OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- Al-Ahrar center for prisoners’ studies reported Saturday that the Palestinian prisoners in Ashkelon prison have been living in difficult incarceration conditions especially since the prison administration decided to escalate its repressive practices against them.
The center said that the prison administration escalated its actions against the prisoners after they asked to have their dirty and worn-out mattresses replaced with new ones, but the administration refused their demand pushing the prisoners to go on hunger strike.
It added that afterwards, the administration retaliated to the hunger strike by taking a number of punitive measures including locking prisoners in isolation cells and transferring others to other sections or prisons.
Director of the center Fouad Al-Khafsh said that the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) started to pursue a policy aimed at forcing the prisoners to accept the status quo and not to ask for improving their conditions in prison or else they will lose more of their rights.
For its part, the high national committee for the defense of prisoners said that the imprisonment conditions of the Palestinian women in Israeli jails worsened especially in May after they staged a hunger strike last month.
The committee appealed to human rights organizations to intervene to stop the punitive measures taken against these women and provide some of them who suffer from different diseases with appropriate medical treatment.
Director of the committee’s information office Riyadh Al-Ashqar said that the IOA, through escalating its actions against female prisoners, wants to send them a message that their participation in any protest steps to improve their conditions would not make things better but on the contrary they would be worse than before.
Ashqar noted that the punitive measures which the prison administrations escalated against the female prisoners in May included depriving them of seeing their families or buying their needs from the canteens and shortening the time of taking a stroll in the prison yard from three hours to one hour a day.
He added that the IOA still refuses to transfer the Palestinian women in Damon prison, who are imprisoned in a section adjoining a section for homicide convicts or to stop the policy of arbitrary transfers it pursues against other women.
The director pointed out that the prisoners unveiled their suffering when Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoghbi visited the Hasharon prison last month.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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