Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held without trial or charge in Israeli jails have been staging a boycott of Israeli courts for the 150th consecutive day to demand an end to the policy of administrative detention.
In early January the administrative detainees announced a complete boycott of all judicial procedures related to their administrative detention.
The Palestinian Center for Prisoners Studies (PCPS) said that the administrative prisoners decided to take additional protest steps to pressure Israeli jailers to respond to their demands before staging an open-ended hunger strike as a final resort.
PCPS added that the administrative detainees decided to organize sit-ins in prison yards and delay standing up for the evening count in all jails.
Recently Amnesty International said that the boycott of Israel’s military courts by hundreds of Palestinian administrative detainees “underscores the need to end this cruel and unjust practice which helps maintain Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians.”
“Nearly all the 490 Palestinian administrative detainees currently being held by Israel began a collective boycott on 1 January 2022 by refusing to participate in military court procedures that lack due process and are used merely to rubber stamp arbitrary detention” Amnesty said on its website.
“Their act of disobedience highlights the long-standing complicity of military courts in the use of administrative detention against Palestinians where individuals are held for months without charge or trial often on the whims of military officials or the minister of defense and based only on secret information provided by the Israeli security agency” the rights group added.
“Palestinian human rights defenders journalists academics and others have suffered from this cruel and inhuman practice and have been protesting it for decades including through hunger strikes. This boycott is a renewed collective call saying enough is enough” Saleh Higazi Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa stated.
