Politics
Lebanon abandons its captives as Israel keeps them locked away
For years, detainees from Lebanon have languished in Israeli prisons, some without charges, others without sentences — all without justice.
Their bodies bore the cost of occupation through torture, isolation, and medical neglect. Their families bore it through silence, waiting, and erasure. Yet the most enduring violence may not have come from prison walls alone, but from the sustained failure of the Lebanese state to act.
Captives from Lebanon
As Israel violated international law with impunity and acts of terror, Lebanon’s institutions watched. They issued statements and moved on — leaving detainees suspended between an occupier that abused them and a state that abandoned them.
There is no official number, but recent Lebanese reports (late 2025) indicate that around 23 Lebanese prisoners are being held by the occupational Israeli forces — including 14 captured during the most recent war.
One of them is Imad Amhaz, a Lebanese detainee who was apprehended during the previous war, who the IOF published a video of his testimony, where Imad looked tired, worn out, and raised lots of suspicion about what he was saying, as if he was forced to say it.
Mohamad Shamas — an experienced journalist specialising in war and Hezbollah — has said:
the video is not an intelligence disclosure but a strategically released media tool, intended to justify attacks on Lebanese infrastructure and embarrass Hezbollah. It serves as a manufactured psychological victory and a way to fill a political and security void through a carefully curated narrative.
Israel has always been a sociopathic entity when it comes to dealing with prisoners, regardless of their nationality. For what Israel did to Lebanese prisoners was not a series of isolated abuses; it was a deliberate system of domination built on illegality. Detention during the occupation of the South was designed to break bodies, erase identities, and terrorise entire communities.
Khiam Detention Centre, Lebanon
Facilities like Khiam Detention Centre operated outside any judicial framework — torture replaced due process and silence replaced law. Prisoners were held without charges, without trials, and without timelines; not because evidence was lacking, but because legality was never the point. It is never a point when it comes to Israeli detention centres, in Palestine or formerly in Lebanon.
Cells were small, dark, and overcrowded, often underground, with minimal ventilation and little exposure to daylight. Prisoners were frequently kept in solitary confinement, sometimes for weeks or months.
The lack of natural light and silence was itself a form of punishment, designed to disorient and break detainees psychologically, as former Lebanese prisoner Nizar Haidar describes to the Canary, where he was imprisoned for fighting alongside the Lebanese Communist Party against the Israeli occupational forces in southeastern Lebanon back in the 80s.
He also adds:
interrogation was systematic and brutal. I still suffer from the physical torture, the beatings, stress positions, electric shocks, and suspension
This comes alongside psychological abuse such as threats against family members — many prisoners did not know whether their families were alive or not. In addition to that, there was sleep deprivation and mock executions.
He explains that the:
screams from interrogation rooms were often audible throughout the prison, creating a constant atmosphere of fear.
Prisoners of war
As for today, the imprisoned Lebanese in Israeli prisons during the last war have suffered from deliberate violations, as per the “committee of detained and liberated”, of the Third Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in times of war, such as:
- Torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, including physical and psychological abuse such as beatings, strip searches, and threats, beginning from the very moment of capture.
- Deprivation of basic necessities, particularly water and food, in addition to a severe lack of essential living requirements.
- Deliberate medical neglect, accompanied by the failure to provide adequate healthcare.
- Collective punishment imposed by the occupying power on prisoners and their families.
- Arbitrary arrests without distinction between combatants and civilians, carried out under inhumane conditions.
- Preventing the International Committee of the Red Cross from visiting detainees, and denying prisoners the right to communicate with their families and with lawyers responsible for following up on their legal status.
On the other hand, if Israel’s detention of Lebanese captives is a crime of occupation, then the Lebanese state’s response has been one of systematic abandonment.
Government! What government?
For decades, successive governments, presidents, and parliaments have failed to treat detainees as a national priority, reducing their fate to an occasional slogan rather than a sustained political and legal battle. Beyond statements of concern, the state has taken no serious action to document abuses, pursue international legal mechanisms, or apply consistent diplomatic pressure for their release.
Families of detainees have been left to navigate uncertainty alone without clear information, legal support, or institutional backing. The Lebanese government has neither established a permanent body to follow detainee cases nor ensured coordination with international organisations.
In practice, prisoners have been treated as expendable files, activated only when negotiations or political interests require them, then discarded once the moment passes.
This failure is not merely bureaucratic; it is political.
By refusing to confront Israel’s violations in international forums, and by failing to mobilise legal accountability mechanisms, the Lebanese state has implicitly accepted a reality in which its citizens can be imprisoned indefinitely without consequence.
Silence, in this context, is not neutrality, it is complicity.
A state that cannot fend for its detained citizens cannot claim sovereignty. The continued neglect of Lebanese prisoners is a stark reminder that while individuals endured torture, isolation, and years stolen from their lives, the institutions meant to protect them chose inertia.
This absence of action has become a second punishment on those taken captive — one imposed not by the colonial occupier, but by their country itself.
Featured image via the Canary