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Why Are So Many Palestinians in Israeli Jails?

Israa Jaabis is embraced by her family after spending 8 years in an Israeli prison.

 

Israa Jaabis is greeted by her family after spending 8 years in an Israeli prison. She was released on the second day of a prisoner exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas. Israeli police assaulted journalists at her home, where she described Israeli prison authorites denying her needed medical care, abusing young women, putting women prisoners in solitary confinement and shooting tear gas at them after October 7.    Photo: AP

A key part of the temporary pause that began on November 24 in Israel's all-out assault on Gaza was a swap of hostages being held by Hamas (kidnapped during the reactionary October 7 attack), in exchange for the release of three times as many Palestinians that have been held in Israeli jails. 

This has opened up the question of why so many Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails.

Last August, the Associated Press reported that Israel was holding over 1,200 detainees—nearly all of them Palestinians—without charges, let alone trials. And just in the weeks since October 7, Israel has detained between 2,000 and 2,500 Palestinians.

The first Palestinian women prisoners released from Israeli jails told Al Jazeera they had been confined to cells, kept hungry, denied drinkable water, beaten, and told they would be locked up again if they celebrated their release. And many Palestinians in Israeli prisons are being held under Israel’s policy of “administrative detention.” That means they are held without charges or trial from a few months to years—and authorities often extend these detentions for reasons they do not disclose.

Palestinians Systematically Detained without Charges, Trials

On November 24, the Associated Press reported, “Israel often holds detainees for months without charges. Most of those who are tried are put before military courts that almost never acquit defendants and often don’t follow due process, human rights groups say.” (For a detailed exposure of the total lack of rights for detained Palestinians in Israel see Apartheid in the Occupied West Bank: A Legal Analysis of Israel’s Actions by The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.)

CNN’s Nima Elbagir reported that the 39 Palestinians released in the hostage swap this week included some in East Jerusalem where authorities enforced an order by Israel’s fascist Security Minister Ben-Gvir who declared the prisoners released were “terrorists,” and that any Palestinians who celebrated their release would themselves be charged as terrorists. Those released Palestinians included 17 minors, arrested as young as 16. Most of them were never convicted of crimes. Some of those formally arrested were charged with “incitement on social media” under Israel’s draconian “anti-terrorism” laws that criminalize even expressing basic human sympathy for victims of Israel’s bombing

Seizing and detaining Palestinians without charges, and holding them indefinitely in Israeli prisons, is essentially a form of imposing terror on the oppressed Palestinian people as a whole to enforce Apartheid oppression, and genocidal ethnic cleansing. 

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