TEHRAN- Around 5,000 Palestinians, kidnapped by the Israeli occupation regime, are suffering in Israeli prisons. Among them are women and children.

That’s according to a new joint report to mark the occasion of International Palestinian Prisoners’ Day.

Most of the footage that we see of Palestinian prisoners on TV is the footage that Israel wants to be published. The extreme brutality that Palestinian prisoners face is only seen by the Palestinian prisoners themselves.

Israel is the only authoritarian regime in the world which enjoys Western support in cracking down on Palestinians. The arrest campaigns are only one dimension of Israel’s ethnic cleansing measures against the natives of the land.

Among the detainees are many political prisoners. 

Several NGOs have put the report together to highlight the dire plight that Palestinian inmates are facing, while issuing calls for the international community to address the suffering and atrocious terror the prisoners are being subjected to.

The NGOs stress that “guaranteeing the rights of prisoners, their families and their entitlements, as well as their national and humanitarian cause, should not be subject to blackmail and bargaining.”

Israel does not limit its terror only to the Palestinian prisoners. Their families also face intimidation, and in a large number of cases their homes are demolished.

According to the report, the detainees and their families are subjected to systematic violations and crimes that start with the first moment of arrest, such as collective punishment, attacking detainees and their families, threatening, arresting family members, torturing in interrogation centers, preventing them from meeting attorneys and holding them for long periods in interrogation centers and solitary confinement. 

Over the past decade, the regime has dramatically increased cases of solitary confinement.

The Palestinian prisoners have faced an uptick in atrocities by the regime’s forces this year, especially physical assaults and torture of female inmates as well as depriving the prisoners of their most basic rights.

This is where the international community must be ashamed of itself, especially the so-called Western advocates of human rights, particularly women’s rights.

Earlier this year, the regime’s prison forces conducted provocative searches in the cells of three women inmates which led to protests in which two cells were set on fire. The shameful measures against female prisoners led to a "rebellion in all jails".

Unlike anywhere else in the world, the apartheid entity practices something called administrative detention, where it imprisons Palestinians without charge or trial for an indefinite time frame, simply because it claims they may pose a threat.

According to the NGOs, more than a thousand Palestinians are being held under administrative detention, which is around 300 more than last year’s reports.

Palestinians who are seeking the freedom of their land from an occupation regime, should not be kidnapped and sent to Israeli dungeons in the first place.

This should be condemned by the international community instead of being met with silence. That silence has only enabled the regime to expand its atrocities against the Palestinian prisoners.

Amid the silence, many of the prisoners have gone on hunger strike to bring some form of attention to their dire plight.

Among the most prominent prisoners at the moment on hunger strike is Khader Adnan. The Palestinian Prisoners Club says Adnan is now in a critical condition after at least 72 days of his hunger strike protest; he is reported to be facing an imminent death.

The report says there are currently 4900 detainees in Israeli prisons, including 31 women, 160 minors and more than 1000 administrative detainees, including 6 minors and 2 women.

Moreover, there are 23 detainees who have been imprisoned since the so-called Oslo Accords, the oldest of whom is the detainee Mohammed Tous, who has been imprisoned since 1985.

There are 400 detainees who have spent more than 20 years in Israeli dungeons, which the NGOs have referred to as senior detainees.

Currently there are 554 detainees serving life sentences. Abdullah Barghouthi is serving the longest prison term with 67 life sentences.

The NGOs have saluted the “brave prisoners in the prisons of the occupation, renewing the pledge to the martyrs of the captive movement and all the martyrs of our people to continue the struggle until achieving the goals of our people in freedom, return, independence and the establishment of the Palestinian state with al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital.”

They have also said that 232 prisoners have been martyred during their long years of incarceration. Around 700 of the prisoners are suffering from serious diseases and other health conditions.

This year has witnessed even more dire events for Palestinian prisoners in light of the changes imposed by the Israeli elections and the formation of a new extremely fascist coalition with ministers such as Itamir Ben Gvir, who has resorted to many measures of incitement against the detainees and the martyrs' families.

At one point Ben-Gvir poured cold water on the wishes of Palestinians who were seeking freedom. He said, "The death penalty should be enacted for ‘terrorists’ but until then, they should be treated as terrorists."

This is while Israel is the biggest terrorist and illegal entity in West Asia and until its apartheid demise, will continue to practice terror against the indigenous people of the land and against al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site in occupied al-Quds.

The report does not include the regime’s arrest campaign this year. So far in 2023, the occupation has arrested more than 2300 Palestinians, including 350 minors, the majority of them have been abducted from al-Quds, in addition to 40 women. It is not clear whether these Palestinians have been released or not.

Since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, al-Quds, and the Gaza Strip in 1967, an estimated number of at least 800,000 Palestinians have been dragged blindfolded to Israeli dungeons.

Some organizations have put that number at more than a million.