Institutions concerned with prisoners and human rights said that Israel’s policy of administrative detention against Palestinian detainees amounts to a war crime and a crime against humanity, and called for steps to end it, and work to save the lives of the hunger strikers.
This came within a press conference of the institutions of the Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission (affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization), the Palestinian Prisoner Club, the Addameer Foundation for Prisoner Care and Human Rights, and the Wadi Hilweh Information Center (all non-governmental).
The head of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, Qadoura Fares, said that there are “indications that the prisoners are planning a broader hunger strike, such as the 2014 strike, which lasted 64 days against administrative detention, in light of the ongoing battle to confront the administrative detention law, which will not be closed before stopping its implementation as a backward law.” .
Sahar Francis, director of the Addameer Foundation for Prisoners and Human Rights, said – in the press conference held at the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the city of Al-Bireh – that a remarkable increase was recorded in the number of administrative detainees in the last month, including children and citizens from within the 1948 territories.
She called on Francis to focus on administrative detention as a form of arbitrary detention, and as an important issue in light of the recent international decision of the Human Rights Council to establish an investigation committee, and said, “It is time to shed light on administrative detention, which amounts to a war crime against humanity that is systematically and widely practiced against Palestinian people”.
The institutions said – in a previous statement – that the Israeli occupation authorities arrested 3,100 Palestinians, including 42 women and 471 children, from various regions, as part of random and organized arrest campaigns.
She stated that the highest cases of arrests were in the occupied territories in 1948, which amounted to about two thousand arrests, including 291 children, and indicated that the release of most of the detainees was conditional, and that indictments were directed against more than 170 of them.
She added that about 1,100 arrests were recorded in the West Bank, including 180 boys and girls, and 42 women and girls, and 677 were arrested in Jerusalem.