Arrest & Detention
Activism and Advocacy
According to The Palestine Monitor, since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, over 650,000 Palestinians -- or 20 percent of the population -- have been detained by Israel. Palestinians have protested the detention of their family members by staging peaceful demonstrations and prisoners have staged hunger strikes to raise awareness of their plight. Support and advocacy organizations and human rights groups have also launched campaigns around prisoners' rights as the number of Palestinians in Israeli detention grows with each passing day.
Administrative Detention
One of Israel's most notorious means of suppressing the Palestinian people is its widespread use of administrative detention, whereby individuals are detained "without charge or trial authorized by administrative order rather than by judicial decree," as defined by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. Palestinians are generally issued three- to six-month-long, indefinitely renewable administrative detention orders upon arrest or after a period of interrogation during which they are denied access to legal counsel.
Child Detainees
Since the beginning of the current intifada, Israel has detained around 5,000 Palestinian children, according to Defence for Children International-Palestine Section, for participation or "suspected participation" in Palestinian resistance. According to the Palestine Monitor, "Israeli Occupation Authorities don't deprive Palestinian children from their freedom as a measure of last resort and for a minimum perios of time (Article 37 of the CRC), instead of that, Palestinian children are being arrested as the first resort and imprisoned for long periods of time."
Detention of Human Rights Defenders
The threat and implementation of administrative detention is one of the many severe restrictions imposed by Israel on human rights defenders working towards the respect of human rights and the rule of law in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). As the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Hina Jilani stated in a 2006 report to the Secretary General, information she gathered from Palestinian human rights organizations "suggests that administrative detention is being used as a means to deter defenders from carrying out their human rights activities."
Detention of Palestinian political leaders
Israel has long used the dention of Palestinian political leaders as a means of repressing the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Before and during 2005 and 2006 municipal elections, Israel conducted sweeping arrest operations in the West Bank, detaining many candidates and those already elected into office -- most of them from the Islamic opposition parties. Israel was the subject of condemnation after administratively detaining a large number of ministers elected to the new Palestinian legislative council in the summer of 2006, many of whom are still in Israeli detention.
Diaries
"Zafer's father is not allowed to visit him. His mother has been able to visit only once in three years. Each time she applies for a pass, she is informed that she has no relation to Zafer and has to go through many organizations to correct this misconception. She is on her second round of proving that she is his mother. During that one visit, she was prevented from handing him the pants, shirt, underwear and slippers he had requested through the appropriate channels." Zafer's story, as reported by Rima Merriman in her Prisoner Stories series, is just one of the individual stories of Palestinian detainees featured in The Electronic Intifada's Live from Palestine diaries.
Palestinian Detainees at Risk
Palestinians in Israeli detention generally do not enjoy the minimal fulfillment of their rights. They are held in substandard conditions, like in open-air tents riddled with bug infestation in the Ansar III (Ketziot) detention center in the Negev desert. They are denied medical rights and Palestinian women detainees suffer particular violations of their rights. Palestinians in Israeli detention, often initially denied access to legal representation, remain vulnerable to ill-treatment and torture as Israeli authorities try to coerce them into providing information or confessions.
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