On Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Call for Renewed Efforts to Release All Prisoners

April 17, 2011

Ramallah, 17 April 2011 – Every year, Palestinian
Prisoners’ Day provides an opportunity to reflect on the continuing
incarceration and ill-treatment of Palestinians who have been detained,
sometimes without charge or trial, for their resistance to the Israeli
occupation and its illegal policies and practices.

Although the total number of political prisoners held in Israeli
prisons has decreased again this year from over 6,600 in April 2010 to 5,716,
this overall amelioration conceals some troubling trends and as such should not
be interpreted as an indicator of improved Israeli policies. Particularly
worrying is the fact that although Israel’s practice of administrative
detention is widely recognized as violating international human rights and
humanitarian law and has been repeatedly condemned by Palestinian human rights
organizations and members of the international community alike, 218
Palestinians remain in this form of detention without charge or trial, only 19
fewer than a year ago. Moreover, Israel continues to hold Palestinians from
Gaza under the Unlawful Combatants Law, whose implementation results in grave
violations of international law.

Furthermore, this year Palestinian Prisoners’ Day comes in the
midst of a wave of mass and arbitrary arrests by the Israeli Occupying Forces
(IOF) in the village of Awarta, following the murders of 5 family members in the
nearby settlement of Itamar on 11 March 2011. So far more than 500 men, women
and children have been rounded up, taken for questioning and asked to sign
statements in Hebrew, a language they do not understand. While most villagers were
released within hours of their arrest, 50 still remain in detention without
charges, including two children. These arrests demonstrate Israel’s alarming continuing
willingness to resort to disproportionate measures targeting an entire community,
echoing its detention practices during the first and second intifada.

Israel also persists in its attempts to undermine the Palestinian
civil resistance movement and deter activism against the Wall and settlements
by targeting movement leaders, as well as children from the villages engaged in
these kinds of popular struggle. Children have increasingly become the target
of arrests in occupied East Jerusalem too, particularly in neighborhoods like
Silwan and Issawiya, which have emerged as focal points of tension as Israel
continues to escalate its policies of repression, Judaization and settlement
expansion in the city.

Finally, Israel continues to sanction the torture of Palestinian
prisoners by allowing for unrecorded interrogations and affording interrogators
involved in torture impunity under Israeli law. Moreover, despite the existence
of a complaint mechanism for victims of torture, the Israeli authorities have
systematically failed to open criminal investigations into these cases, thus
furthering the prevailing culture of impunity.

Despite the slight decrease in the number of political prisoners
held by Israel, attention to their cause should not wane. Instead, the
illegitimacy of Israel’s detention policies, the gravity of the manifold violations
that prisoners and detainees are subjected to and the extent of Israel’s
impunity in this regard should be exposed afresh to spur renewed and more
effective action. As Palestinian human rights organizations, we stand in
solidarity with the Palestinian political prisoners and detainees currently in
Israeli jails and their families, and urge all members of the international
community, including civil society, national governments, the United Nations
and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to seize Prisoners’ Day as an
opportunity to redouble their efforts in the pursuit of the immediate and
unconditional release of all Palestinian political prisoners.

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