‘If you’re watching this… then Al Jazeera has been banned in Israel’. Correspondent Imran Khan recorded his last report from occupied East Jerusalem pre-empting the Netanyahu government’s unanimous decision to close Al Jazeera in Israel.
Published On 5 May 2024
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Every year, April 17 marks Palestinian Prisoner’s Day, a day dedicated to the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Campaigners use the day to call for the human rights of such prisoners to be upheld and for those who have been detained without charge to be released.
On Monday, Israel released 150 Palestinian prisoners detained during the war in the Gaza Strip. These prisoners, including two Palestine Red Crescent Society workers, said they suffered abuse during their 50 days in Israeli prison, according to a report by the Reuters news agency.
Here’s more about Palestinian Prisoner’s Day and the situation of the prisoners in Israel.
The Palestinian National Council chose April 17 as Palestinian Prisoner’s Day in 1974 because it was the date that Mahmoud Bakr Hijazi was released in the first prisoner exchange between Israel and Palestine in 1971.
Hijazi, who had been serving a 30-year prison sentence on charges of trying to blow up the Nehusha Water Institute in central Israel in 1965, was released by Israel in exchange for a 59-year-old Israeli guard named Shmuel Rozenvasser.
In the occupied Palestinian territories, one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged at some point. This rate is twice as high for Palestinian men as it is for women – two in every five men have been arrested and charged.
There are 19 prisons in Israel and one inside the occupied West Bank that hold Palestinian prisoners. Israel stopped allowing independent humanitarian organisations to visit Israeli prisons in October, so it is hard to know the numbers and conditions of people being held there.
As of Tuesday, about 9,500 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank were in Israeli captivity, according to estimates from Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a rights group based in the West Bank city of Ramallah that supports Palestinian prisoners. The organisation works with human rights groups and families of prisoners to gather information about the situation of the prisoners.
Palestinian prisoners who have been released have reported being beaten and humiliated before and after the start of the war on Gaza on October 7.
Prisoners released into Gaza on Monday have complained of ill-treatment in Israeli prisons, according to the Reuters report. Many of those released said they had been beaten while in custody and had not been provided with medical treatment.
“I went into jail with two legs, and I returned with one leg,” Sufian Abu Salah told Reuters by phone from a hospital in Gaza, adding that he had no medical history of chronic diseases.
“I had inflammations in my leg, and they [the Israelis] refused to take me to hospital. A week later, the inflammations spread and became gangrene. They took me to hospital where I had the surgery,” said Abu Salah, adding that he had also been beaten by his Israeli captors.
Permission for family members of prisoners to visit them has been suspended since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Gaza and since December 2020 in the West Bank, according to HaMoked, a human rights NGO assisting Palestinians subjected to human rights violations under the Israeli occupation. HaMoked added that minors being held in prisons were allowed a 10-minute phone call to their families once every two weeks during 2020.
About 3,660 Palestinians being held in Israel are under administrative detention, according to Addameer. An administrative detainee is someone held in prison without charge or trial.
Neither the administrative detainees, who include women and children, nor their lawyers are allowed to see the “secret evidence” that Israeli forces say form the basis for their arrests. These people have been arrested by the military for renewable periods of time, meaning the arrest duration is indefinite and could last for many years. The administrative detainees include 41 children and 12 women, according to Addameer.
According to Addameer, 80 women and 200 children are currently being held in Israeli prisons.
In 2016, Israel introduced a new law allowing children between the ages of 12 and 14 to be held criminally responsible, meaning they can be tried in court as adults and be given prison sentences. Previously, only those 14 or older could be sentenced to prison. Prison sentences cannot begin until the child reaches the age of 14, however [PDF].
This new law, which was passed on August 2, 2016, by the Israeli Knesset, enables Israeli authorities “to imprison a minor convicted of serious crimes such as murder, attempted murder or manslaughter even if he or she is under the age of 14”, according to a Knesset statement at the time the law was introduced.
This change was made after Ahmed Manasra was arrested in 2015 in occupied East Jerusalem at the age of 13. He was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years in prison after the new law had come into effect and, crucially, after his 14th birthday. Later, his sentence was commuted to nine years on appeal.
