Palestinian Prisoners Data

Quick start

The API is served by PostgREST. Send the public key with every request as an apikey header. The key is safe to use in client-side code — access is governed by the database, which only ever returns published rows to it.

BASE="https://nbuwoujnljvihdqhiyyw.supabase.co/rest/v1"
KEY="sb_publishable_kFUwkD9S4RsycDmf3JO0zg_KF_pcY38"

# Five most recent recorded deaths in custody
curl "$BASE/prisoners?select=name_en,date_of_death,cause_of_death&order=date_of_death.desc&limit=5" \
  -H "apikey: $KEY"

Records are added through an editorial review queue and are not exposed here until a human marks them published — so this endpoint reflects reviewed data only. Read the methodology →

Resources

Each is available at BASE/<resource>.

Endpoint	Contents
`/prisoners`	People — deceased-in-custody records and living detainees
`/facilities`	Prisons, interrogation and detention centers
`/organizations`	Human-rights organizations and publishers
`/testimonies`	Individual survivor / released-detainee accounts
`/sources`	Citations behind the records (reports included)

Querying

PostgREST exposes filtering, ordering and pagination as URL parameters.

# Choose columns
?select=name_en,date_of_death,residence

# Filter (operators: eq, neq, gt, gte, lt, lte, like, ilike, in, is)
?status=eq.administrative_detainee
?date_of_death=gte.2023-10-07
?name_en=ilike.*khan*
?status=in.(sentenced,detainee)

# Order & paginate
?order=date_of_death.desc&limit=50&offset=100

CSV instead of JSON

Add an Accept: text/csv header to any endpoint:

curl "$BASE/prisoners?select=name_en,date_of_death" \
  -H "apikey: $KEY" -H "Accept: text/csv" > prisoners.csv

Full operator reference is in the interactive API reference.

What's public

The public key reads only published rows. Draft and in-review records — including newly imported or partially documented ones — are never returned. This is enforced by the database, not by the application, so the guarantee holds for every consumer.

A record's verification field describes corroboration, not truth: single_source corroborated disputed unverified.

Fields

The most-used columns. See the reference for the complete, current schema of every resource.

`prisoners`

`name_en` / `name_ar`	Name; primary transliteration and Arabic
`aliases`	Other spellings (array)
`residence`, `region`	Origin (West Bank, Gaza, '48, Jerusalem)
`status`	administrative_detainee, sentenced, detainee, citizen_of_israel, unknown
`is_deceased`, `date_of_death`, `cause_of_death`	Death-in-custody details
`body_withheld`, `body_returned_on`	Whether the body is held by Israel
`charges`, `location_of_arrest`	Arrest context (living detainees)
`detention_start`, `detention_end`, `times_arrested`	Detention period and history
`narrative`	Source narrative paragraph

Other resources

facilities (name, aliases, type, region) · organizations (name, website, telegram) · testimonies (testifier_name, full_text, detention_facility, classification) · sources (type, title, url, published_on). Full details in the reference.