WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Nearly 300 human rights groups and civil organizations have denounced the continued detention of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Zionist regime’s jails, and the Tel Aviv regime’s contentious policy of “administrative detention” without charge or trial.
The 292 human rights organizations and civil institutions, in a joint statement, said the Palestinian inmates include 32 women and girls, about 180 minors under the age of 18, as well as 780 administrative detainees – among them two women and four children.
Moreover, there are 600 prisoners suffering from various diseases, of whom 22 have cancer. A total of 549 Palestinian prisoners have also been once or several times sentenced to life imprisonment.
The organizations urged international bodies, particularly the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, to “pressure the occupying and apartheid Israeli regime to stop the exercise of administrative detention against Palestinians.”
The statement highlighted that the Zionist regime is holding about 780 Palestinian detainees without charge or trial, and the regime authorities have issued nearly 1,350 administrative detention orders against Palestinians since the beginning of the current year.
The organizations also called for an immediate end to “the outdated colonial-era emergency law, and demanded a concerted international campaign in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in general and administrative detainees in particular.”
They noted that dozens of prisoners have gone on hunger strikers since September 25 in protest against the administrative detention policy, and in defense of more than 700 Palestinian inmates who are jailed under administrative detention.
The statement underlined that the continued detention of Palestinian prisoners constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law, especially the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war and detainees, and is a war crime according to Article 85, Paragraph 5 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, and in accordance with Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.