Palestinian Ambassador Husam Zomlot has delivered a searing account of what he describes as arbitrary mass detention by Israeli authorities, accusing Israel of operating a system in which Palestinians can be arrested on the basis of future or imagined intent — without charge, without trial, and in conditions he characterised as state-sponsored mass murder.
Speaking on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Zomlot described the Israeli detention system in stark terms. Israel, he said, would come in the middle of the night, arrest a Palestinian, and then charge them on the basis that authorities believed the individual may, at some point in their life, commit or even think about committing a crime. It was, he argued, a system that had abandoned any pretence of due process or legal legitimacy.
The ambassador noted that there were currently approximately 9,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. He acknowledged host Piers Morgan’s question about how many may have committed acts of violence against Israelis, but argued that the framing itself was inadequate, because it ignored the fundamental question of what constitutes legitimate resistance under international law for a people living under military occupation. He pointed out that the Israeli military court conviction rate for Palestinians stood at nearly 99 percent — a figure he suggested reflected not justice, but the absence of it.
Zomlot went on to describe conditions that he said went far beyond imprisonment. He stated that 90 Palestinians had died in Israeli jails since October 7th — deaths he attributed to torture and rape. He described those responsible as facing no meaningful accountability, with racists, as he put it, actively protesting against any attempt to prosecute perpetrators. He argued that the Israeli system had demonstrated a capacity to kill Palestinians with complete impunity.
Perhaps the most striking detail he raised was what he described as Israel’s practice of continuing a deceased prisoner’s sentence after death — forcing the body to remain in custody to complete the term. He asked Morgan if he had ever heard of anything comparable anywhere in the world, calling it absolutely unimaginable.
He also drew attention to what he described as the asymmetry at the heart of Israel’s new death penalty legislation — a law that applied exclusively to Palestinians designated as terrorists, with no equivalent provision for Israeli settlers who had been killing Palestinians in the West Bank in plain sight. Zomlot asked with evident frustration how a state could legislate death for one population while its own nationals committed documented acts of terror without consequence.
For Zomlot, all of this formed part of a single coherent system — one designed not to deliver justice, but to crush the will and spirit of a nation. He was emphatic that no amount of killing, torture, or arbitrary imprisonment had ever succeeded in extinguishing Palestinian identity or resolve, and that until the international community named the system for what it was and demanded accountability, nothing would change…..See More
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