On Monday, an Israeli military incursion into the occupied West Bank town of Qabatiya, located near Jenin, has drawn renewed scrutiny after multiple Palestinian detainees were found marked with handwritten numbers on their foreheads and arms. During the large-scale raid, Israeli troops rounded up roughly 50 local residents, according to one detained local resident who was directly targeted by the practice, and the group of detainees included women and previously incarcerated Palestinians.
Ahmad al-Hathnawi, a 44-year-old local resident who has been arrested by Israeli forces four times prior to this incident, told local Palestinian media that he received the number 44 written directly onto his forehead. For Hathnawi, this numbering marked an unprecedented mistreatment despite his history of detention by Israeli authorities.
Following their detention, Hathnawi and other rounded-up residents were transferred for interrogation by Israeli forces. He detailed that interrogators focused on pressuring detainees to avoid opposition to future Israeli settlement activity in the area, framing the messaging as an attempt to secure “no problems” for incoming settlers. In Hathnawi’s assessment, the entire operation — including the numbering of detainees and the interrogation process — was a deliberate tactic to spread fear among local Palestinian families and suppress resistance to ongoing settlement expansion in the Jenin region.
The controversial practice of marking detainees with numbers is not a new incident for the Israeli military. Israeli media reports confirm that the military has already acknowledged that soldiers carried out the numbering in this latest raid, adding only that “lessons have been learned” from the incident. This mirrors an identical response the Israeli military gave in April of this year, when a group of Palestinian women from Jenin were found marked with numbers on their arms. Two years prior, in 2024, Israeli soldiers also carried out the same practice, marking the foreheads of a group of Palestinian detainees detained in Hebron.
This report was originally sourced from independent coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region by Middle East Eye, an outlet focused on on-the-ground reporting from the area.