Controversially, Palestinian prisoners are tried and sentenced in military courts rather than civil courts.
International law permits Israel to use military courts in the territory that it occupies.
A dual legal system exists in Palestine, under which Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subject to Israeli civil law while Palestinians are subject to Israeli military law in military courts run by Israeli soldiers and officers.
Some Palestinian prisoners have been held in Israeli prisons for more than three decades.
These are people who were arrested before the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 between then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzakh Rabin, who was assassinated by an ultra-nationalist Israeli in 1995 who opposed the negotiations, and Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. These pre-Oslo prisoners are called “deans of prisoners” by Palestinians, according to the website of Samidoun, an international network of organisers and activists advocating for Palestinian prisoners.
Al Jazeera could not independently verify the current number of pre-Oslo prisoners in Israeli prisons.
On April 7, the prominent Palestinian prisoner, activist and novelist Walid Daqqa died at Israel’s Shamir Medical Center. Daqqa had been arrested in 1968 for killing an Israeli soldier and remained in prison for 38 years before his death. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2021. Despite pressure from rights groups to release Daqqa on medical grounds, Israel refused to free him.
Walid Daqqa,🇵🇸 prisoner battling cancer,has died in an Israeli Hosp. Despite international & Palestinian calls for his release due to severe medical neglect in prison, he remained detained until his death. Daqqa leaves behind a legacy as a 🇵🇸 hero, survived by his wife & daughter pic.twitter.com/liBBnFBVtM
— Lema (@Lemapal) April 7, 2024
Prominent Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti – who was the co-founder of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, also known as Fatah, the party that governs the West Bank – has been in prison for 22 years. In February, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, announced that Barghouti had been placed in solitary confinement in February.
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Occupied East Jerusalem – Fakhri Abu Diab had no time to pack his belongings when the Israeli authorities arrived on his doorstep in occupied East Jerusalem on February 14. The police first evicted his family and then ordered a bulldozer to demolish his home.
“All of my memories were in that house,” said Abu Diab, 62, who was born and raised in that home. “I even had a picture of my mother holding me as a child. It was hanging on our wall, but now it’s gone.”
In the wake of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, the Jerusalem municipality has stepped up home demolitions on the east side of the city, which Israel annexed from the occupied West Bank in 1967 and where most of Jerusalem’s 362,000 Palestinians live.
During the first nine months of 2023, Israel demolished a total of 97 Palestinian homes. But 87 homes have been bulldozed in East Jerusalem since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israeli communities and military outposts in southern Israel on October 7 last year, according to Ir Amim, a local non-profit which monitors home demolitions and advocates for Palestinian rights.
The acute uptick in demolitions suggests that Jerusalem’s municipality is exploiting the global attention on Gaza, where nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, to try and uproot more Palestinians from East Jerusalem, activists and experts say.
“These [demolitions] are done under the guise of law enforcement – as if it is a bureaucratic measure – but it is actually a form of state violence and it serves as a mechanism of Palestinian displacement to drive them from the city,” said Amy Cohen, the director of international relations and advocacy for Ir Amim.
Israel justifies demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem by claiming that they have been built without permits. The municipality typically only allows majority Jewish neighbourhoods to build new homes.
The legal discrimination has forced Palestinians to build without permits, rendering 28 percent of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem “illegal”.
The Israeli authorities have issued orders to demolish most of them, according to Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who specialises in legal and public issues in East Jerusalem.
“Before the war, there were roughly 20,000 outstanding demolition orders and those orders never expire,” Seidemann told Al Jazeera.
Home demolitions are prohibited under international law unless they are necessary for military operations. But Omar Shakir, the Israel-Palestine director of Human Rights Watch, said that Israel has created a legal structure to allow it to demolish Palestinian homes.
“There are different mechanisms (to enforce demolitions), each of which ultimately furthers the same objective of forcing Palestinians off their land and maximising land for Jewish Israelis,” he told Al Jazeera.
