RAMALLAH, August 7, 2011 (WAFA) –  Israeli police took a decision to prevent Prisoners’ families from entering the 1948 land (under Israeli control) for 5-17 consecutive years, under the pretext of ‘smuggling phones into prison through books’, Sunday said Palestinian centre for Prisoners’ study.

Prisoners told the center that Israeli police interrogated a number of prisoner’s families, all from Nablus, during their visit to family members detained at Shata prison. After they accused them of smuggling phones, they decided to prevent them from entering Israel again for 5-17 running years.

Prisoners’ families said that this decision is unjust and that a person at the prison’s gate distributed some books without their knowledge of anything inside them.

The prison’s administration punished the prisoners by adding an extra month to their sentence, preventing them from entering the canteen and fining them of more than a hundred dollars.

Center’s Director, Ra'fat Hamduna, said that these measures and decisions come within the frame of the restriction policy, in which the political, judicial and executive levels in Israel participated.

Hamduna called upon international institutions, the Red Cross, United Nation’s Commission on Human Rights and humanitarian organizations as well as the international lobbies to pressure Israel to stop its daily punishable, illegal, and unjustified measures against prisoners.

T.R./F.R.