WEST BANK (Dispatches) – A Zionist military court has extended the detention of Sheikh Hassan Yousef claims of “inciting terror” and “supporting a terrorist group.”
According to the regime police sources, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas official in the occupied West Bank, would be charged in the coming days.
Israeli newspaper, The Times of Israel, reported the police as saying that Sheikh Hassan Yousef mourned Palestinian Fadi Abu Shkhaydam as a hero after he opened fire at Zionists in Al-Qud’s Old City in December.
The newspaper also reported that Sheikh Hassan Yousef arrived in the mourning tent of Abu Shkhaydam and “conveyed the condolences of the Hamas movement to his family.”
Sheikh Hassan Yousef, 66, who is a Palestinian MP, has spent a total of 21 years inside the occupying regime’s jails, mostly under the so-called administrative detention.
He was among the 415 Palestinians deported by the regime to no man’s land in South Lebanon in 1992.
In July 2020, Zionist regime authorities freed Youssef in the West Bank after imprisoning him without trial for 16 months. The 66-year-old had also been released from a previous 10-month term of imprisonment in October 2018.
More than 7,000 Palestinians are reportedly held in the regime’s jails. Hundreds have been incarcerated under the practice of administrative detention, which allows holding Palestinian inmates without trial or charge. Some Palestinian prisoners have been held in administrative detention for up to eleven years.
Hamas has time and again stressed that the freedom of the Palestinian prisoners would remain a top priority and a national and humanitarian goal for the movement and its supporters.
In a speech delivered on the 34th founding anniversary of Hamas last month, Saleh al-Aruri, deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau, reiterated that the regime’s prisoners in the besieged Gaza Strip will not see the light of day until Palestinian inmates held in the regime’s jails were released.
Hamas managed to free more than a thousand Palestinian detainees from the regime’s jails in the Wafaa al-Aharar (“True Promise of Free Men”) prisoner swap deal with the occupying regime in 2011.
The resistance movement has hailed retaliatory attacks against Tel Aviv regime forces and extremist settlers, stating that the incidents are a natural response to the crimes being committed by the regime on a daily basis.
Human rights groups have voiced their deep concerns over the increasing number of senior Zionist officials encouraging forces to kill Palestinians even when they are not a threat.