A demonstration demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners, Gaza, 2016. Photo: Magdy Fathi/AFP.
By Ammar Ahmed Al-Shouqairi – July 24, 2024
In Palestine, it is not difficult to find people formerly imprisoned by the Israeli occupation to talk to. Nearly a million Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem have been taken into Israeli prisons at least once in their lives since the June 1967 defeat of the resistance.
At the end of April this year, a group of veteran former-prisoners who had been detained at different times met at the house of Omar Al-Assaf to congratulate him on his release from captivity after spending about six months in zionist detention. Al-Assaf, who is in his 80s and is the coordinator of the Palestinian Popular Conference, faced his first arrest more than 40 years ago and was arrested in late October last year for the tenth time (or perhaps the fifteenth, he does not remember the exact number of times due to how often he has been arrested). Those sitting with him had been arrested prior, some in late 1967.
The group may have disagreed during discussions on some political issues, but they agreed that what the prisoners are currently going through in occupation prisons is unlike any previous period in the history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement. The prison guards’ “creativity” has produced the greatest displays of humiliation inside prisons after October 7, such as forcing prisoners to kneel during counting operations, keeping them in the same clothes for months with only a few liters of water for bathing, locking them in rooms for long periods, and giving them only spoonfuls of food until their bodies lost kilograms of flesh.
This is happening within 23 interrogation, detention, and prison centers comprising the Prison Service administration. In other newly constructed prisons (under Israeli intelligence and military) designated for Gaza Strip prisoners, such as the Sde Teiman detention camp, the situation was worse. Prisoners were gathered into groups of 100-200 in barracks, forced to sit on the ground all day, forbidden from talking to each other, with their hands cuffed behind their backs almost day and night as the shackles dug into their flesh. Hands damaged by shackles were amputated without anesthesia in the same detention center by Zionist doctors.
In their joint statement to the media, organizations that are active in defending prisoners use phrases like “no less than,” “there may be female prisoners,” “there are no clear data,” and “those present in unknown occupation camps” to describe the number of prisoners as well as the dozens of prisoners who “were martyred in detention centers and camps whose identities were not disclosed.”[1] Precise figures are impossible because “Israel” does not allow international organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, lawyers, or prisoners’ families to visit them.
These organizations estimate the total number of prisoners and detainees at about 9,700 Palestinians in addition to no less than 1,400 prisoners from the Gaza Strip whom “Israel” has classified as “illegal combatants.” These include a number of Gazan women likely in army camps; as well as 16 bodies of prisoners who were martyred after October 7, their identities revealed and bodies being held by the Zionist regime.
For a brief period following the June 1967 defeat, the occupation arrested thousands of Palestinian resistors and political activists. Prisoners were initially grouped by kinship, village, and city; “Israel” dealt with them as individuals and subjected them to insults and beatings. Prisoners began to take collective action before the end of the 1960s—burning cell contents and going on hunger strikes to improve detention conditions and gain the right to bring reading/writing materials and increased family visit times.
Over time, prisoners built an organizational body inside the prisons that consisted of several committees; some specialized in managing daily affairs and others represented factions in negotiations with prison administrations in cases of collective action. These committees held programs to refine the prisoners’ political knowledge while imprisoned, with some focused on preparing them for the post-prison period when they would be freed in an exchange deal or at the end of their sentence.
Former prisoner Walid Al-Hodali, who spent about 14 intermittent years in many occupation prisons starting from 1979, remembers the role of these committees by virtue of his supervision of one of them. “Our role in leading the prisoner movement was to transform the prison from a place to kill time and for the jailer to empty the human of their national and human content, into academies that connect with the human academically, security-wise, and in terms of struggle,” he described.
In one of these courses, prisoners studied specific aspects of the Zionist mentality (e.g. politics, economy, security) every three months, for a year in total. Al-Hodali also observed the daily activity of prisoner leaders such as Marwan Barghouti in Hadarim Prison in academic studies, and Yahya Sinwar in Ashkelon Prison in translation, research, and reading.
At the end of these courses, the prisoner graduates with a certificate and awareness of how to confront the jailer within the framework of collective political movements based on engagement with the prison service in a conscious manner and the equation of “shared suffering” (which involves confrontations that cause anxiety for the jailer so that the stability of prisons becomes a common interest for both prisoners and jailers).
If the prison administration refused to implement prisoners’ demands related to facilitating prison life or overstepping them, prisoners carried out collective hunger strikes, or burned cell contents, and sometimes killed jailers. “Prisoners suffer, there are arbitrary transfers, isolation of leaders, and beatings,” Al-Hodali said. “This harm is also present in the prison service, suspension of vacations, constant alert, and [jailers] exert greater effort, so historically there has been an implicit agreement, prisoners reduce tension in exchange for obtaining what facilitates their life in captivity.”
After the signing of the Oslo Accords between “Israel” and the Palestinian Authority, the influence of the prisoner movement declined, as the the prison administration escalate its campaign against the prisoners and rolled back the achievements of previous prisoners, as happened with the outbreak of the Second Intifada after thousands of young men with recent detention experience were imprisoned.[2] However, the prisoner movement would appear from time to time and move collectively, despite “Israel” developing methods to control it, attempting to engineer prisoners’ consciousness, and changing the form of repression and torture to be complex and modernized in line with the discourse of “human rights.”[3]
Over these years, through the prisoners’ sacrifices of their former lives and exposure to inhumane treatments, the issue of prisoners has become one of the unifying values of the Palestinian struggle against the occupation.
