Portraits of Humiliation—and Dissent

Since October 2023, hundreds of Israeli citizens — the vast majority Palestinian — and at least 17 foreign activists have been arrested as part of a campaign to silence those speaking out against Israel’s war on Gaza. In certain cases, police photographed the detainees in front of an Israeli flag and distributed the images either through official police channels, or via National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and other unofficial channels. Many of the photos were posted on social media platforms and led to incitement and threats against the individuals pictured.

In distributing such images among themselves and with the general public, the police completely circumvented the proper legal procedures regarding the rights of detainees and suspects. Moreover, in many cases, the police did not obtain — or even request — authorization from the State Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the detainees for “incitement,” so instead, they detained them under the pretext of “behavior that could disturb the public peace.”

The goal of publicly sharing these photos was clear: to humiliate the detainees and to deter others from voicing any opposition to the Israeli offensive on Gaza. Indeed, in the early months of the war, many remained silent; even today, many choose not to speak out publicly for fear of the consequences.

I printed and framed the images that had been circulated by the police or by Ben Gvir, and then returned to the people depicted in them. In this way, the very images meant to degrade and create a chilling effect became symbols of defiance: the individuals were photographed anew, this time on their own terms. They also recounted to me their experiences of being arrested, as well as their reflections on the public dissemination of their images.

Many of those photographed only found out that their image had been circulated publicly after they were released from Israeli custody. They describe an ongoing struggle with the aftermath of the public shaming and of being branded “enemies of the state” by the police. None of those documented in the project were prosecuted; most of the cases were eventually closed without an indictment.

Intisar Hijazi, a school therapist from Tamra

Hijazi was arrested on Oct. 7, 2024, after she re-shared a video of herself dancing that she had originally uploaded to TikTok a year earlier. Ben Gvir sent the video to the police before her arrest; a photo of her in a police vehicle was then published by the police spokesperson’s office. At the Nazareth police station, officers photographed her blindfolded in front of an Israeli flag, which Ben Gvir then shared on his social media.

Hijazi recounted the ordeal: “On TikTok, you can re-share a post you uploaded the previous year. I re-shared it in the morning and left the house to go shopping with my mother,” she told me. “When I got home, the coordinator [from a school where she works] called and said someone posted the video [on social media] and wrote that I’m celebrating. He told me to delete it, which I did, but I still didn’t understand what was going on. Then someone from the Ministry of Education called, asking, ‘What’s this video—are you celebrating?’ and told me to delete the original post. My mother called to say the police were at [her] house. Fifteen minutes later, they were at mine.”

After she was arrested, Hijazi was taken to the police station in Tamra. “They said a vehicle from Nazareth would come to pick me up. They handcuffed me and blindfolded me. The photo [in the police car] was taken when I arrived [at the police station] in Nazareth. It was quiet, but I knew they were taking pictures. They took me upstairs, put me in a room, told me to move back, and then took the photo [with the flag]. I had seen the photo of Maisa Abd Elhadi [an actress who was arrested and photographed at the beginning of the war], so when they [instructed me to move] ‘back, a bit more back,’ I knew there was a flag on the wall and that they were taking the picture.”

After spending the night in the Nazareth police station, she was transferred to the Kishon Detention Center near Haifa, before being brought back to Nazareth the next day for further questioning and then eventually released. “When I got home, my mother and family said, ‘Do you know what’s going on outside?’ They told me that I’d been photographed and all the pictures had been circulated.”

Hijazi described the emotional toll of the public humiliation. “Honestly, it was very hard. Why did they do all this to me? Why did they publish my photos? When I came back to school after a month, everyone had seen them and told me they cried, that it hurt them a lot.”

During the interrogation, the police asked Hijazi if she knew her social media followers. “I said that most of my TikTok followers are kids, students, and parents. There are also educators and people I don’t know, but the majority are kids, and my content is aimed at children. I explained that the videos had nothing to do with politics.”

Since she was released, it has been difficult for Hijazi to return to social media.  “A lot of kids asked when I’d post a video again, and if I was scared now. I wanted them to see that I’m strong—but it’s hard. The confidence I used to have has changed. My life used to be quiet. I never tried to harm anyone, or do anything bad or even political.

“People sometimes say I seem like someone detached from reality, from the wars—but I [work] with children. Why should they be exposed to all of this?”

