RAMALLAH, May 3, 2015 (WAFA) – Israeli authorities Sunday issued administrative detention orders without charge or trial against 11 Palestinian prisoners, reported the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club (PPC).
PPC said that the Israeli military court of Ofer issued administrative detention orders against three prisoners for a period of six months. They were identifies as Izz Ed-din Saleh, a resident of Jenin, Ahmad Tawafsheh from Ramallah, and Nidal Zboon from Nablus.
The remaining eight prisoners received detention orders without charge or trial for a period of four months. The detainees were identified as Nour Dodeen from Hebron, Mustafa Brijieh from Bethlehem, Murad Shqiqat from Jenin, Nader Jafal from Abu Dis, Tareq Hamed from Ramallah, Izz Ed-din al-Sirfi from Nablus, Mohammed Asi from Ramallah, and Nader Taqatqa from Beit Fajjar to the south of Bethlehem.
Administrative detention is the
imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or trial and on the basis of secret
evidence for up to six month periods, indefinitely renewable by Israeli
military courts.
The use of administrative
detention dates from the “emergency laws” of the British colonial era in
Palestine, said the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
It stated, “Israel’s use of
administrative detention violates international law; such detention is allowed
only in individual circumstances that are exceptionally compelling for
“imperative reasons of security.”
Israel uses administrative
detention routinely as a form of collective punishment and mass detention of
Palestinians, and frequently uses administrative detention when it fails to
obtain confessions in interrogations of Palestinian detainees.
There are around 500 detainees
serving administrative detention in several Israeli jails. Jarrar is not the
only lawmaker to be imprisoned; 18 of the Palestinian Legislative Council
members are currently held in Israeli detention without charge or trial.
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.
T.R.
