The central national activities will begin tomorrow, Saturday, on the “National and International Day to Support Gaza and the Prisoners,” which were announced by the prisoners’ institutions, the national and Islamic forces, and all official and popular formations and frameworks.

The Preparatory Committee for the National and International Day to Support Gaza and the Prisoners said that the idea for this day was initially conceived by the institutions working in the field of prisoners (the Prisoners and Freed Prisoners Affairs Authority, the Palestinian Prisoners Club, the Higher Authority for Monitoring Prisoners’ Affairs, the national forces and the prisoners’ families’ committees, and a cadre of freed prisoners and those interested in the issue), in light of the ongoing genocide against our people in the Gaza Strip, and the new phase that detainees are experiencing in the prisons and camps of the Israeli occupation, who are being subjected to systematic crimes, unprecedented in their level and intensity.

She added that this “requires every Palestinian to reconsider his role at the public and popular level in supporting his people and spreading awareness towards a collective responsibility that we seek to benefit from the current transformations to raise popular and international solidarity and establish the principle of the right to freedom and self-determination.”

Today will include widespread popular demonstrations in all Palestinian governorates, and will coincide with demonstrations in several countries around the world.

The committee stressed that participation in this day is a national and moral duty, and an individual and collective responsibility.

She said, “The war of extermination and comprehensive aggression against our people and our land are an extension of long decades of colonialism. Our struggle today and the victory for the blood of our martyrs and our prisoners in the occupation’s prisons are an extension of our ongoing struggle against the Israeli colonial system and all the forces suppo
rting it, and against the silence and helplessness that gave this system the green light to practice this level of crimes and brutality.”

In a paper on ‘The Reality of Prisoners after October 7,’ the Palestinian Prisoners Club said: ‘The Israeli occupation has been continuing its war of genocide against our people in Gaza for 10 months, accompanied by a comprehensive aggression against all Palestinian geographies without exception. This stage constitutes a new milestone in the history of the occupation’s crimes that have been ongoing for decades, and bears witness to the bloodiest period against our people since before the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, as the occupation has regained the level of its true criminality that it was practicing at a different pace despite the state of extension of everything we are witnessing today.’

He added, “All the crimes we are witnessing today, which have reached their peak, and did not reach that stage even at the height of the two intifadas and popular uprisings, are fixed a
nd systematic crimes. However, the basic variable in this war is the intensity of these crimes, which no longer have a ceiling or limits, and which aim only to erase the Palestinian existence in its most minute details, as an extension of the occupation’s goal that has continued for many decades.”

He pointed out that “the issue of Palestinian prisoners has been one aspect of the war of extermination, as a result of the unprecedented level of crimes that we have monitored and documented over the past months. It also forms the basis for crimes that the occupation has committed against prisoners over many decades. It has carried out many attempts to encroach on what remains of the prisoners’ rights, and the prisoners have remained throughout the past decades in a state of constant and continuous confrontation in order to preserve the minimum conditions of life in detention. They have fought many strikes and battles in which martyrs have risen.”

He explained that “the occupation worked to exploit the date of Oc
tober 7th to practice its true brutal image, and practiced all forms and methods of crimes whose main goal was to kill and execute them. Dozens of prisoners and detainees in the occupation’s prisons and camps have been martyred after this date, making the number of martyrs in this stage the highest historically since 1967.”

He pointed out that “the testimonies and statements from prisoners inside the occupation prisons that were transmitted by legal teams and the testimonies that were documented from those released, reflected a shocking and horrific level of systematic torture methods, specifically in the accounts of the detainees in Gaza. These testimonies included, in addition to the torture operations, methods of humiliation – unprecedented – to violate human dignity, severe and repeated beatings, and deprivation of the minimum necessary conditions of life in detention. Some crimes constituted war crimes, and we find that the occupation worked to institutionalize crimes with specific tools and methods, wh
ich require the international human rights system to view them as a new stage that threatens all of humanity and not just the Palestinians, and this also applies to the issue of Palestinian prisoners and detainees.”

According to data from the prisoners’ institutions, the Israeli occupation forces escalated their arrest campaigns after October 7, and the number of arrests reached more than (9,700) arrests in the West Bank alone, including all categories of Palestinian society, including more than (330) women and girls (as this statistic includes women who were arrested from the 1948 territories), and the number of arrests of children reached at least (670) cases, noting that the arrests include those who were arrested and the occupation kept them in detention, and those who were later released.

The arrests included journalists and activists, as the number of arrests among journalists reached (90) cases of arrest, including (16) journalists from Gaza. The occupation kept (52) of them in detention, while relea
sing the rest. As for the crime of administrative detention, which constituted the largest and most important difference in the increasing number of detainees in Israeli occupation prisons, the occupation issued more than (7500) administrative detention orders after October 7, between new orders and renewal orders.

As for the number of arrests in Gaza, it is estimated in the thousands, and the occupation has admitted that it has arrested no less than 4,000 citizens from Gaza, in addition to thousands of workers, as well as citizens from Gaza who were in the West Bank for work, treatment, and residence.

The total number of prisoners in Israeli occupation prisons is more than (9900), while the number of administrative detainees in occupation prisons is about (3380), and the number of those classified by the occupation authorities as (illegal combatants) is more than (1400).

The number of martyrs of the prisoner movement since 1967 has risen to (257), including (20) prisoners who have been killed since the be
ginning of the war of extermination, and whose identities have been announced, in addition to dozens of martyred detainees from Gaza, and the occupation continues to conceal their identities.

Since October 7, Israel, the occupying power, has been waging a war on the Gaza Strip, leaving more than 130,000 dead and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine that has claimed the lives of dozens of children.

Israel continues the war, ignoring the UN Security Council resolutions calling for an immediate halt to it, and the International Court of Justice orders to take measures to prevent acts of genocide and improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza

Source: Maan News Agency