9,500 Prisoners Need Every Form of Solidarity
The Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies has called for an escalation of solidarity in all its forms with Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli occupation prisons, who endure brutal detention conditions and face what amounts to a policy of direct killing under the occupation’s aggressive measures against them.
The Center’s director, researcher Riad al-Ashqar, said the occupation holds 9,500 prisoners in deplorable conditions, particularly since October 2023. Calls to kill prisoners have intensified, a law authorizing their execution has advanced, and an unprecedented starvation policy has been imposed. Israeli authorities have also openly boasted about rape crimes committed against prisoners, all while international justice and human rights principles remain absent.
Al-Ashqar said prisoners in occupation prisons are subjected to slow death. The occupation has killed 87 identified prisoners over the past 28 months through lethal torture methods during interrogation, deliberate medical neglect of ill detainees, and starvation.
These prisoners need every free and honorable voice to amplify all forms of solidarity, al-Ashqar stressed, and to carry their voices and suffering to the world. He called on people of conscience everywhere to participate actively in the solidarity day on Saturday, January 31, to break the silence on the occupation’s crimes against prisoners, and to restore the standing of international humanitarian law and human rights principles that the occupation has trampled without fear of punishment or accountability from the international community.
The call for solidarity with Palestinian prisoners is the ultimate test of the world’s conscience and humanity, al-Ashqar said. Thousands of prisoners remain buried away in the occupation’s prisons. Some have been detained for 40 consecutive years. Hundreds have spent more than 20 unbroken years behind bars, sparing neither the old nor the young.
Al-Ashqar revealed that the occupation employs a policy of human attrition against the Palestinian people through continuous individual and mass arrest campaigns. The vast majority are detained without charge. In the past year alone, 7,500 arrests were carried out, targeting all segments of society: minors, women, the sick, people with disabilities, the elderly, and university students.
The occupation ensures at all times that thousands of prisoners remain in its jails as political hostages, al-Ashqar explained, to subjugate the Palestinian people, break their will, blackmail them, disrupt their lives, and spread chaos and social instability.
Since 1967, more than one million Palestinians have been arrested, al-Ashqar said. Every Palestinian household has felt the fire of detention through its sons and daughters, not once but many times over. Some entered prison on their own feet and left carried on shoulders after being killed inside. The occupation still holds the bodies of dozens of prisoners it killed behind bars, refusing to return them to their families for burial.
The silence of the world’s human rights and humanitarian institutions over the occupation’s crimes encourages it to continue and escalate them, al-Ashqar said, and to accelerate passage of the prisoner execution law while treating itself as a state above the law. The world must end its silence and take real action to stop the occupation’s crimes and its ongoing aggression against prisoners, and work urgently to secure the release of every last one of them.
