The Palestinian Prisoner Club announced on Tuesday that the Israel Prison Service (IPS) had reported a new case of coronavirus among the Palestinian inmates. This brings the total number of infections since November 2 to more than 100 cases.
The prisoner club said in a statement that the prisoners are living in a state of anxiety as new infections continue to be recorded among them after 15 days have passed since the virus infection started to spread inside the Israeli prisons.
The club pointed out that the majority of the infections are being held in section No. 3 in the Gilboa prison another group of prisoners was transferred to three other prisons.
360 prisoners in Gilboa are at high risk of acquiring coronavirus as the virus continues to spread among them.
The club stated that the IPS is fully responsible for the prisoners’ lives. It noted that the continued spread of the pandemic inside the prisons foreshadows a catastrophe especially with the lack of necessary preventive measures.
It renewed its demand for all human rights institutions on top of which the United Nations and the World Health Organization to put pressure on Israel to release the sick and the elderly prisoners.
For its part Wa’ed Association for Prisoners and Liberated Prisoners called on the competent international authorities to send an international team to conduct the necessary examinations and to transfer the sick prisoners to “real” hospitals to receive treatment instead of the “slaughterhouse of the living” which is called the Ramla prison clinic.
In a statement Wa’ed called on the Palestinian Arab and international media to highlight this “crime” that is practiced against male and female prisoners.
“The Israeli crime that started with negligence and deliberate transmission of the virus to prisoners continues. The infected prisoners face medical neglect and they have been transferred to solitary confinement departments in a clear insistence on the slow and deliberate killing policy” Wa’ed elaborated.
