A report by two Israeli human rights organisations, the Public Committee Against Torture (PCAT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), claims that medical staff are also failing to report suspicion of torture and ill-treatment, returning detainees to their interrogators and passing medical information to interrogators.
prisoners
Israel has most explicitly devalued Arab life in the differentials it has been careful to maintain in the deaths and injuries its forces inflict and are prepared to sustain during conflict – Israel’s famous “deterrence”. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, nearly 6,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, compared with 506 Israeli fatalities. And Israel increased that imbalance more than tenfold during its attack on Gaza in winter 2008, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed as opposed to nine Israelis.
News that Israel and Hamas had reached agreement on a prisoner exchange instantaneously displaced the PLO bid for full UN membership from the headlines in mid-October. Arguably, Hamas and Israel had a common interest in this regard. More importantly, the Palestinian Islamists, no longer relegated to the margins of the Palestinian UN initiative by the rival leadership in Ramallah, can now resume reconciliation talks from a position of relative equality.
While hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and Gilad Shalit return home, hundreds others go into exile, and thousands remain jailed in Israel.
Israeli soldiers should kill terrorists ‘in their beds’ following Shalit deal, former IDF rabbi says
Former IDF Chief Rabbi: “When you arrive to arrest terrorists like the murderers of the Fogel family, they should just be shot, exterminated. They were terrorists that murdered people and should be killed in their beds.”
Some 203 prisoners from the West Bank will not return home: 40 will be exiled outside to other countries and the rest will be sent to Gaza, the official said.
Palestinian prisoners have entered their third week of hunger strike. After two weeks of hunger strike, physical symptoms become increasingly severe and prisoners’ lives and health are ever more at risk…As of October 9, 300 prisoners were participating in a complete open ended hunger strike and 3000 in a partial hunger strike. Additional prisoners have been joining the strike on a daily basis – on October 10 and 11, over 1500 prisoners at Nafha, Ramon, Eshel, Asqelan, and Gilboa prisons have joined in the open-ended strikes
On 9 October 2011, four women political prisoners have joined the open hunger strike…the prison authorities punished the women prisoners who joined the hunger strike and took many things from their cell, including television, radio, hot plate, kettle, notebooks, books, pens and all the food that was in the cell, including sugar and salt.
Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said Israel will release 1,027 prisoners in two stages. Within a week, 450 will be swapped for Shalit and the rest will be freed two months later. Twenty-seven women are among those on the release roster.
The head of the Palestinian Detainees Center has criticized prisoners affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad for stalling on joining a hunger strike to protest Israel’s prison conditions…The prisoners’ rights group Addameer says Israel has detained over 650,000 Palestinians since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, around 20 percent of the population.
The dynamics that guard these protests are that of a social movement. However, the content of the demonstrators’ demands should be subjected to a serious discussion and critique. One of the major contradictory aspects of this movement is the exclusive understanding of the value of social justice. Social justice is a universal value, but for the protesters in Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, it is limited only to the internal dynamics of Israeli society.
Palestinian prisoners in several prisons, including Nafha prison, have reported in the past few days that they were threatened that family visits would be denied in retaliation for their participation in the hunger strike. Israeli prison officials told the prisoners that for each day they spent on hunger strike, they would be banned from family visitation for 1 month.
Israel’s prison administration has refused Palestinian detainees’ demands as prisoners enter their eighth day on hunger strike, the minister of detainees’ affairs in Ramallah said Tuesday… According to latest reports from the Palestinian Authority, 6,000 Palestinians are being detained in Israeli prisons, including 219 in Administrative Detention who are held without charge.
Palestinian detainees in prisons across Israel are on hunger strike for the seventh consecutive day in protest against being forced into isolation cells and being deprived of family visits.
Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails have started a hunger strike to protest their treatment by the Israeli prison services, Palestinian Authority Minister of Detainee Affairs Issa Qaraqe said Tuesday.
On Friday, 24 June at 12:46 pm, the prison administration brought us, the prisoners, a watermelon. It was our first watermelon of 2011. According to the prison regulations, each prisoner gets 180 grams of fruit each day. It’s one of our basic rights.
Bassem Tamimi of Nabi Saleh delivered a court statement at the start of his trial last Sunday saying ‘I reject [these laws] and cannot recognize their validity.’
Israeli prison authority terrorized Palestinian prisoners in a ‘commando’ raid at the Ketziot prison which was designed to “boost the morale” of prison guards. One Palestinian prisoner was killed and several were injured. This was a routine prison raid, carried out against sleeping prisoners in the middle of the night. The video had been suppressed by the Israeli government from the time it was made in 2007, but was shown on Israel’s Channel 2 TV last week.
As many as 90% of Palestinian prisoners are denied this basic right despite civilian and military legislation, says study produced by Public Committee Against Torture and Palestinian Prisoners’ Society.
And what about the sexual assault?
“I caressed his leg? He’s a liar. I would never touch him. On the contrary, I took the picture from a distance so as not to be close to them, because they stink. It’s a simple as that…”
So, you didn’t kiss him, you didn’t touch his leg?
“They are ingrates and of course they wouldn’t say that I gave them food. Of course they would slander me.”
