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Israel\u2019s Supreme Court has said in a rare ruling that the Israeli government is intentionally depriving<\/span> thousands of Palestinian prisoners of even a minimum amount of food for daily subsistence amid the genocidal war on Gaza<\/span>.<\/p>\n The three-judge panel, which has so far mostly refrained from taking any action against the government or military during 23 months of war on besieged and relentlessly bombarded Gaza, deliberated on the issue based on a request from two Israeli rights groups.<\/p>\n It ruled unanimously on Sunday that the Israeli government had a legal duty to provide Palestinian prisoners with three meals a day to ensure \u201ca basic level of existence\u201d and ordered authorities to fulfil that obligation.<\/p>\n In a two-to-one decision, the court furthermore accepted the petition filed last year by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Gisha, siding with their allegations that the government\u2019s deliberate restriction of prisoners\u2019 food in Israeli detention facilities has caused Palestinians to suffer malnutrition and starvation.<\/p>\n Palestinians in Gaza are meanwhile suffering an Israeli-induced famine<\/span>, with daily deaths from malnutrition.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are not speaking here of comfortable living or luxury, but of the basic conditions of survival as required by law,\u201d the ruling said. \u201cLet us not share in the ways of our worst enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n The Israeli army has taken thousands of Palestinians<\/span> from Gaza and the occupied West Bank since the start of the nearly two-year war, significantly ramping up its arbitrary detention of people based on suspicions of \u201cterrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n Countless prisoners who have been released have described brutal conditions<\/span> in Israeli military detention, including torture and abuse, starvation, lack of medical attention, overcrowding, and diseases.<\/p>\n ACRI, one of the two organisations that brought the case forward, said its staff were subjected to \u201ca barrage of harassment, verbal abuse and intimidation\u201d from senior members of the Israeli government and far-right Knesset members during the Supreme Court hearings.<\/p>\n \u201cThe outbursts began to seem less like a show of power and intimidation and more like lashing out in desperation,\u201d it said in a statement in late July, when the hearings began.<\/p>\n A main figure fighting their case was Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a small religion-based party and heads the police and other armed forces.<\/p>\n Ben-Gvir attacked the Supreme Court judges following the ruling, saying they are not favouring their country.<\/p>\n \u201cOur hostages in Gaza have no Supreme Court to protect them,\u201d he wrote in a post on X, suggesting that Palestinians now have a Supreme Court that protects them, which they do not.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will continue to provide the imprisoned terrorists in jails with the minimum conditions required by law,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n Last month, Ben-Gvir visited the jail cell<\/span> of long-imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and was filmed taunting him in an effort to further dishearten thousands held in Israeli prisons, drawing condemnation from Palestinians and rights groups.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n