RAMALLAH, Wednesday, September 8, 2021 (WAFA) – The Palestine
Prisoner’s Society today cautioned against the outbreak of an open
confrontation between Palestinians in Israeli imprisonment and the Israeli
Prison Service.
PPS said in a press release that all Palestinian prisoners in
Israeli prisons warned the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) that the punitive
measures currently imposed on prisoners risk an open confrontation with IPS.
It pointed that IPS has imposed additional punitive measures
on all prisoners following the escape of six prisoners from the highly
fortified Gilboa
Prison through a tunnel.
As
part of these measures, IPS conducted violent searches in Gilboa
Prison, deprived prisoners from accessing canteens and forcefully moved all
prisoners from Section 3 of Gilboa to Shatta Prison after a prisoner threw hot water into a
warden’s face. It has also forcefully transferred 34 prisoners from Section 2
of Gilboa to the Naqab and Ofer detention facilities.
IPS has threatened to disperse Islamic Jihad-affiliated
prisoners, currently in Section 22 of Ofer, among
various prisons, an action which was vehemently opposed by the prisoners.
Meanwhile, the Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs Commission
warned that punitive measures imposed by IPS have thrown Gilboa
Prison into s a state of turmoil.
Israel’s
widely condemned practice of administrative detention that allows the detention
of Palestinians without charge or trial for renewable intervals ranging between
three and six months based on undisclosed evidence that even a detainee’s
lawyer is barred from viewing.
The
US State Department has said in past reports on human rights conditions for
Palestinians that administrative detainees are not given the “opportunity to
refute allegations or address the evidentiary material presented against them
in court.”
Amnesty
International has described Israel’s use of administrative detention as a
“bankrupt tactic” and has long called on Israel to bring its use to an end.
Palestinian
detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes as a way to
protest their illegal administrative detention and to demand an end to this
policy, which violates international law.
K.F.
