RAMALLAH: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates today welcomed the OHCHR report on detention of Palestinians in the context of the Israeli genocidal aggression on the Gaza strip from October 7, 2023 to June 30, 2024.
The report showed that in the aftermath of 7 October, Israeli occupation forces ‘initiated daily mass, apparently arbitrary, arrests of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, affecting all sectors of Palestinian society.’
According to the latest figures from Addameer, the Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, there are currently 9,700 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centres, including 250 child prisoners and 79 female prisoners.
This number includes 3,380 Palestinians placed under ‘administrative detention’, which allows the detention of Palestinians without charge or trial for renewable intervals ranging between three and six months based on undisclosed evidence that even a detainee’s lawyer is barred f
rom viewing.
The report showed that since early November 2023, the Israeli occupation forces ‘have taken into custody thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, mostly men and boys, but some women and girls as well. They have generally been held in military facilities and further transferred to detention facilities and prisons inside Israel and the occupied West Bank. During raids on hospitals and schools serving as shelters for internally displaced persons (IDPs), the ]Israeli occupation forces[ have taken into their custody large numbers, in the thousands, including at least 310 medical staff, as well as patients, companions and IDPs.’
It also showed that ‘more than 10,000 workers and patients from Gaza, who were legally present in Israel on 7 October, were also taken into custody in Israel in the days after. It is estimated that 3,200 of them were released and transferred into Gaza in November 2023, 6,441 were transferred to the occupied West Bank, while around 1,000 of them remain unaccounted for.’
It said tha
t ‘those taken into custody in Gaza, as well as in Israel, have been generally held in prolonged secret and incommunicado detention, with no information provided to their families on their fate or whereabouts, in many cases for weeks or months, raising serious concerns of enforced disappearance.’
It revealed that ‘a large number of Palestinians – men, women, children, doctors, journalists, human rights defenders – detained since 7 October, most of them without charges or trial and in conditions that raise concerns of the abuse of administrative detention, along with reports of torture and other ill-treatment and violation of due process, raises serious concerns regarding the arbitrariness and punitive nature of such arrests and detention.’
‘Many of those detained and subsequently released have reported being subject to forms of torture or other ill-treatment, including severe beatings, electrocution, being forced to remain in stress positions for prolonged periods, or waterboarding. At least 53 detainees fr
om Gaza and the West Bank have died in Israeli detention since 7 October,’ it added.
Source: Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA