Damon prison keeps three or four Palestinian women in solitary confinement at any one time, and swaps them out almost every week. Nobody tells the women what legal grounds lie behind it. Nobody tells their families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Prisoners’ Media Office has tracked the practice through its own monitoring, visits by lawyers from prisoners’ institutions, and testimony from the women’s families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Damon’s administration has stepped up its punishment of the women over the past few months, sending them into isolation again and again, with nothing in law to justify it. Starvation, repression, and humiliation were already policy inside the prison. Isolation threatens the women in body and in mind. It is a new stage in the violations against them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First the leaders, now the women<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The occupation has used isolation against prisoners for years, above all against the leaders of the prisoners’ movement in Megiddo and Ganot. The aim never changes. Cut the leaders off from everyone around them, weaken their influence inside the prisons, break their morale. Some spent years in isolation, and the security reasons the occupation gave were thin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That policy stayed with the men. In recent months it has reached the women of Damon, a dangerous turn and the latest escalation in the punishment they have faced since October 7, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Families are told nothing<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Families of several women prisoners say the administration put their daughters in isolation and never told them why. It issued no formal decision. Most families learn what happens inside Damon only from released prisoners, or through the few visits lawyers are able to make. Their daughters were already living under starvation, medical neglect, and repeated repression, stripped of the most basic necessities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Isolation hands the administration one more tool to deepen the damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No oversight, rising violations<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The International Committee of the Red Cross does not visit. Lawyers get in rarely. The administration bars family visits. It has pushed the isolation policy as far as it wants, and families often find out their daughter was held alone only after she is back among the other women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conditions in the rest of Damon are grim enough on their own: women who are not in isolation sleep in damp, poorly ventilated rooms overrun by insects, with no light. That leaves an obvious question about the isolation cells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aya Faqha: in a cell alone since the day of her arrest<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Aya Hatem Faqha, 34, from Kafr al-Labad east of Tulkarem, has been in solitary confinement since her arrest on February 26, 2026. She is still held pending trial, with a new hearing set for August.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her case shows what the policy looks like in practice. Her family told the Prisoners’ Media Office that the isolation comes on top of starvation and repression, and that she has wasted away under these conditions. She managed to get a message out. Her morale is still high, she said, whatever she is going through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shatila Abu Ayada: 10 years inside, and isolation always waiting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Shatila Suleiman Abu Ayada, 33, from Kafr Qasim in the occupied interior, has been in prison since April 3, 2016, longer than any other woman now in Damon. She is serving 16 years. The “Tufan al-Ahrar” exchange deal left her behind because she is one of the Palestinians of the occupied interior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The administration put her in isolation and told her family nothing, not why, not what she went through there. She is out of the cell now. Like every woman in Damon, she can be sent back at any moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her liver enzymes are sharply elevated, and her family has asked human rights and humanitarian organizations to step in, find out how she is, and take up her case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even the Quran brings punishment<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Isolation is not the whole of it. Women in Damon say the administration punishes them for the smallest things: using clothes as a pillow, keeping a spoon, reading the Quran. The husband of the imprisoned writer Lama Khater says repression units attacked her and two other prisoners over the Qurans in their room, then turned on the rest of the women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A clear violation of international law<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n International law and human rights standards treat solitary confinement as an exceptional measure, to be used within the narrowest limits, for the shortest possible time, and under judicial supervision. Prisoners keep their right to human contact and to legal advice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Committee Against Torture says that holding a prisoner in isolation, particularly beyond 15 days, may amount to torture or to cruel or inhuman treatment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The occupation’s prisons break those standards systematically. Isolation there is punishment. It is revenge. No prisoner, man or woman, can challenge an isolation order or find out why it was issued, and there is no real judicial review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A systematic policy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What the Prisoners’ Media Office has documented is no longer the exception. Isolation has become a punishment policy at Damon, running alongside starvation, medical neglect, and constant repression, and aimed at breaking the women down, body and mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No international body is watching. The silence around what these women face has not broken, and the violations keep widening. They are a flagrant breach of international humanitarian law and international conventions, and much of what the occupation does to these women inside Damon amounts to torture and to cruel and inhuman treatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Damon prison keeps three or four Palestinian women in solitary confinement at any one time, and swaps them out almost every week. Nobody tells the women what legal grounds lie behind it. Nobody tells their families. The Prisoners’ Media Office has tracked the practice through its own monitoring, visits by lawyers from prisoners’ institutions, and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[102,45,41,39,101,27,28,459],"class_list":["post-1516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reports","tag-damon-prison","tag-human-rights-violations","tag-international-conventions","tag-israeli-prisons","tag-palestinian-women","tag-political-prisoners","tag-prison","tag-solitary-confinement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516","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=1516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1518,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions\/1518"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asramedia.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}