RAMALLAH, May 26, 2018 (WAFA0 – The Prisoners’ Affairs Commission said on Saturday that an affidavit by a Palestinian prisoner in Israel indicated that Aziz Oweisat, who recently died of a heart attack while in an Israeli prison, was before his death severely beaten by 10 prison guards.
Firas Omari, from the village of Sandala, inside Israel, said in the affidavit that he met Oweisat when they were being transported from Eishel prison to Ramle prison clinic on May 7.
“I met the martyr Oweisat when I got into the prison bus and noticed blue bruises around his eyes that go all the way to the middle of his nose and red lips,” he said. “When I asked him about this he said ’10 guards from Eishel entered my cell and started to brutally beat me and break my bones. I lost my dentures from the beating and the strikes on my face’.”
Omari added, “I saw the martyr Oweisat breathing with difficulty and he complained to me of pain in his chest and difficulty of breathing. His throat was always dry. He was brought before court in Beer Sheba and was charged with beating a prison guard.”
Head of the Prisoners’ Commission, Issa Qaraqe, said that an autopsy conducted on Oweisat on Friday showed that he had bruises on the right side of his waist and clear marks of the handcuffs on his feet and hands.
He said the autopsy report said Oweisat was suffering from heart problems and that he had an open heart surgery in 1998 and cardiac catheterization in 2003. Yet, even though the Prison Services knew about his health condition, they did nothing to provide him with treatment causing deterioration on his health until he suffered from blockage in the vascular valves, an enlarged heart, weakness of the heart muscles and an obstruction in the main left coronary artery.
He said in spite of this knowledge, the guards attacked him and caused him a serious deterioration in his health until he died on Sunday of an acute stroke.
“This is a premeditated and compounded crime committed by the Israel Prison Services against the martyr Oweisat and it is a continuation of the war crimes against prisoners in jails, which demand submitting these crimes to the International Criminal Court so that the occupation state does not enjoy impunity while it does not pay any regard to the life of the prisoners,” said Qaraqe.
Oweisat, from Jabal al-Mukabber neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, was serving a 30-year prison sentence after he was convicted of plotting to blow up a gas pipeline extended to an illegal Israeli settlement built on expropriated Palestinian land.
M.K.
