EXCLUSIVE... Bet She'an is a small Israeli town in the valley of the same name, south of lake Tiberiade. It's one of those places that history, in the grand sense, would never really take an interest in, but recently even a small town like Bet She'an now has a story to tell and, consequently, a place in history. Bet She'an is one of those (none) places where the West, which loves to think of itself as civilised and highly evolved (and therefore thinks of itself as the opposite of “another” society that is neither civilised nor highly evolved), is losing its identity. This anonymous Israeli town contains Gilboa maximum security prison, one of those impersonal buildings where society attempts to lock away its fear (and maybe even throw away the key). Inside the prison, hidden from view and a long way from that normality which wants to defend it as a valuable asset, there are 850 people divided up into 7 blocks made up of cells of 20 square metres where 9 prisoners live and breath together. All of them have been imprisoned either for crimes linked to the Intifada or, in some cases, for belonging to the Hamas armed movement, with sentences ranging from 2-3 years to life imprisonment, and some of them are still adolescents. For Israelis they are terrorists while for Palestinians they are political prisoners, and it's this difference that sums up the entire drama of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and this incomprehension that runs the risk of becoming even more rigid and crystallised, just like life inside prison. This photographic report, the only one in one of the most isolated prisons in Israel, captures the faces and everyday-day activities of prison life and prisoners and shows how, when the only response to problems is repression, they eventually start to resemble each other in a disturbing way.  (More) ...