Since October 7, Seidemann said Palestinians in East Jerusalem have become noticeably more afraid of losing their homes. He cited the perceived increase in racist rhetoric and violent harassment that Israeli politicians and security officials have shown Palestinians.
“The tense atmosphere at the moment is causing [Palestinians to think that] if they have a demolition order, then their home could be [destroyed] next,” he said.
The demolition of Abu Diab’s home has compounded this fear, experts and activists say.
Abu Diab, is, himself, a human rights activist and the elected spokesperson of Silwan, a district that represents about 60,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Residents trust him to speak out against home demolitions and other forms of systemic discrimination that Palestinians face from the Israeli occupying authorities.
“This is not the first time that the Israelis have targeted him,” said Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, the Israeli co-director with Abu Diab of Jahalin Solidarity, a local organisation trying to prevent the forced displacement of Palestinians. “He was put in prison on one occasion and, another time, his son was arrested. The message was to ‘Tell your father to shut up’.
“I asked Abu Diab after [Israel] demolished his house if he would stop speaking out. He said, ‘I’ll speak out even more now,’” Godfrey-Goldstein told Al Jazeera.
Palestinian and Israeli activists believe that advocacy to protect Palestinian homes is needed now more than ever. With municipal elections approaching on February 27, Abu Diab believes that candidates may be deliberately calling to demolish more homes to appeal to their constituents.
He said he fears that the far-right candidate, Arieh King, who is currently deputy mayor of Jerusalem, could become the next mayor. King has previously stated that he aims to limit the building of Palestinian homes in order to protect Israel’s character as a Jewish state. In December, he posted on X, calling Palestinians “subhuman”.
“If King becomes the next mayor in the coming elections, the situation will become quite difficult. He has openly threatened to demolish Palestinian homes and kill Palestinians,” said Abu Diab.
Abu Diab said that he owes his life to Godfrey-Goldstein and other activists for quickly notifying journalists and human rights organisations when the police stormed his home. He believes the police may have seriously injured or killed him had it not been for those arriving to video the demolition.
“My wife was sleeping when about 20 or 30 officers stormed in. We are traumatised from what we experienced,” he told Al Jazeera.
But while Abu Diab survived, he and his family – children and grandchildren – are now homeless. He told Al Jazeera that he is sleeping in the homes of friends and relatives in his community, often moving from one residence to another.
Abu Diab is also concerned that he may not be able to afford the demolition. Israeli authorities typically require Palestinian residents to pay for the bulldozing of their homes as well as the salaries of police officers who are deployed to evict residents and secure the premises.
Abu Diab expects the total bill to amount to $20,000 or $30,000. However, his immediate priority is to try and find a new home for his grandchildren, who are too young to understand why they are homeless.
His two-year-old granddaughter recently asked him why the police destroyed their house. He said he had no idea how to answer.
Although he’s trying to remain strong for his family, Abu Diab worries about the future, and warned that Palestinians in East Jerusalem will eventually erupt in anger if Israeli authorities continue to step up home demolitions.
“There will be a reaction,” he told Al Jazeera. “People can’t stand this for long.”
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Damascus Gate, occupied East Jerusalem – Samer and Omar* woke up early on Friday morning, hoping to make it to noon prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Located just 15 minutes away from their homes in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Issawiya in occupied East Jerusalem, the two young friends are among the tens of thousands of Palestinians in the city who attend Friday prayers at the mosque – one of the holiest in Islam.
But when the two arrived at Damascus Gate – the main entrance used by Palestinians to the Old City – they were stopped by Israeli forces.
“Where are you from?” the officer asked Samer and Omar, aged 22 and 28 respectively.
“Issawiya,” they replied.
“Go back to Issawiya and pray there,” the officer told them – a response that multiple Palestinian men said they received as they tried to enter that Friday. While Israeli forces had imposed a strict closure on the Old City since October 7, they have loosened the restrictions slightly the past two Fridays, allowing more people to enter.
The two men, feeling antagonised, turned away and went to grab something to drink from a kiosk opposite the Israeli forces checkpoint. Shortly after, the Israeli officers approached them and told them to leave the area – the most central area for Palestinians in the city – without offering any explanation.