Rasha Karim Harami, owner of a beauty salon from Majd Al-Krum

Karim was arrested in May 2024 over posts expressing outrage after Israeli forces bombed a tent camp in Rafah. “What’s the difference between what Netanyahu is doing and what Hitler did? Bodies of children, young women and the elderly were burned,” she wrote in an Instagram story.

A video of her arrest—in which a policewoman handcuffs Karim with zip ties, covers her eyes and leads her into the station—taken by officers was shared on social media, drawing condemnation from Palestinian MKs.

“I was sitting in my office at the studio, in the middle of a consultation session, when the police stormed in,” Karim recounted. “The studio was full of women and intended for women only, and I asked them to wait a moment, but they didn’t listen. They went into every room, took my phones, and told me I was under arrest. I tried to understand why, and they said I’d find out at the station—but first, they were taking me home. There, they began searching for anything related to Palestine, Hamas, flags, books, but they found nothing.”

Police then took Karim to the station. “When I arrived, they took me out of the police vehicle and put plastic zip-tie cuffs on me. When they came to put a blindfold over my eyes, I was really shocked and frightened. After they covered my eyes, they took me in for interrogation at the station; it lasted four or five hours. The interrogator was rude and harsh with me, treating me like I had come from Hamas.”

Karim was held overnight, and then placed under house arrest for five days. “After I was released, I broke down,” Karim said. “Until then, I wasn’t afraid. I thought they were filming for internal use. I didn’t realize [the video] was on a phone. I fell into a depression for two months, afraid to leave the house. Many Jews and Arabs came to support me.”

Her lawyer, Hussein Manaa, explained that he tried to speak with the investigators at the police station, arguing that her client did not pose a danger to anyone. “Her actions weren’t incitement, and most importantly, [the police] had no approval from the State Prosecutor’s Office to launch an incitement investigation. So they questioned her for disturbing public order, which is not an arrestable offense,” Manaa explained.

“The police could have just called her—she would have come in. Instead, they sent four or five vehicles with 15 to20 officers to arrest this woman, as if they were capturing Yahya Sinwar.”

To Manaa, it was clear that the arrest video aimed to send a message. “The video was taken inside the station, and wasn’t released through the police spokesperson’s office. It was meant to humiliate anyone who speaks out—to say, ‘You have no freedom of speech,’ to instill fear, so no one would speak out against the government or Netanyahu.

“It’s no coincidence they distributed the video illegally,” Manaa added. “They knew it would spread like wildfire—and that’s exactly what happened. I contacted the State Prosecutor’s Office, the police, and the Ministry of National Security, demanding answers. The State Prosecutor’s Office issued a press statement [criticizing the arrest] saying that no request was made to open an incitement investigation, and that they gave no authorization. There was a huge outcry that led to her release, but we still haven’t received any answers.”

Sari Hurriyah, a real estate lawyer from Shefa-‘Amr

Hurriyah was arrested in November 2023 for posts he published on Facebook in the days after on October 7. Police filmed his arrest at his law office and distributed the footage to various media outlets, and Ben Gvir also published the footage. He was held in Megiddo prison in northern Israel for ten days under harsh conditions, during which he was tortured and humiliated. The case against Hurriyah was eventually closed.

“I was in my office when three men entered, dressed in civilian clothes,” Hurriyah recalled. “They presented me with authorization from the State Prosecutor and the Bar Association [to arrest me]. One of them had a camera in his hand, but in the chaos of the moment, I didn’t realize he was recording me. They said they needed to cuff me. We went down the stairs, and they filmed me there too.”

Hurriyah was eventually taken to Megiddo Prison, where he faced inhumane and degrading conditions alongside other Palestinians in the security inmates’ wing. He testified about his experience to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem as part of “Welcome to Hell,” a groundbreaking report detailing the systemic abuse of Palestinians and inhuman conditions inside Israeli prisons since October 7—what they describe as a “network of torture camps.”

On the eighth day of his detention, Hurriyah finally met with his lawyer, after having been denied access. His lawyer told him that his photo had been published. “But I didn’t register it all until I got out [of detention],” Hurriyah explained. “Even under house arrest, many people came to support me. Then one day, in a quiet moment, my wife showed me the police video. Honestly, it was humiliating. I didn’t know what to say.”

