RAMALLAH, March 21, 2011 (WAFA) – As Mother’s Day is celebrated in Palestine on Monday, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club praised the steadfastness of the almost 6000 political prisoners and called on the international community to uphold its responsibilities to achieve justice for them.

According to a report by the Prisoner’s Club, 38 female prisoners, 7 of whom are mothers, are held in Israeli prisons with sentences ranging from 13 – 30 years.

The report stated that female prisoners have been denied from seeing their children and others had delivered their children inside the prison, while enduring bad conditions such as bad quality of food, the spread of rats and insects, and high humidity.

The report added that the administration of the Israeli prison Hasharon has recently installed a magnetic gate to check female prisoners on their way in and out, exposing them to radiation several times a day and harming their health. Israel also uses strip searching to check the prisoners.

Prisoners complained about being transferred at dawn to court and brought back to prison at night or the next day with hands and feet bound all that time.  

Prisoners Mariam Tarabeen and Abeer Odeh are still under solitary confinement, the policy that Israel uses to force prisoners to comply with their orders. 22 prisoners are held in solitary confinement, 14 of whom have been there for more than 5 years.  These confinement cells have an area of 3.75 square meters.

The Prisoner’s Club stresses the extreme importance of the prisoners issue in international conferences and gatherings, as Israel intensifies its arrests of Palestinians to also include more than 350 children in recent months.  

The report urged the international community to “take a serious stance in order to release all Palestinian prisoners.”