“They started pushing us and then beat my friend with the baton,” Samer told Al Jazeera after the incident. “We tried to say ‘don’t touch us.’”
Omar cursed at the officers, before the latter chased the two men for a distance of about 500 meters (1,640 feet) and beat them with batons.
As the officers ran after the two men, Al Jazeera’s reporter – who was present at the scene – heard one of the Israeli officers say, “Break their legs so that they don’t come back.”
Omar, the 28-year-old, suffered heavier blows than his friend. A strip of the skin on his leg looked as though it had been burned; he was in pain and was not able to walk.
“They don’t want us here. They want us out of this country, and to forget about the homeland,” said Samer, still frazzled by the beating.
“To be a male in Jerusalem – it’s not a life,” he said. “Just simply existing as a Palestinian male in Jerusalem – that bothers them.”
Yet, the young men say they have no option but to stay strong.
“This is at the end of the day, a military occupation. We will never leave here, no matter what they do,” Samer said, before the two jumped on a bus going back home.
Since October 7, life for Palestinians living under the 57-year Israeli military occupation in Jerusalem has become much more difficult than it already was.
That day, Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking more than 200 others captive. Israel responded with a brutal military campaign, first by air and then on the ground as well, killing more than 29,000 people — mostly women and children — in Gaza, less than 80km (48 miles) away from Jerusalem, over the past four months. Thousands of others are buried under the rubble and presumed dead.
Shortly after the Hamas attack, Israeli forces were deployed in the thousands in the Old City of Jerusalem as well as the dozens of neighbourhoods surrounding it. They imposed strict closures and restrictions on movement, in addition to the further isolation of Jerusalem by cancelling all military permits to enter the city for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Young Palestinian men have, in particular, borne the brunt of increased violence and harassment by Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem.
Abu Mohammad*, who runs a store and lives inside the Old City, said that after October 7 – especially during the first few days and weeks – Israeli forces imposed a strict curfew after 5pm.
“No one was allowed to stand in the street after 5pm, even if we live in the Old City. If we did, they would attack us with beatings, provocative searches, cursing at us,” the 30-year-old told Al Jazeera.
Describing the situation today and how violence by Israeli forces unfolds, Abu Mohammad said, “Anytime a male wants to enter the Old City, they get searched.
“A group of soldiers will search this one man. While they are searching you, they hit you with their elbows, with their knees, to provoke you to say something.
“If you say anything, you find them all on top of you, punching you on the head and all over your body. All of a sudden, you need a hospital,” explained Abu Mohammad.
He noted that the Israeli officers “don’t differentiate between older and younger men.”
“I have seen them push elderly men. They don’t care,” he said. “There is no Palestinian male here that hasn’t been beaten,” the father-of-three continued.
Attacks by Israeli forces on Palestinians in Jerusalem have not only targeted residents and passersby. They have also targeted journalists trying to do their jobs.
Mustafa Kharouf, a 36-year-old resident of the city and a photojournalist with the Turkish Anadolu Agency, was severely beaten by Israeli paramilitary officers while reporting on December 15.
Along with a group of journalists, Kharouf had been stationed in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Wadi Joz, which lies close to the Old City. Due to the Israeli ban on Palestinians from entering the Old City and the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound, residents have been gathering to pray on the streets of the Wadi Joz on Fridays as an alternative. On many Fridays, Israeli forces fired live ammunition and large amounts of tear gas at worshippers.
As Kharouf and his colleagues were leaving after the prayers had ended, they were stopped by a group of officers who tried to prevent them from moving to a different area nearby to continue reporting.
“We were standing and talking to the officer in charge, when one of the soldiers attacked me suddenly. He started shouting, ‘Get out of here.’”
“I said, ‘Why are you beating me?’ ‘Calm down,’ ‘What’s wrong with you?’ The soldiers on the side, not knowing what is going on, saw him beating me and then decided to join the attack,” continued Kharouf. “I got angry and said, ‘We will meet at the department of investigations against police’ – meaning that I was going to file a complaint against him.”
