GAZA, (PIC)
The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) released on Thursday a number of Palestinian detainees from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including two detained women from Gaza. They appeared in miserable conditions that indicate the extent of brutal torture and inhumane treatment they have been subjected to.
The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) explained that signs of torture were seen on their bodies, indicating they had passed through tough detention including torture, humiliation, and tragic and inhumane circumstances.
Among the prisoners who were released, Hamza Al-Saifi (32 years old) from the Al-Duhaisha refugee camp in Bethlehem, who spent two years in administrative detention. Upon his release, his mother could not easily recognize him because of the gross loss of his body weight.
The PPS affirmed that the IOF has been committing crimes of torture against the prisoners in the Negev desert prison since the beginning of the genocide war.
The number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails since the beginning of this month jumped to more than 9,700, including about 3,380 administrative detainees, and more than 1,400 captives from Gaza who are classified by the Israeli Prison Service as illegal combatants.
In a similar context, the Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees in Gaza confirmed that more than 38 prisoners of those who were arrested in Gaza during the ongoing Israeli genocide war were martyred under torture and because of inhumane detention conditions, systematic assault and the most heinous methods of slow killing carried out with no accountability or supervision.
The ministry said in a statement that the IOF detains approximately 5,000 citizens from Gaza, and that it has documented shocking testimonies by a number of newly released prisoners about the IOF brutal practices that constitute crimes against humanity and contradict all the rules and regulations of the international and humanitarian laws.
The ministry’s statement listed the documented testimonies, which included using prisoners as human shields at their arrest, blindfolding their eyes, stripping them of clothes, breaking their bones, killing some of them with bulldozers, holding them in overcrowded prison cells, amid high risk of the spread of epidemics and diseases, depriving them of medicines and visiting medical clinics and starving them.
The statement reported testimonies revealing that “every prisoner lost more than half of his weight inside the prison”, due to the policy of deliberate starvation of the prisoners, noting that a large number of the released prisoners needed physical and psychological treatment.
The ministry called on international institutions to exert efforts to reveal the fate of Gaza detainees, especially those held in the ill-famed Sde Teiman detention center, where they are subjected to the most heinous torture methods which are newly innovated and have not been used elsewhere.
The martyrdom of Sheikh Mustafa Abu Arra at dawn Friday raised the number of the Palestinian prisoners who were martyred inside Israeli jails since the beginning of the Israeli genocide war on Gaza to 55 martyrs.
This brings the number of the identified martyrs, who have died in Israeli prisons since 1967, to 256 martyrs other than dozens of Gazans who were executed in the field during the ongoing genocide.
