One summer afternoon last year, Mohammad Abu Samour was caught red-handed while ransacking a Beersheba shopping mall.

Breaking into the building, which was closed for Shabbat, the 32-year-old man had gone from business to business, nicking two display T-shirts from a sushi restaurant, NIS 200 ($67) from the tip jar of an Aroma cafe and two packs of cigarettes from a kiosk.

He was at his fourth shop, trying to pilfer clothes from an outlet store, when police burst into the mall and apprehended him, according to an indictment.

When he was caught, the Rahat resident had only been out of jail for two months, after doing a six-month stint in prison for similar offenses. This time around, though, lockup would be much worse for the repeat offender, who was also dealing with a drug addiction.

In June 2025, Abu Samour was charged with four counts of robbery. As he went back into the system, his public defense attorney began trying to arrange admission to a rehab center for his drug problem.

But in August, during the middle of the legal proceedings, the lawyer suddenly lost contact with him.

That is because Abu Samour had been transferred to a security wing at Ganot Prison, used to house Palestinian inmates convicted of terror offenses — despite the fact that Abu Samour had been accused of criminal activity, not terror or nationalistically motivated crime.

The move led to an immediate downgrade in his living conditions and left him with virtually no access to his attorney or anyone else.

“The man suddenly disappeared. The moment you’re a security prisoner, you don’t have phones, you have no link to the outside world, they don’t even notify the lawyer,” said Layil Patishi, a public defense attorney who worked on Abu Samour’s case.

“If he hadn’t been in the middle of criminal proceedings, it’s likely that nobody would’ve known he was moved to a security wing,” she said.

Abu Samour is one of a growing number of Arab domestic criminals who have been transferred to security wings based on alleged misbehavior behind bars, a new practice that has picked up steam under the oversight of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

According to Patishi and other attorneys in the Public Defender’s Office, the practice of moving a prisoner to a security wing — subjecting them to the same dire conditions as those held on terror offenses — was unheard of a year ago.

Now the practice is quickly burgeoning under the noses of rights organizations, lawyers say, alarmed as the line between Arab criminal and terrorist becomes increasingly blurred.

“Anyone who so much as moves in the wrong direction gets classified as a security prisoner,” said Shani Moran, a public defender who has dealt with similar cases.

Unlike standard criminal prisoners, security prisoners are in custody for committing offenses under Israel’s counter-terrorism law, which can range from deadly terror attacks to publishing incendiary content online. Almost all are Palestinian or Arab Israeli.

Defending the decision to move Abu Samour to a security wing, the Prison Service said that during a headcount one morning, the inmate threatened to “burn all the Jews in the wing” after getting peeved at a guard who locked the door to his cell.

The inmate and his lawyers denied the allegations, for which the Prison Service provided no evidence. At the agency’s request, police launched a probe into Abu Samour on suspicion of threats but soon closed the case without charges.

Nonetheless, he remained in the security wing, which meant he was denied access to rehab for his drug addiction.

“There was nothing to discuss anymore,” Patishi said. “Being classified as a security prisoner cuts the process off entirely.”

After eight months of legal wrangling, Abu Samour’s attorneys got him transferred back to a general criminal wing he never should have been moved out of, according to the Beersheba District Court’s final ruling on the matter.

He returned much skinnier and more exhausted than before, according to a legal source who is in regular contact with the prisoner.

“The conditions that he spoke of were horrible. He was cut off entirely from his environment,” the source said. “Something in his face had been extinguished.”

Abu Samour isn’t the only person to come out of a security prison in much worse shape than he went in.

Under Ben Gvir, particularly in wake of the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, conditions for Palestinian prisoners jailed for security offenses have drastically deteriorated. Security convicts receive meager food portions compared to domestic criminals, live in dire sanitary conditions and are often subject to violence by guards, according to rights groups.

Palestinians who have been freed after spending more than a few months in prison often emerge frail and gaunt, having lost a considerable amount of weight. Others emerge with lasting scars from scabies, a common disease running........

© The Times of Israel