Tags

, , , , , , ,

On Prisoner’s Day, April 17, 2024, there are more Palestinian Prisoners and Conditions are Worse Than Ever

(A shorter version of this article appeared today in the “Freedom” site.)

Ever since the 1948 Nakba, the Palestinian people are a captive nation. They did not only lose their homes, lands, and dreams of freedom, but are subject to constant restrictions on their daily lives and endless humiliations and torture at the hands of the racist Israeli Apartheid state. Since 1967 Israel expanded its occupation and settler colonialism to the whole of Palestine, from the river to the sea, bringing humiliation and torture to the life of millions more Palestinians. Almost every Palestinian man, and many thousands of women, spent time in Israeli prisons, for any or no reason. Imprisonment became central part of the Palestinian experience. No wonder that the fate of the Palestinian prisoners is at the heart of the painful and bloody conflict.

Hamas’ attack on Israeli army bases and settlements around the Gaza strip, and Israel’s genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza, provide another stark demonstration of the centrality of the prisoners’ issue. Hamas never thought that their attack could defeat Israel militarily, but they clearly hoped to relieve the siege of Gaza, the big “open air prison” where over two million Palestinians are trapped. Moreover, as they concentrated their effort on capturing as many Israeli hostages as possible, they clearly aimed at what is the biggest prize that might be available for Palestinians at this stage of a completely asymmetric confrontation – the release of thousands of prisoners from Israeli prisons.

On the other side, the Israeli state also proved again that it prioritizes its vengeance against the Palestinian prisoners even over the lives of its own citizens. Throughout the bloody events of October 7, and later in its bombing and invasion of Gaza, the Israeli army implemented its “Hannibal Doctrine,” killing Israeli soldiers and civilians to avoid the need for massive prisoner’s exchange.

Gazans in Israeli forced disappearance face torture and death

Some of the first victims of Israel’s indiscriminate vengeance against the people of Gaza were thousands of Gazan workers who had permits to work “in Israel”, following strict screening by Israel’s Shabak (the GSS – General Security Service). Since crossing the siege walls was tough, they used to stay out of the strip for weeks or months. On October 7, all their work permits were abruptly annulled, and the army and police started a manhunt, badly beating anyone who was caught. Thousands of workers were thrown into provisional detention centers, without any legal status or the very rudimentary rights that other detainees might have. In these over-crowded pens, they were systematically tortured for no reason at all, and at least two of them died as a result. After months of suffering, those hapless workers were gradually thrown back into the killing grounds in Gaza.

Today, April 17, is Palestinian POW’s Day, and the situation has never been more dire. Since Israeli forces invaded Gaza, in addition to the mass indiscriminate killing of civilians, they have also implemented a policy of mass detention. In many areas that the army invaded, the entire male population was ordered at gunpoint to strip and carried away, sometimes on open trucks, while Israeli journalists and soldiers were taking photos and publishing them to celebrate their purported “victory” and Palestinian humiliation. After this public exposure, Palestinian abductees were forcefully disappeared from the public eye for an unlimited period, without any legal process.

After their capture, Gazan detainees are held in military bases, the most famous of them being “Sde Teiman.” The abducted are denied any communication with the outside world, and the army does not even disclose the names of the people it is holding. Gradually, as some of the abductees were cleared of any suspicion and thrown back to Gaza, evidence began to appear about the harsh conditions and systematic abuse and torture in these camps. The abuse has many different faces: Detainees are chained by the wrists and ankles all the time; they are blindfolded and held for entire days in stress positions. Basic provisions like food and hygiene are systematically prevented. Soldiers in the camps are encouraged to satisfy their sadistic fantasies towards the helpless detainees. And, of course, there are torturous interrogations by different army and other “security services.”

According to Khaled a-Nabris, a resident of Khan Yunis, “When they depopulated the city, we left on the road close to the sea, and when we reached the Israeli army checkpoint, they abducted me along with other people and took us to the corrals, where they tortured us with beatings and also let us sleep with wet blankets and did not let us drink… There are young boys who have reached severe states of anxiety from so much torture, and they send dogs to attack them when they are asleep”.