The Israel Police had published the video of Hurriyah’s arrest on its official website. “You can imagine the responses—calls to kill me, revoke my license, and other not-so-flattering things,” Hurriyah said. “I learned that the police photo was shared widely on private websites and on Facebook. In all the publications, they used that same photo and claimed I was a terrorist and a Hamas lawyer.”

Hurriyah’s wife showed him the Facebook posts and comments in small doses. “Eventually, I asked her to stop. I realized that this is the atmosphere in the country. The Israel Police—the central law enforcement body—published my picture and portrayed me as  Hamas’s Che Guevara, and I understood that this damage is irreparable. Even if they paid me millions, it wouldn’t restore the image I built over fifty years of work, career, and public service,” he said.

About a year after the arrest, Hurriyah was sitting and waiting for someone at the police station in Shefa-’Amr. “A young man approached me and said, ‘How are you, Hurriyah?’ I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he replied, ‘You don’t know me, but I’m from police intelligence. I was one of the people who recommended your arrest. You’re a public figure, a lawyer, a Christian, and the secretary of the Hadash movement [a non-Zionist Palestinian and Jewish political party]. You’re the only one who speaks publicly without holding back. As far as the Shin Bet [domestic intelligence] is concerned, you’re a nationalist extremist.’”

The charge sounded absurd to Hurriyah. “I’m someone who advocates for two states for two peoples and building bridges for peace—and he tells me I’m dangerous. That really deepened my distress.”

Like many other detainees who had their photos taken and shared on social media, Hurriyah understood that Israeli police wanted to make an example of him. “Looking back, I understood the whole thing was planned, that it was part of a strategy. I was a member of the Haifa District Bar Association. They didn’t want trouble from lawyers. They wanted to silence all the lawyers, so that ordinary people would get the message on their own.”

Dr. Meir Baruchin, a philosophy and civics teacher from Jerusalem

Baruchin was arrested in November 2023 after he published two short posts on social media condemning Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. The arrest followed a complaint by the Petah Tikva municipality, where Baruchin teaches at a high school, and he was held for four days as a security detainee in the solitary confinement wing of Jerusalem’s “Russian Compound.” Upon being released, he fought a lengthy legal battle with the municipality to return to teaching. The police released a blurred photo of him with an Israeli flag in the background, but unblurred photos of him were soon circulated online. The case against him was later closed.

Baruchin recounted that after the blurred photo of him was distributed by the police spokesperson, the mayor of Petah Tikva shared it, as did news sites. “Then the unblurred version was shared—I received a lot of threats. After my release, I was banned from accessing social networks, including Facebook, for 15 days. Only three weeks after my release did I get my phone back, and then I saw the posts,” he said.

“There’s no doubt: the publication of the images was meant to deter others,” Baruchin concluded. “Other teachers were also harassed, but I was the only one arrested. The distribution of the photo was intended to make an example of me, to send a collective message: ‘You’ve been warned.’”

Baruchin maintains that such repression is hardly new. “You can’t say we’re on the way to dictatorship — we’ve been there for a while. More than a thousand teachers reached out to me via messages and private calls, all off the record, saying things like: ‘Listen, I support you, but I have kids to feed,’ or, ‘I have a mortgage.’”

Though Baruchin has returned to teaching, the atmosphere is still hostile. “Every word I say is monitored. Every day I arrive at school, students—not even those in my classes—curse at me,” he said. “I don’t even report it anymore because I don’t expect anything to be done. One father told me, ‘I don’t want you teaching my son to have compassion for the enemy.’ That’s stayed with me.

“In class, a student asked me if I had the chance to kill all Arabs at the press of a button, would I do it? I told him, ‘Of course I wouldn’t,’ and he said, ‘That’s insane. How could you not?’ I said to the students, ‘Just a few minutes away from here, at the Rabin Medical Center, there are Arab doctors and nurses—do you want me to kill them?’ And one student replied, ‘Of course! What do you mean? I would never let an Arab doctor treat me. I’d rather die.’

“That’s the mindset,” Baruchin continued. “It’s not some fringe thing—it’s mainstream. These are kids, yes, but we need to take it seriously and confront it. It’s clear to me they are echoing what they hear at home and from politicians.”

Alison Russell, a Belgian-British activist and English teacher from Scotland

Russell was arrested in November 2023 while documenting the demolition of a home in Masafer Yatta, in the South Hebron Hills of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. She had arrived in the West Bank before October 7 to provide protective presence to rural Palestinian communities at risk of settler violence.

