RAMALLAH, (PIC)
With the advent of Eidul Adha, more than 9,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention experience a disastrous reality and punishments that have deprived them of all the rights guaranteed by all international and humanitarian laws and covenants.
The prisoners spend Eid without visits from their families or even the minimum contact, without being able to hear messages from their loved ones through the radio, without being allowed to receive written letters or photos, and without any form of communication with the outside world.
The occupation authorities and the prison administration deprive the prisoners of all their rights, including restricting lawyers’ visits, ongoing repression and persecution, and confiscating all the prisoners’ possessions.
Eid coincides with very high temperatures and extremely poor prison conditions, leading to the widespread outbreak of infectious skin diseases among the prisoners. In addition, sick prisoners are generally deprived of treatment.
The Israeli Prison Service (IPS) persists in maltreatment and oppression against the prisoners, by prohibiting cleaning and disinfection materials, and by restricting drinking and cleaning water.
Some prisoners sleep on the floor due to the overcrowding of the prisons, as the IPS deliberately increases the number of prisoners in each room beyond the maximum capacity.
Starving the prisoners
In the few past days, a number of prisoners were released from the Israeli prisons, most notably the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Dr. Aziz Dweik, who spent eight months in administrative detention. The bodies of the prisoners exposed the crime of starvation against them.
After his release from the Israeli prisons, Dweik said that what is happening to the Palestinian prisoners is a real massacre in which they are facing slow death and starvation.
Dweik described the Negev prison as worse than Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, adding that the IPS deals with them in a gang-like manner, and the prisoners have become in a very bad state of health at the level of skin diseases while food given to them is not enough for children, let alone what adults need.
He added that the conditions of the prisoners are heartbreaking and extremely difficult, and “the prisoners’ message to our people is: save your prisoners from this ongoing suffering.”
The Speaker of the Legislative Council pointed out that the occupation deliberately wastes the dignity of the human being in every sense of the word, but stressed that “the will of our people will not be broken.”
Dozens of martyr prisoners
Since the start of the Israeli genocide war on the Gaza Strip on October 7, the Israeli detention centers have turned into arenas of torture and killing.
The occupation forces admitted to killing 36 prisoners from the Gaza Strip under torture in prisons and detention centers, while previous statistics indicated that 18 prisoners distributed among detainees from Gaza and the West Bank also died in detention.
The IPS has carried out horrific crimes against the prisoners and violated all international covenants, with the aim of killing them and depriving them of their humanity, according to dozens of testimonies provided by the prisoners who regained their freedom after serving their sentences and by the legal teams.
The IPS pursues the policy of starvation, depriving prisoners of meals, providing unhealthy and insufficient meals, which are exposed to sunlight and dust for long hours before giving them to the prisoners.
The IPS also practices systematic physical and psychological torture that the prisoner goes through from the moment of his arrest, during the investigation, and through raiding the cells, from beating and insults that affect human dignity, in addition to the humiliating policy of strip searches inside the cells, or during the transfer of prisoners from one cell to another, or from one section to another.
Israel continues to detain more than 9,300 prisoners in its prisons, including at least 75 female prisoners, and at least 250 children, not including all the detainees from Gaza, whose number is estimated in the thousands. The IPS had acknowledged the detention of 899 Palestinians under the classification of unlawful combatant.
