Rights Group Petitions High Court to End Prison Overcrowding

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) has filed a petition with the Supreme Court demanding the cancellation of emergency orders that permit severe overcrowding in Israeli prisons. The group argues these orders allow detainees to be held in conditions violating Israeli law and previous High Court rulings, including sleeping on mattresses instead of beds.

ACRI stated that approximately 60% of detainees, totaling 13,653 individuals as of August 31, 2026, are held in spaces less than three square meters per person. This violates a High Court determination that such conditions are unfit for human habitation. The petition highlights that nearly 90% of security prisoners, numbering 8,422, are affected by this overcrowding.

The association is calling for the termination of the "state of emergency in prisons" declaration, which has been repeatedly extended since the start of the current war. ACRI contends that this measure, initially intended as a temporary fix for increased detainee numbers, has become a permanent arrangement enabling authorities to bypass legal standards for detention conditions. The group asserts that Israel has failed to use the time since the war's outset to implement solutions that would reduce overcrowding.

ACRI emphasized that the prison crisis predates the current conflict. In 2017, the High Court ruled that prisoners have a right to adequate living space, mandating a minimum of 4.5 square meters per detainee. Despite this ruling, many prisoners were held in substandard conditions even before the war, with some lacking beds. The current emergency orders, extended by the state instead of addressing the root causes of the crisis, exacerbate the problem.

The petition details that about 19% of all detainees sleep on mattresses, and the extreme overcrowding forces many prisoners to spend most of their day in cells, often unable to move freely. This leads to significant physical and psychological harm, increased tension within prisons, and a higher risk of disease transmission, particularly for security prisoners held in cells for up to 23 hours daily.

ACRI further noted a broader deterioration in detention conditions since the war began, including reduced basic services, limited medical access, and increased violence and mistreatment. The association argues that the crisis is a result of state policies on arrest and enforcement, not an inevitable security outcome. Instead of reducing detainee numbers or using alternatives to detention, the state has opted for solutions like expanding prison facilities, which ACRI claims do not offer a real or immediate solution to the existing overcrowding.

Attorneys Nitzan Ilani and Elsa Punie from ACRI stated that overcrowding has reached dangerous levels over the past three years, turning the detention conditions for most prisoners, especially security prisoners, into continuous suffering that infringes on their human dignity. They reiterated that the crisis is not unavoidable but a product of state-controlled policies, and that the state repeatedly chooses to extend emergency orders allowing it to bypass the law and court decisions, holding thousands in inhumane conditions. They urged the immediate cancellation of the emergency orders and swift action to alleviate overcrowding and improve detention conditions.