A special place in this multi-facetted hell is kept to the “infirmary” department at Sde Teiman. It was established after regular Israeli hospitals refused to treat wounded or sick Palestinian abductees. Badly sick or wounded prisoners are held chained from all directions and blindfolded. The medical treatment is rudimentary and not by proper specialists. Conditions there are so shocking that even one of the doctors wrote to the Health Ministry to complain. . He mentioned that many detainees lost hands or feet as a result of wounds caused by excessive chaining. Apparently, the Israeli authorities are aware that this butchery is a war crime, so they have ordered that the names of the staff and the patients should not appear in any written report.

On March 7, Haaretz reported that 27 Gazan detainees died in the custody of the Israeli military. Currently, the number appears closer to 40.

After the abductees goes through the stage of military hell, some of them are transferred to the occupation’s “civilian” prison authority, under the authority of the thuggish ultra-right “state security minister” Ben Gvir. For that purpose, the Knesset enacted a special law against “illegal combatant,” that allows detention without trial for unlimited period. On December 2023 this draconian law was amended to make it even more inhumane, depriving the detainees of even the most rudimentary rights. According to an investigation by Al Mezan, a Human Rights organization based in Gaza, at least 1650 Palestinians from Gaza are held under this law.

Israeli onslaught on Palestinians everywhere

While Gaza is the main stage of the ongoing Israeli genocidal onslaught, it is not restricted to it. Since October, the occupation army and Jewish settlers hold daily terror campaigns against the Palestinian population throughout the West Bank. These campaigns aim not only to prevent any expression of solidarity with the suffering of the people in Gaza or resistance to the occupation, but also to drive whole Palestinian communities from their land in order to build new illegal Jewish settlements in their place. As part of these terror campaigns, there is no night without the occupation army, Shabak and police attacking Palestinian neighborhoods, shooting whoever stand in their way, invading homes and waking families in the middle of the night, and arresting dozens of people.

On March 22, Al-Jazeera reported that more than 7350 Palestinians were already arrested in the West Bank since October. Ad-Dameer, a Human Rights organization from Ramallah, specializing in defense of Palestinian political prisoners, publish daily statistics about these prisoners. As of today, April 16, it reports 9500 prisoners, not including unknown thousands of Gazan detainees. Ad-Dameer reports an unprecedented number of administrative detainees, 3660 of them, more than two hundred children and eighty women.

Even less reported are political detentions from the Palestinian community that is under Israeli occupation since 1948. Since October, hundreds of what is called “48 Palestinians,” from all walks of life, were detained, most of them for minor expressions on social media that Israel regarded as “incitement”. Many of them are still in prison, and are being sentenced. On this “internal front,” Israel’s “Democracy” is proud of itself for crashing any expression of protest against its genocide in Gaza.

When I go to the Haifa court to cover political detentions, I inevitably encounter the daily detentions of West Bank workers that cross the green line in search for work to bring bread for their families. On October all work permits were abolished, and to this day there is almost no way to get one. More than seven thousand workers were detained just for the crime of working without permit, and they are not even included in the count of political prisoners. As I reported on November, the occupation courts and prosecution agreed on a minimum punishment of two months behind bars for these workers.

Behind all this harsh statistic, lies a hell of reality, which devastated the lives of many thousands of Palestinians. Since the Israeli state apparatus and general public devoted themselves to “revenge” and threw away all legal and cultural prohibitions on violent cruelty, the whole prison system was converted from “law enforcement” (as distorted and racist as its laws have always been) to a mode of operation of all-out lynch mob. Soldiers, prison guards, prosecutors and judges, all work in tandem to smash the human dignity of their Palestinian victims. It has nothing to do with “harsh interrogation” and all to do with sadistic treatment to force “Jewish supremacy” by humiliating and degrading your victims. I heard many Palestinians that spent years in jail before and months in prison during the last half-year saying that a month now is much harder to bear than a year before.

Israel, as a colonialist project, is based on its ability to hold most of the population of Palestine without basic human rights for eternity. The fact that they resort to the most extreme levels of violence proves that this distorted inhumane system is unsustainable.