AL-QUDS (Dispatches) –
Palestinian political prisoners in jails across the Israeli-occupied territories have begun a series of mass civil disobedience actions to protest against punitive measures imposed by the occupying regime’s new far-right cabinet.
On Tuesday, prisoners launched a campaign in the infamous Nafha prison, in Naqab (Negev) desert in the southeast.
On Wednesday they were joined by Palestinian political prisoners in the jails of Rimon, Ofer, Megiddo, Gilboa and Negev.
The disobedience will culminate in a hunger strike at the start of Ramadan in late March, prisoners say.
“Our only demand is freedom,” the Supreme Emergency Committee for Prisoners said in a statement. “Everyone must get our message and hear our voice, for we can no longer tolerate the violations being committed against us day and night.
“This strike, bearing the banner of freedom or martyrdom, is a strike that will be undergone by every capable prisoner regardless of what faction they belong to,” the committee added.
“The amount of aggression we have been facing since the start of the year requires all of our people to support us with all means possible.”
Zionist far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wasted no time delivering on his plans to create harsher conditions for Palestinian prisoners in the regime’s jails.
On 6 January, one week after assuming the role, he visited Nafha prison, considered one of the regime’s most severe for Palestinians.
Since then, the regime’s prison service (IPS) has begun moving inmates and transferring them between the 20 prisons used exclusively for Palestinian political prisoners.
Approximately 140 Palestinian prisoners were transferred to Nafha in January. The prison is notorious for terrible living conditions, which some prisoners describe as “inhumane”.
“The situation in prison over the last couple of weeks has been terrible. The transfer of these prisoners is an attack on their lives,” the commissioner of Palestinian prisoner affairs, Hassan Abid Rabbah, told Middle East Eye in January.
“Israeli media is talking about transferring 2,000 prisoners between jails. It is a strategy to weaken and destabilize Palestinian resistance within the prisons.”
Prisoners are planning to start a “hunger strike for freedom” beginning on the first day of Ramadan, 22nd March.
Human rights organizations have long condemned the Zionist regime’s prisons holding security prisoners for their inhuman treatment of Palestinians.
Palestinians have been resorting to hunger strikes since 1968 to fight issues such as solitary confinement, denial of family visits, inadequate medical treatment, and other degrading conditions.