Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention are subjected to conditions of torture, starvation, and torment that are the worst they have been since 1967. My brother has been imprisoned amid these conditions for over a year.
On Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, rights groups report at least 5,000 Palestinians have been detained from Gaza since October 7, and at least 16 Palestinians have died in Israeli detention amid unprecedentedly inhumane conditions.
Walid Daqqah has become a prolific writer and astute commenter on the Palestinian condition from inside Israeli prisons. He once said that he would write until he is freed from prison, and “in the hopes of freeing the prison from within me.”
Mass incarceration has defined Israel’s colonial project. Since 1967, over 850,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli regime. Currently there are 4,450 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, including hundreds of administrative detainees being held without charge or trial. But just as mass incarceration remains a defining feature of the Israeli occupation, so too has prisoner resistance. Currently, an ongoing boycott of the Israeli judicial system by all 530 Palestinian administrative detainees has surpassed 100 days.
News and analysis from the past week of Mondoweiss’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in Palestine.
Everywhere, COVID-19 has revealed the disproportionate effect of the disease on communities that are already disenfranchised by state-sanctioned violence, including the incarcerated. April 17, Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, brings new urgency to calls to free all prisoners in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The issue of political prisoners resonates internationally, and are yet another key linkage between the movement for Palestinian’s rights and others. Devyn Springer writes that It is no coincidence, then, that many of the biggest non-Palestinian voices of solidarity are themselves former political prisoners, as well as prison abolitionists.
As more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails launch a hunger strike on the occasion of Palestinian Prisoners Day, Tamam Abusalama recalls the combined 15 years her father spent as a prisoner. “Being a former prisoner’s daughter has instilled in me an unstoppable determination to break all borders and limits. I struggle against everything that violates my freedom and that of my people.”