A firestorm of international condemnation has forced Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to pull an AI-generated video from his social media accounts that graphically depicted Palestinian prisoners being systematically starved in detention. The video, which was posted to Ben Gvir’s official channels, opened with scenes of groups of apparently well-fed Palestinian men clad in numbered prison uniforms moving along a conveyor belt toward a fenced detention facility. Thought bubbles above the prisoners displayed icons representing their basic needs: food, education, safety, and other fundamental human requirements. By the end of the sequence, after passing through the facility, the men emerged gaunt, disheveled, emaciated, and emotionally distraught, with several openly weeping. Ben Gvir captioned the video in Hebrew with the line “We promised – we delivered,” a reference to his longstanding, public pledges to deliberately worsen living conditions for Palestinians held in Israeli state custody.
The disturbing imagery immediately drew widespread condemnation, with numerous observers drawing explicit parallels between the video’s content and the systematic starvation, dehumanization, and abuse carried out at Nazi concentration and extermination camps during the Holocaust, where prisoners were stripped of their identities, reduced to numbered labels, and killed en masse through starvation and mistreatment. Among the high-profile figures condemning the post was U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego, who wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “This piece of shit should never be allowed in the US.”
As criticism mounted across social and political platforms, Ben Gvir moved to delete the controversial post. The controversy surrounding the video is not an isolated incident: Ben Gvir has increasingly centered harsh punitive policies toward Palestinian detainees as a core plank of both his public messaging and political campaigning. On the same weekend the AI video was posted, he released self-recorded footage of a confrontation with Palestinian women detainees at Israel’s Damon Prison, after the detainees raised complaints about being denied basic necessities. During the exchange, one prisoner told Ben Gvir that detainees had gone multiple days without access to showers, lacked adequate medical care, and had no access to clean clothing. In response, Ben Gvir openly boasted that he was personally responsible for the poor conditions, stating “The good conditions in the prisons are over. This is the current situation, and I am directly responsible for everything. I’m glad we lowered these conditions to the bare minimum.”
Social media users amplified widespread condemnation of the video, with many pointing to the explicit Nazi parallels. Analyst Alonso Gurmendi wrote on X, “Ben Gvir deleted his call for building extermination camps for Palestinians. Make no mistake, this is what he wants. When someone tells you they are a Nazi, believe them.”
The AI video is just the latest in a string of increasingly extreme, graphic public statements and displays by Ben Gvir focused on the punishment and execution of Palestinians. Last month, the national security minister shared footage from a construction site that he claimed would be converted into an execution facility for Palestinian prisoners. “In this place, the terrorists will be executed,” he said at the time, adding that the complex would include viewing chambers where relatives of attack victims could watch prisoners be hanged, again repeating his campaign slogan “We are fulfilling what we promised.”
Political commentators have emphasized that Ben Gvir is far from a marginal figure in Israeli politics, but rather a central power broker in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition that keeps Netanyahu in office. Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote on X, “Ben-Gvir is not only a minister in Netanyahu’s government but holds the keys to Netanyahu’s coalition staying in power. He isn’t some weird outside agitator. He is a central part of the Israeli government.”
The far-right minister’s pattern of extreme rhetoric stretches back months. In a podcast interview earlier in August, former Israeli captive Rom Braslavski asked Ben Gvir whether he would be willing to personally execute Palestinian prisoners, to which Ben Gvir replied he would “try and turn the world upside down” to make that outcome possible. During the same interview, he called for Israel to kill dozens of people in the besieged Gaza Strip every night and advocated for the resettlement of Gaza by Israeli settlers, stating “I see all of Gaza as ours.” Ben Gvir has also repeatedly campaigned for the implementation of the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners and has made the enforcement of degrading conditions in Israeli prisons one of his signature policy priorities since taking office.
Documentation from former detainees and leading Palestinian human rights organizations confirms that severe abuse, including unaddressed severe weight loss, torture, sexual abuse, and multiple other forms of mistreatment, have become widespread inside Israeli detention facilities since October 2023. Leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has gone so far as to describe Israel’s prison system as a network of “torture camps.”
Once considered too extreme for mainstream Israeli politics, Ben Gvir has a well-documented history of extremist activity. He cut his political teeth as an activist in the Kahanist movement, an ideology inspired by late extremist rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane’s Kach party, which advocated stripping Palestinian citizens of Israel of their citizenship, was eventually banned from Israeli politics and later designated a terrorist organization by the United States government. In 2007, Ben Gvir was convicted on charges of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Before entering mainstream politics, he was infamously known for displaying a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his home – Goldstein was an Israeli settler who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994.
Despite this background, Ben Gvir has risen from the far-right fringes of Israeli politics to become one of the country’s most influential policymakers, holding oversight of Israel’s national police force and entire prison system as national security minister. His policies toward detainees have previously drawn sharp criticism even from Israel’s closest Western allies.