a compromise.

The conference was organised by Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister, and an outspoken member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party. Chikli has over the past several months courted ties with far-right parties across Europe.

Early last year he met the Sweden Democrat leader who visited Jerusalem, and was a speaker at a Vox conference in Madrid.

Chikli defended the inclusion of far-right politicians from Europe, saying they had faced “lies spread against them by those who slander the State of Israel worldwide”.

Among those at the conference whose presence had caused some consternation was National Rally President Jordan Bardella, whose party was originally founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man accused of antisemitism and found guilty of Holocaust denial.

Jean-Marie was expelled from the party – then called the National Front – in 2015 by his daughter Marine over his comments about the Holocaust being a “detail” of history. But since his death in January she has said she can’t “forgive herself” for doing so.

The 29-year-old Bardella – a rising star of the French right – spoke on stage where he acknowledged the “eminent symbolic significance” of his invitation to Israel.

Whilst he did not explicitly reference his party’s past, he made vows for its future under Marine Le Pen, who heads the group in parliament.

“I would like to tell you in all sincerity, through its positions, its proposals and its steadfastness in the face of this threat, the National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, is the best shield for the Jews of France,” he said.

“Islamism is the totalitarianism of the 21st century,” he warned. “It threatens to destroy everything that is not like it,” echoing a claim often made by his party that France is facing an “Islamist threat”.

Bardella had earlier visited some of the places where Hamas carried out attacks on 7 October 2023, and Israel’s Holocaust memorial institute Yad Vashem.

The conference was also a reminder of how Israel sees itself under attack by parts of the international community. Panel discussions were held on topics including “Addressing Anti-Israel Bias in International Institutions”, “How Radical Islam Fuels Antisemitism in the West?” and “Double Standards, From the Battlefield to the ICC”.

The ICC – International Criminal Court – has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes against the Palestinians.

The move caused outrage across Israel, which accused the ICC itself of being motivated by antisemitism.

Yahya Sinwar was the architect of the 7 October attacks, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. He was also one of Israel’s top targets from that day on.

Sinwar had been the leader of Hamas in Gaza, but became the overall head of Hamas following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July this year.

Sinwar, who was born in the Gaza Strip in 1962, joined the movement at an early age.

He founded Hamas’s security service, known as Majd, which manages internal security matters, investigates suspected Israeli agents, and tracks down Israeli intelligence and security services officers.

Israel had arrested Sinwar three times. After his third arrest in 1988 he was sentenced to four life terms in prison.

However, he was among 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners released by Israel in exchange for an Israeli soldier held captive for over five years by Hamas.

Sinwar returned to his position as a prominent leader in Hamas and was appointed head of the group’s political bureau in the Gaza Strip in 2017.

In 2015, the US included Sinwar on its blacklist of “international terrorists”.

Sinwar was killed by Israeli forces in Rafah on 16 October 2024.

Mohammed Deif was the head of Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of the Hamas movement. He was Israel’s most wanted man for decades, and was killed in an Israeli air strike last month, Israel says. Hamas has not confirmed this.

Deif, a shadowy figure, became known to Palestinians as The Mastermind, and to Israelis as The Cat with Nine Lives.

Israeli authorities imprisoned him in 1989 during the first Palestinian intifada (uprising), and released him after a year and half. Soon afterwards he formed the al-Qassam Brigades, with the aim of capturing Israeli soldiers.

He also helped engineer the construction of tunnels that enabled Hamas fighters to get inside Israel from Gaza.

Deif was accused by Israel of planning and supervising bus bombings which killed tens of Israelis in 1996, and of involvement in the capture and killing of three Israeli soldiers in the mid-1990s. He was arrested by the Palestinian Authority in 2000, but escaped seven months later at the beginning of the second intifada.

He became Israel’s most wanted man, but since then left behind little trace.

The most serious assassination attempts on his life were in 2002: Deif survived but lost one of his eyes. Israel says he also lost a foot and a hand, and was left with difficulty speaking.

Israel tried and failed again to assassinate Deif during a 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip, but killed his wife and two of his children.

Deif was one of the figures accused of planning the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, 2023. Israel said it killed him in an air strike on a compound in the Khan Younis area of Gaza on 13 July.