Middle East Monitor / September 1, 2021
Israeli occupation authorities are continuing to hold the bodies of Palestinian prisoners and have not handed them to their relatives for burial, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club announced yesterday.
The club said in a statement that the martyrs’ list includes “Anis Dawla from Qalqilya, who died in 1980, Aziz Owaisat from Jerusalem, who died in 2018, Faris Baroud from Gaza, Nasrat Taqatqa from Bethlehem, Bassam al-Sayeh from Nablus, who died in 2019, and Saadi al-Garabli from Gaza, and Kamal Abu Waer from Jenin, both died last year.”
The statement added that the seven martyrs “were among 226 prisoners who died in the occupation’s prisons during the period from 1967 to 2020,” noting that there were hundreds of others who died “shortly after their release, as a result of diseases and injuries they suffered over the years.”
It added that the use of medical negligence was one of the “Israeli prisons’ administration’s abusive policies” against detainees.
“Physical and psychological torture also constitute the most systematic Israeli policy that caused the death of 73 prisoners over the past few decades,” the statement read.
In the past ten years, 29 Palestinian prisoners died while detained by the occupation, mostly as a result of medical negligence.
A total of 81 prisoner bodies have been held by the occupation and never handed to their families since 2015.
