The three-judge panel, which has so far mostly refrained from taking any action against the government or military during 23 months of war on besieged and relentlessly bombarded Gaza, deliberated on the issue based on a request from two Israeli rights groups.
It ruled unanimously on Sunday that the Israeli government had a legal duty to provide Palestinian prisoners with three meals a day to ensure “a basic level of existence” and ordered authorities to fulfil that obligation.
In a two-to-one decision, the court furthermore accepted the petition filed last year by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Gisha, siding with their allegations that the government’s deliberate restriction of prisoners’ food in Israeli detention facilities has caused Palestinians to suffer malnutrition and starvation.
Palestinians in Gaza are meanwhile suffering an Israeli-induced famine, with daily deaths from malnutrition.
“We are not speaking here of comfortable living or luxury, but of the basic conditions of survival as required by law,” the ruling said.
“Let us not share in the ways of our worst enemies.”
The Israeli army has taken thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and the occupied West Bank since the start of the nearly two-year war, significantly ramping up its arbitrary detention of people based on suspicions of “terrorism”.
Countless prisoners who have been released have described brutal conditions in Israeli military detention, including torture and abuse, starvation, lack of medical attention, overcrowding, and diseases.
ACRI, one of the two organisations that brought the case forward, announced its staff were subjected to “a barrage of harassment, verbal abuse and intimidation” from senior members of the Israeli government and far-right Knesset members during the Supreme Court hearings.
“The outbursts began to seem less like a show of power and intimidation and more like lashing out in desperation,” it said in a statement in late July, when the hearings began.
A main figure fighting their case was Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a small religion-based party and heads the police and other armed forces.
Ben-Gvir attacked the Supreme Court judges following the ruling, saying they are not favouring Israel.
“Our hostages in Gaza have no Supreme Court to protect them,” he wrote in a post on X, suggesting that Palestinians now have a Supreme Court that protects them, which they do not.
“We will continue to provide the imprisoned terrorists in jails with the minimum conditions required by law,” he continued.
Last month, Ben-Gvir visited the jail cell of long-imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and was filmed taunting him in an effort to further dishearten thousands held in Israeli prisons, drawing condemnation from Palestinians and rights groups.
