Press Releases

For Immediate Release

It may be your sister, your father, your brother or even you mother.  There are more than 7,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails at the moment including:  370 children under 18 and 113 women.   Others have been deported from their homes outside the country or from West Bank to the Gaza Strip. 

Children are not allowed family visits, food is poor, living conditions are inadequate, they are denied access to legal advice and they are regularly interrogated or beaten.  Most are political prisoners and they are held in contravention of the Geneva Conventions which the Israeli Department of Justice has recommended that the Israeli Government recognize in law rather than just in theory.

And several thousand of them have been on a hunger strike since the middle or August.  Is it any wonder?

Some 40,000 were arrested during the first intifada 1989-1992 and 18,211 have been detained in the second intifada since 2000.  Almost 600,000 Palestinians have been arrested since the Israeli occupation of West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.  In mid-2003, it was reported that 5,600 Palestinians were security inmates, 2,420 were serving sentences, 2,650 were awaiting trial and 530 were administrative detainees.

Some are just rounded up with others in mass arrests, others are charged with crimes and some are placed under administrative detention which means they are held without charge or trial.

The Palestinian prisoners aren’t asking for much.  Most of them just want better conditions, a phone call to the family and recognition of how prisoners should be treated under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

They don’t want to be denied hospital treatment if they are sick, or do they want to hear from an Israeli Minister that they should starve to death nor do they want the smells from wardens’ barbecue.

For more information on Palestinian prisoners or to offer support, contact: [email protected],

Admeer, Families of Palestinian Political Prisoners, Box 2050 Ramallah, Palestine [email protected], or Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Bethlehem, Palestine. [email protected]