MIFTAH
Thursday, 28 March. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

For Palestinians, April 18 is not a normal calendar day. On this day the Palestinian people commemorate and celebrate their fellow brothers and sisters, who are being held unjustifiably in Israeli prisons. The issue of prisoners is just one of many hardships that the Palestinian people face. This Israeli occupation that has haunted the Palestinian people for 37 years has used a wide variety of gruesome methods, of which prisoners are just a portion, to make life in the Occupied Territories as miserable as possible. Sadly enough, having a member of your family detained is an experience with which almost every Palestinian family has had to deal with.

To commemorate Prisoners’ Day, Palestinian inmates being held in Israeli prisons have started a two-day hunger strike to protest their imprisonment. Like previous hunger strikes, prisoners consciously use this method to make their voice heard to the world that their imprisonment is neither just, nor the conditions they live under fair. Isa Qaraqia, head of the Palestinian Prisoner Club (PPC), told Al Jazeera of the Palestinian detainees’ announcement to start a two day hunger strike on Saturday to attract attention to their “intolerable life inside the prisons.”

“The strike comes as a message, warning the international community that the situation inside the prisons has become very difficult,” Qaraqia said.

The policy of imprisoning Palestinians on an erratic and add hoc basis is a carefully thought out and concentrated policy perused by the by the State of Israel. Israel has used this method since its forceful inception as a state in the Middle East in 1948. Since the 1967 war, Israel has detained up to 650,000 Palestinians, and since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, 35,000 Palestinians have been arrested, including a stunning 3,000 Palestinian children.

Today there are about 8,000 Palestinian prisoners being held without a fair trial, of which are 128 female prisoners and 312 child prisoners. However, to speak of simple numbers and statistics is fairly easy; what the world needs to know and, more importantly, what is expected of the international community is not to stand idle or neutral or even call for a resolution to this pressing and humanitarian issue through negotiations. Rather, they should forcefully demand that Israel release and treat these prisoners in accordance to international law.

The problem is not only why these people have become prisoners or how many of them are prisoners, it is rather the miserable conditions and practices detainees suffer. It is very hard, or nearly impossible, to know exactly how the Israeli prison authorities deal with Palestinian inmates. The only way to be informed is either through being an inmate or having a loved one tell the nightmare stories that take place in these facilities. Though there is one thing the international community can be sure of, Israel is the only country in the world which legally permits the use of torture as a form of interrogation. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Detainees, 177 Palestinian detainees died in Israeli prisons, 69 of which died as a result of inhumane torture and 70 which died during the interrogation process since 1967.

For the sensitive issue that it is, whether for the detainees themselves or the Israeli prison authorities, the world witnessed a horrible, sadistic and, frankly, disgusting to the eye precedent in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib detention center.

Hence, MIFTAH, as a Palestinian non-governmental organization serving Palestinian society as a platform for global dialogue and cooperation and guided by the inalienable and basic principles of human rights and democracy, would like to see the unequivocal release of prisoners before the world witnesses another catastrophe similar to that of Abu Ghraib.

 
 
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