“They kept beating me – most of the beating was on my head, from the neck up. I said, ‘Shame on you’ to the soldier, before he lifted up his weapon at me and loaded the magazine.
“I started shouting, ‘If I did something wrong, then arrest me! Why are you beating me!’ Then they arrested me. They choked me and pushed me down onto the floor. When I was on the floor, the same soldier came back and started beating me again. They kept beating me as they put the handcuffs on my hands. I couldn’t protect my head any more,” he recounted.
Kharouf was lying on the floor, bleeding heavily, with his hands handcuffed behind his back, with cuts to his head and eyes. In a video capturing the assault, one officer can be seen holding Kharouf down while another dealt one kick after another to Kharouf’s head.
Shortly after, when he refused medical attention, the soldiers decided to remove the handcuffs and let him go. He suffered three stitches on the back of his head and received treatment after his release.
For Kharouf, the violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem – particularly the Old City – is arbitrary and abusive.
“The feeling of being beaten is one thing, but the feeling of degradation is a whole other [thing],” he said. “This type of beating is not about them wanting to hurt you, or about you having done anything wrong – it is about them wanting to humiliate you.
“You feel incapacitated, weak while they are punching and kicking you. The feeling is indescribable.”
After October 7, he said, Israeli forces “went crazy.”
He has decided against trying to enter the Old City or its vicinity. “I haven’t entered the boundaries of the Old City in a month and a half. If you want to go to the Old City today, you have to put your dignity and self-esteem aside.”
*Names of interviewees changed upon their request for fear of retribution.
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US has called on Israel to act against violent settler groups in the occupied West Bank.
The US Department of State has said that it will impose visa restrictions on Israeli settlers involved in undermining peace, security or stability in the occupied West Bank.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the move on Tuesday, one day after the State Department said that Israel has not taken sufficient steps to address settler attacks that have driven many Palestinians off their land.
“Today, the State Department is implementing a new visa restriction policy targeting individuals believed to have been involved in undermining peace, security or stability in the West Bank, including through committing acts of violence or taking other actions that unduly restrict civilians’ access to essential services and basic necessities,” Blinken said.
President Joe Biden and other senior US officials have warned repeatedly that Israel must act to stop violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has increased since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
“We have underscored to the Israeli government the need to do more to hold accountable extremist settlers who have committed violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank,” Blinken said.
Blinken did not announce individual visa bans, but department spokesman Matthew Miller said the bans would be implemented starting Tuesday and would cover “dozens” of settlers and their families, with more to come. He did not give a number and didn’t identify any of those targeted due to confidentiality reasons.
Israeli settler violence has long targeted Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and the attacks have surged over the last year, as Israel’s far-right government, which itself includes ultranationalist settlers, signals support.
Today, I announced a new visa restrictions policy targeting individuals and their family members involved in or meaningfully contributing to actions that undermine peace, security, and stability in the West Bank. Violence against civilians will have consequences.
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) December 5, 2023
Settler attacks have escalated further amid the continuing war in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian armed group Hamas, which launched a deadly attack on southern Israel on October 7 that killed approximately 1,200 people and took roughly 240 others hostage.
After the attack, Israel launched a devastating assault on Gaza which has killed more than 16,200 people and displaced more than 1.5 million others, according to Palestinian officials.
Since the October 7 attack, Israeli settlers have killed at least nine Palestinians in the West Bank, three times as many as in all of 2022, and attacks on Palestinian villages and farmers have become commonplace.
While Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank typically meet harsh reprisals by Israeli forces, accountability for attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians, which often take place under the gaze of Israeli soldiers, is exceedingly rare.
Palestinians have described settler violence as one part of a larger Israeli effort to force them from their land.
In 2018, Israel passed a controversial bill known as the nation-state law that, among other things, called Jewish settlement efforts a “national value” that the state would “encourage and promote”.
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Watch the moment Palestinian woman Israa Jaabis returns home and embraces her son after eight years imprisoned in Israel. She was released on the second day of a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas which saw 39 Palestinians come home.
Published On 26 Nov 2023
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