After her arrest, she was interrogated by the special unit established by Ben Gvir to handle international solidarity activists and then spent two days in detention, before being taken to Ben Gurion airport, deported and barred from reentering the country. But before her deportation, police officers photographed her in front of an Israeli flag, and Ben Gvir subsequently published the photo on social media.

On the day she was arrested, Russell was at the site of a home demolition in Sha’ab Al-Botum, when the Border Police arrived. “[They] started asking people for ID. The moment I handed over my passport, the officer who took it got excited and said: ‘Look what I found—she’s not Israeli!’

“I was taken to [the Israeli settlement of] Ma’ale Adumim, and we spent long hours there while they searched my Facebook using Google Translate,” she recalled. “What bothered them most were my supposed connections with ‘terrorists’—like my participation in a women’s protest for prisoners in front of the Red Crescent building in Ramallah.”

Russell said the Israeli government is doing exactly what many European governments do: “‘You oppose us? You’re a terrorist.’ European governments are less blunt about it, but it’s the same principle. The more lies they spread about those who oppose them, the more people fear resisting.

“I speak with people who are afraid to post their own photo, afraid of being labeled a ‘terrorist,’ ‘crazy leftist,’ or ‘untrustworthy,’ just for saying they oppose genocide. I see it among my students, at my workplace.”

Russell felt an obligation to vocalize her dissent and show solidarity with Palestinians on the ground. “I’ve heard of people in Gaza being killed for posting on Facebook, of Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel arrested over things they posted [on social media]. If others are being killed for it, I have a duty to speak out, to bear witness, because others cannot. And I still stand by that.”

M. and L., student activists from Germany

M. and L. were arrested in October 2024 in At-Tuwani, in the Southern West Bank, while accompanying the Huraini family on their private land. Out of concern for their safety and fear of potential legal repercussions in Germany, the two activists requested to remain anonymous. After their arrest, they were interrogated by the same unit which dealt with Alison Russell. They spent several days in detention after which they were forced to cross the border into Jordan.

Before being deported, police officers took their photo, which Ben Gvir later published.

“It all started when a settler-soldier came up to us and asked for our passports,” L. recounted. “We didn’t hand them over right away; we asked him, ‘Who even are you? Are you a soldier? Do you have the authority to do this?’ He repeated the request and then just started calling people. Soldiers arrived, took our passports, returned them, and it seemed like everything was fine. But then a settler we had encountered before showed up and said something to them about Ramallah. [The settler] kept insisting and also wanted to see our passports again. We felt like he was provoking [the soldiers].”

M. continued, “Eventually, they accused us of ‘spreading terror-supporting content’ on social media or something like that, and it was related to a photo of us at a protest in Ramallah. That was the image the settler recognized, and it was probably taken from a video someone posted on Facebook. The guy who spoke at the protest [in Ramallah] posted a photo of everyone standing there on his private Facebook page. He didn’t have many followers or likes, but somehow [the settlers] found it and used it as evidence against us.”

As in Russell’s case, M. thinks their photo was taken right before being deported—but this time at the Allenby Crossing. “We had completed the whole crossing process and we were just sitting there. Then suddenly a police officer came up to us. They photographed us several times, but the one that got published was the one of us just waiting.”

L. added: “He also told us to look directly into the camera. The photo was published that same day—we found out when we arrived in Amman, and someone said to us: ‘Did you see? Ben Gvir published your photo!’”

“It was so absurd,” M. continued. “My first thought was, how did that photo go from a police officer to the National Security Minister’s office in just two hours? They must have WhatsApp groups where they share everything. Honestly, I was kind of glad they blurred our faces, because that really could have had consequences.”

“In Germany, the Anti-Deutsch do almost exactly what the settlers do—they collect photos of Palestinians and anti-Zionist individuals, and post images from places where we meet people,” L. explained. “And there are attacks too. I feel like it’s obviously meant to intimidate, to target individuals, to show that ‘we see you, internationals.’ And especially with this entire police apparatus, the goal is for us to be on their radar and to be hunted down.”

“I think the main goal is to deter new activists. People who haven’t been to Palestine yet, or are considering coming, will see this and maybe decide not to come at all,” M. added. “That’s exactly what they want.”

We contacted the Israel Police and Ben Gvir’s office for comment. Responses will be published if and when received.

Baker Zoabi contributed to this project.