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On October 5 last year, 5,200 Palestinian prisoners closed all prison departments as a warning step within an escalation program that would begin on October 8, including disrupting security checks for prisoners, sit-ins in prison yards, repeated return of meals, and the possibility of an open-ended hunger strike or physical confrontation with jailers.
This step was the culmination of the prisoner movement’s confrontation with the new directives of the Israeli Security Ministry headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who came to a coalition government with several conditions including passing a law allowing the execution of prisoners, and revoking citizenship and expelling prisoners from Jerusalem and the 1948 Occupied Territories.
Attempts to dismantle the prisoner movement had grown in recent years under Ben-Gvir and his predecessor Gilad Erdan, but they kept being postponed at the request of the occupation’s intelligence agencies for fear of an explosion of the security situation outside prisons.[4] After October 7, “Israel” used the emergency law as an opportunity to establish a brutal spectacle against prisoners.
Torture and punishment leading to death were not just for revenge, but to achieve a future political goal aimed at stopping a decades-long march of efforts to build a prisoner movement that caused anxiety for the occupation due to its ability to move collectively inside prisons and the military and civilian backing it receives outside prisons.
In Ofer Prison, during the prisoners’ recess which was reduced to a quarter of an hour every three days after October 7, Munther Amira, a prisoner and coordinator of the Popular Committees to Confront Settlement and the Wall in the West Bank, heard the pleas of an elderly prisoner to one of the jailers to provide him with his dose of heart medication. The jailer did not seem to care, so Amira thought his knowledge of Hebrew might convey the prisoner’s message better, and he stepped forward and explained to the jailer the prisoner’s need, only for the jailer to shout at him: “Who are you? It is forbidden to speak on behalf of anyone here, speak only for yourself.” This summarizes what the prison administration now strives for in its prisons—no prisoner representation or leadership through the isolation and torture of old leaders immediately after October 7, in order to crush any collective movement.
At this stage, torture is present at all three stages that the prisoner goes through, as witnessed by Al-Assaf: during arrest, in interrogation, and inside the prison. Al-Assaf saw for the first time young men unable to walk due to beatings, and elderly prisoners forced to walk between corridors with broken legs. Torture in previous periods was usually during the arrest and interrogation period, not after transfer to prison, even during war periods such as “Israel’s” war on Lebanon in 1982 which Al-Hodali witnessed while detained.
Al-Assaf describes one day of his detention period that extended for months after October 7: a room with six beds, crammed with 12 prisoners, wearing the same clothes for months, unable to wash or change them. In the morning, they are distributed a box of labneh weighing about half a kilogram for the entire room, and with it for each prisoner half a spoon of jam and 375 grams of bread. Then they are poured half a cup of rice for lunch, one or two spoons of legume soup such as beans or peas, and there might be two peppers or tomatoes for the entire room. He repeats the information to clarify that he is not exaggerating. “One carrot, one carrot for ten people, not once or twice, every day,” says Al-Assaf who lost about 30 kg of bodyweight during his months of captivity.
During the day, there is nothing for prisoners to do but sit and wait for the count, the jailers come and ask them to kneel, and sometimes to kiss the “Israeli” flag. They are given spoiled food with no room for objection. In one of the instances that Amira witnessed, prisoners told the jailer that the breakfast meal was not cooked, “after a quarter of an hour the Keter [unit specialized in suppressing prisoners] entered the room with its dogs and began beating the prisoners, then dragging them into the corridor for even more severe beatings.”
The prisoner movement is studying the situation. At the beginning of the war, some prisoner movement leaders in at least one prison discussed the central question of whether it is possible to escalate the confrontation with the jailers. The assessment in the first weeks of the war concluded that the committees should to wait until the end of the battle in Gaza, and avoid entering into confrontation because “Israel” is exploiting the war circumstance to practice torture and killing without limit, in addition to the Palestinian people being preoccupied with their martyrs and the war in Gaza – one of the factors prisoners rely on when they move into confrontation.
When the war dragged on, and because of the increased pressure on prisoners, some of them entered into individual confrontation with the occupation authorities. Among the 16 prisoners who were martyred after October 7, those who defended themselves against insult were beaten to death. Tala Nasser from the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association reports that it has documented at least one such case. In other cases, despair from torture reached the point of some prisoners attempting suicide, in at least two cases in two different prisons.
An analysis of the history of the prisoner movement must conclude with two points. First, the situation has not remained the same inside prisons despite the cruelty of the occupation and its systematic pursuit to liquidate the prisoner issue. Second, prisons have their days numbered, irrespective of whether they were established decades ago or were built during wars. One day they will not exist, and the jailer will disappear with them, as happened to the Ansar prison camps in southern Lebanon and Nekhel and Abu Zenima prisons in the Sinai desert which were designated for prisoners from the Gaza Strip.
Footnotes:
[1] These are the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoners Club, and Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.
[2] Issa Qaraqe and Abdel Razek Faraj, “Conditions of Palestinian and Arab Prisoners in Israeli Prisons,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Volume 18, Issue 69 (Winter 2007), p. 164.
[3] Walid Daqqa, “Melting Consciousness or Redefining Torture,” Al Jazeera Papers Series (15), Arab Scientific Publishers and Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, 1st edition, 2010, pp. 20-21.
[4] Abeer Bakr, “Palestinian Prisoners and the Israeli State of Emergency,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Issue 137, p. 104.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/DZ/SC
Ammar Ahmed Al-Shouqairi
A writer and journalist based in Jordan. His articles and short stories have been featured in several Arab magazines and newspapers. His work for 7iber Magazine can be found in Arabic.