Israeli Soldiers Mark Palestinian Captives With Numbers

Israeli soldiers in the illegally occupied West Bank marked Palestinian captives with numbers earlier this week, drawing comparisons to the behaviour of Nazis during the Holocaust.

Soldiers used marker pens to write numbers on the foreheads and arms of detainees during a raid in Qabatiya, south of Jenin, on Monday 17 August.

Dozens of Palestinians were rounded up at around 5am and taken to a home that had been turned into a makeshift interrogation centre, where they were bound and questioned for around ten hours while some were beaten.

​“They treated us with extreme brutality,” said Ahmad al-Hathnawi, a detainee who was marked with the number 44, in a video published by Quds News Network. It was the fifth time he had been detained, he said, but the first time soldiers had written a number on him.

There were around 50 detainees in the house, “including blindfolded women”, he added.

Mahmoud Nazzal, who lives in the house where the interrogations happened, said troops stormed his home by breaking down the doors just after dawn prayers, Middle East Eye reported. 

They handcuffed his father and took him outside, while Nazzal was handcuffed and kept indoors.

“I was left lying on the ground unable to move for ten hours while handcuffed. I was also prevented from using the bathroom. I saw someone being beaten as he left the house after his interrogation,” Nazzal said.

Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian-Israeli lawmaker in the Knesset, condemned the detainees’ treatment on X. “This is what dehumanisation looks like: erasing the person and turning them into a number. An image that recalls dark periods, and should shock every person.”

The Israeli military admitted soldiers had marked people with numbers and said “lessons were drawn from the matter” – but this is only the latest of several such incidents. In April, Israeli forces marked dozens of women with numbers at a refugee camp in Jenin, and in 2024 men were marked with numbers on their foreheads in the West Bank town of Dura.

The treatment, especially in the context of the genocide in Gaza, has elicited widespread comparisons to the Holocaust, during which Nazis wrote serial numbers in indelible ink on detainees at concentration camps.

Israeli soldiers and violent settlers have significantly ramped up their attacks against Palestinian in the West Bank in recent years, killing at least 1,185 and detaining over 24,000 since October 2023.