More than 90 percent of Palestinian prisoners have caught scabies, a disease the occupation is deliberately spreading through its prisons, the Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The center calls scabies one of the occupation’s main hidden weapons, used alongside the open ones, torture and starvation, to keep prisoners suffering and break them in body and mind, throughout their detention and after their release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scabies is contagious and spreads fast. The skin reddens, then comes severe itching and a rash, then inflammation and sharp pain. Left untreated, it can turn into serious ulcers that need specialist care and a hospital stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By spreading the disease, the occupation weakens prisoners’ bodies and piles on their suffering, the center says, leaving them so consumed by pain and illness that they have no room to think about the rights the prison administration has stripped from them over the past three years. Conditions now are worse than at any time in the long history of the prisoners’ movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The occupation itself does much to spread it. Cells and wings are packed far past capacity. Soap, shampoo, and other cleaning supplies are rationed. The occupation bars clothes, especially underwear, as well as new bedding, and lets prisoners wash only rarely. Cleaning crews never reach the wings, so the mites that cause scabies spread unchecked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even though it is contagious, the occupation refuses to isolate the prisoners who have it. It passes through direct contact and shared items no one can do without, and it has run through the prison population. Some have recovered. Most still live with its effects, women and children among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The occupation also withholds effective treatment to drag the suffering out, the center says. Prisoners’ health has worsened, and in some the disease has reached a dangerous stage, with ulcers and skin so eroded that pits have opened in it. These wounds are slow to heal, or need hospital care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cutting off clothing has fed the outbreak too. With nothing to change into, prisoners wear the same clothes for long stretches. They wash what little they have, wait for it to dry, and put it back on, or borrow from another prisoner, having none of their own. New arrivals fare worst. The occupation takes the clothes they came in with and gives them a single outfit, one shirt and one pair of trousers, to last their entire detention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Full responsibility for the prisoners’ lives falls on the occupation’s prison administration and the extremist occupation government behind it, the center says. They have left prisoners prey to diseases that gnaw at bodies already weakened by harsh and steadily worsening detention, and have shown reckless disregard for those lives by deliberately creating the conditions that spread disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The center is calling on international bodies to set up a specialist medical team through the World Health Organization, send it into the prisons to see how far the disease has spread, and confirm the methods the occupation uses to spread it. It wants urgent, practical steps to stop the outbreak, which it says puts prisoners’ lives in real danger, and immediate medical care for those already infected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More than 90 percent of Palestinian prisoners have caught scabies, a disease the occupation is deliberately spreading through its prisons, the Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies says. The center calls scabies one of the occupation’s main hidden weapons, used alongside the open ones, torture and starvation, to keep prisoners suffering and break them in body …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[45,41,39,27,28,33,480],"class_list":["post-1478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reports","tag-human-rights-violations","tag-international-conventions","tag-israeli-prisons","tag-political-prisoners","tag-prison","tag-prisoners","tag-scabies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1480,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478\/revisions\/1480"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}