Sunday 13 February 2011

Statement: Israel holding more than 20 Egyptians captive

[ 13/02/2011 - 06:11 PM ]

NABLUS, (PIC)-- At a moment of celebration in Egypt over freedoms attained after the ouster of the 30-year reign of Hosni Mubarak, several Egyptians remain captured by Israeli occupation, whose new relations with Egypt have yet to unfold.

According to the Ahrar prisoner studies center, more than 20 Egyptians are being held in Israeli prisons under conditions worse than Palestinians. Unlike many Palestinians, the Egyptian prisoners are denied access to their families and even unable to write to them for reassurance.

The lightest sentence served by them is seven years, a statement by Ahrar says. Spread throughout prisons across the occupied country, the majority hail from Sinai which shares borders with Gaza and the Israeli occupation, it adds. They were detained while conferring support to the Palestinians.

The captives' conditions are tragic, the statement goes on to say. They are visited once or twice yearly by the Egyptian consulates who have so far only registered their names and statements, treatment far different from that towards the six Egyptian students the government rushed to rescue in a swap deal with spy Azzam Azzam.

Ahrar center director Fouad al-Khafsh expressed surprise at the Egyptian consulates' neglect of the Egyptian POWs. Egypt has two representatives in the 1948-occupied Palestine as well as an embassy in Tel Aviv.

The detainees have filed many petitions amid demands to contact their families and bring clothing, but the prison authority rejected requests time and time again saying that Egypt itself was behind the banning-order.

Khafsh called on Egyptian media and the bar association to turn attention to the country's men jailed in Israel after the revolution and changes in the Egyptian political regime.

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