Oldest female Palestinian prisoner dies in Israeli custody

“The news of my mother’s death shook me up. It was already extremely difficult to accept the fact of her incarceration. How could I believe that she was killed?” 

So said Hayat, daughter of Sa’diya Matar in a live interview with Al Jazeera following the death of her mother on Saturday, July 2, 2022. 

Sa’diya Matar was a 68 year-old Palestinian woman from Idna, near Hebron. She has eight children–four sons and four daughters. She died in the Israeli prison of Damon, where she was being detained. 

The third and final arrest 

Palestinian women are not just housewives. Yes, they shape generations of children in imbuing them with a sense of ownership over their occupied homeland; they teach in schools, work in hospitals, and care for those wounded by Israeli forces. Yet they are also fighters and partners in the struggle against colonialism. Sa’diya Matar is exemplary of that fighting spirit.

She was first arrested during the First Intifada of 1987, and was held in administrative detention without charge or trial in 2017 for a period of three months. 

In 2021, Israeli military forces arrested Matar after violently assaulting her. At her military trial, the prosecution accused her of attempting to stab a soldier near the Ibrahimi Mosque in occupied Hebron, and was sentenced to five years in prison and levied a 15,000 Shekel fine.

A slow death behind bars

While she was in prison, Matar’s health deteriorated rapidly. This dramatic shift was suspect, as she began to develop a number of conditions, such as diabetes and heart problems.

“We neither knew she was ill, nor did we get any updates about her health condition, except for the news relayed to us by the lawyer,” said Muhammad Matar, Sa’diya’s son. “During her final days, we were denied visitation under the pretext of security.” 

Yet at her last court session, Matar was wheeled in on a wheelchair and suffered from extreme fatigue, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society. Her lawyer confirmed that she was in immediate need of medical attention by a specialist, and that her condition required intervention before it further deteriorated. 

Her son maintains that “she was perfectly healthy before her arrest, and didn’t suffer from any illnesses.”

Female detainees in the same prison reported that while Matar was carrying out her customary pre-prayer ablutions, she lost consciousness and collapsed. She was transferred to the clinic in Damon prison, where she was reported dead on arrival. 

Matar’s family demanded an autopsy through the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainess, which came in light of several reports of torture, assault, and medical neglect on the part of the Israeli prison authorities.

The Prisoner’s Society asserted that Matar was killed due to deliberate medical negligence–which it regarded as a systematic and premeditated policy. This very same crime is what led to the death of 230 Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody ever since 1967.

Matar is not the only detainee to suffer from systematic medical negligence. According to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, there are over 600 sick Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, 200 of whom have been diagnosed with chronic conditions, including 22 cancer patients suffering from tumors in varying degrees of severity. Many of them are therefore put in a position where their lives are at risk.

Death looms over Palestinian prisoners

Since the first moment of their arrest, female detainees are subjected insults, humiliation, and systematic torture–both physical and psychological.

Addameer reported that Matar is one of 31 female detainees who suffer from various critical conditions. One notable case is that of 36 year-old Jerusalemite prisoner Israa Jaabis, whose body was severely burned by a gas cylinder that exploded in the back of her car at the Al-Z’ayyem military checkpoint, before she was arrested and later accused of carrying out an attack. 

Khitam al-Saafin, head of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, spent three months in administrative detention without being charged. “Sexual harassment and torture are often used as a means of intimidation in order to coerce confessions [from female prisoners]” al-Saafin said. “The methods of torture used on female prisoners include stress positions, sleep deprivation, beatings, cursing and sexual insults–and even questions about their husbands.”

Saafin asserted that, in fact, most female detainees experience sexual violence at the hands of the Israeli prison staff–including “beatings, threats, explicit sexual harassment, threats of rape, and body searches.  Routine body searches involve forcibly tearing off clothes. Female detainees are also often asked to squat naked, and are subjected to an intrusive internal physical search.”

Palestinians react

The Palestinian prisoner’s movement protested Matar’s death. Prisoners returned food uneaten and chanted protests in several Israeli prisons.

Several Palestinian political factions also condemned Matar’s death. The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement held the Israeli occupation fully responsible for the murder of  Matar, while Hamas decried her death as the result of the Israeli government’s racist policies against Palestinian detainees, and called for holding it accountable at the International Criminal Court, regarding the government to be guilty of war crimes.

Both the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) warned of the rising death toll amongst Palestinian detainees and patients in Israeli custody, calling for the internationalization of their cases. Fatah asserted that Israel’s medical neglect of Palestinian prisoners violates the Fourth Geneva Conventions, which guarantee the rights of prisoners to proper medical treatment, and called on the international community to intervene.