According to the Israeli NGO HaMoked, being arrested by the Israeli authorities for any infraction, no matter how slight, is routine for Palestinians.
According to a 2017 report by the prisoners rights association Adameer, 40 percent of all male Palestinians have at various points been arrested by Israeli forces.
HaMoked said this month that 10,221 Palestinians were jailed by Israel, of whom 3,376 were being held under administrative detention. Administrative detention allows Israeli authorities to hold prisoners for indefinite periods without charge or, in some cases, without even explaining what they are being held for.
Dania Hanatsheh was among the many released on Monday who had been held in administrative detention. “Palestinian families are prepared to be arrested at any moment,” Hanatsheh, who said she has never been told why she had been detained, told US-based ABC News. “You feel helpless, like you can’t do anything to protect yourself.”
What sort of conditions are Palestinian prisoners held in?
Dire ones.
Shatha Jarabaa, 24, who was arrested in August for a social media post that Israeli authorities deemed “incitement” told the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper that she had lost 14kg (31lb) during five months of imprisonment.
“The treatment in prison was so bad,” she told the newspaper. “Each prisoner had only one outfit. It was bitterly cold inside the detention centre. The rain would fall on us inside the cells. My arrest was illogical and unjustified. The charge was incitement and support for terrorist organisations due to posting Quranic verses on social media.
“It was a way to imprison as many women as possible because of the prisoners inside Gaza and to exchange them for the Israeli hostages. We were hostages as well because we were imprisoned against our will without any credible charges.”
The Israeli prison system and the conditions Palestinians are held in have been the focus of acute criticism by rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Israel’s B’Tselem.
Several rapes have been reported over the course of the war. In August, many of Israel’s leading politicians took to the streets to defend soldiers who had been serving as prison guards against charges of having gang-raped a Palestinian detainee. A few months later, in November, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese described prominent Palestinian surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh as likely having been “raped to death”.
At the time of his death, Dr Al-Bursh was being held at Ofer Prison near Ramallah, the same facility where many of the women and children released this week had been held.
In its August report on the Israeli prison system titled Welcome to Hell, B’Tselem documented the treatment meted out to Palestinians in more than a dozen prison facilities transformed since the outbreak of the war in October 2023 into what the NGO described as “a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy”.
Source: Al Jazeera
