Palestinian Prisoners’ Day – 17th April
Khaled Ghannam
16/4/2023
On 17th April each year, Palestinian Prisoner’s Day is marked to highlight the plight of Palestinian political prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons and to call for their freedom. Those Palestinians detained come from across Palestinian society, including women and children. Israel consistently uses administrative detention to imprison Palestinians for indefinite periods of time with no charge or trial. This is a blatant violation of article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners are reported to be rising. You can find more information about this from a variety of sources, including Addameer, Al-Haq and Miftah, and you can join online campaigns they run
As Palestinians prepare to mark Prisoner’s Day, which coincides on April 17 of every year, prisoners’ advocacy groups today said an estimated 4900 Palestinians are currently incarcerated in Israel, including 31 women, 160 minors, one of them is a girl, and more than 1000 are held in administrative detention without charge or trial, including six minors and two women.
The Commission for Prisoners and Ex-Detainees Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, Addameer Association for Prisoner Support and Human Rights, and Wadi Hilweh Information Center – Jerusalem, said in their joint report that 23 of the freedom fighters have been held since before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the oldest is Mohammad al-Tous, held since 1985, in addition to 11 who were released in a prisoners’ exchange in 2011 and then re-arrested in 2014 and their sentences reinstated, most notably is Nael Barghouti, considered the longest serving freedom fighter with 43 years behind bars, 34 of them were continuous.
They said some 400 freedom fighters have been in jail for over 20 years and that 554 are serving multiple life terms, one of them, Abdullah Barghouti, was sentenced to 67 life sentences.
In addition, the Israeli occupation authorities are still holding the bodies of 12 Palestinians who died while in prison, one of them held since 1980, and 700 prisoners are ill, including 24 suffering from various degrees of cancer, the most difficult case among them is that of Walid Daqqa, held for 37 years.
