Two Palestinian prisoners died under the harsh conditions of Israeli detention on Thursday, as 42 men were released from Israeli custody in the latest stage of the prisoner exchange deal.
The Israeli occupation authorities released tonight 42 detainees from the seventh batch within the first phase of the ceasefire agreement.
The Israeli occupation authorities were scheduled to release the seventh batch of detainees, as part of the ceasefire agreement, which includes 641, last Saturday.
37 detainees arrived in the city of Ramallah, where hundreds of citizens and detainees’ families received them in front of the Ramallah Cultural Palace and the Mahmoud Darwish Museum Square, while 5 released detainees arrived in the occupied city of Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society announced that its crews in Jerusalem received the injured released prisoner Kazem Zawahra from Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital and transferred him to Al-Hussein Hospital in Beit Jala.
The seventh batch, according to the Prisoners Club and the Commission of Prisoners and Freed Prisoners Affairs, includes 641 detainees, 151 of whom are serving life sentences and long sentences, 42 of whom will be released to the West Bank, including Jerusalem, 97 of whom will be deported outside the country, 12 from the Gaza Strip who were arrested before October 7, 2023, and 445 from Gaza who were arrested after October 7, 2023, in addition to 45 women and children from Gaza.
Raafat Adnan Abdel Aziz Abu Fanouneh has been detained since October 7, along with his brother Shadi. He was injured during his detention, and throughout this period the occupation did not disclose details about his fate or allow visits to him. According to the available information, the detainee Abu Fanouneh remained in Ramla prison and was recently transferred to Assaf Harofeh Hospital, until his death was announced today. It is worth noting that before his detention and injury he did not suffer from health problems. It is worth noting that he is married and has a child.
Also, prisoner Raafat Adnan Abu Fanouneh from the Gaza Strip died in Ramla prison on Wednesday.
The General Authority of Civil Affairs informed the Authority of Prisoners and Freed Prisoners Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners Society of the death of prisoner Raafat Adnan Abdul Aziz Abu Fanouneh, 34 years old, in the Israeli occupation prison. He is a resident of Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, in the Ramla Prison Hospital.
These two deaths follow the death of Musab Hani Haniyeh (35 years old) from Gaza, in the Israeli occupation prisons. The Commission and the Prisoners Club said in a joint statement in late January that they received a response from the occupation army regarding the death of the prisoner Haniyeh on January 5, 2025 .
They added that Haniyeh was arrested from Hamad Town on 3/3/2024, and that he did not suffer from any significant health problems before his arrest, according to his family, noting that he is married and has one child, who is nine years old.
With these two deaths, the number of killed among the prisoners and detainees in the occupation prisons since the beginning of the war of extermination has risen to 60, and they are the only ones whose identities are known, and among them are at least 39 from Gaza, and this number is the highest historically, so that this stage is the bloodiest stage in the history of the prisoner movement since 1967, so that the number of martyrs of the prisoner movement whose identities are known since 1967 has risen to 297, noting that there are dozens of martyrs from the Gaza detainees who are subject to enforced disappearance.
She added that the case of the martyrdom of the detainee Abu Funouneh constitutes a new crime in the record of the Israeli system of brutality, which has reached its peak since the beginning of the war of extermination.
They continued, saying that the occupation is not satisfied with killing the detainees, but rather deliberately does not reveal their fate and manipulates the responses, and this has happened many times, so we confirm that all the responses related to the martyrs are responses from the occupation army and there is no other evidence of their martyrdom, since the occupation continues to detain their bodies, and in most of the responses it indicates that an investigation is underway in an attempt to evade any international accountability.
They also stressed that what is happening to the detainees is just another aspect of the war of extermination, and its goal is to carry out more executions and assassinations against prisoners and detainees.
The Commission and the Club stressed that the rate of increasing numbers of deaths among prisoners and detainees will take a more dangerous turn as more time passes on the detention of thousands of prisoners and detainees in the occupation prisons, and their continued exposure to systematic crimes, most notably torture, starvation, assaults in all their forms, medical crimes, sexual assaults, and the deliberate imposition of conditions that lead to their contracting serious and contagious diseases, in addition to the policies of theft and deprivation – unprecedented in their level.
They held the Israeli occupation fully responsible for the martyrdom of the detainee Abu Funouneh, and renewed their demand for the international human rights system to move forward in taking effective decisions to hold the occupation leaders accountable for the war crimes they continue to commit against our people, and to impose sanctions on the occupation that would place it in a state of clear international isolation, and restore to the human rights system its fundamental role for which it was created, and put an end to the terrifying state of helplessness that it suffered during the war of extermination, and end the state of exceptional immunity that the old colonial states granted to the occupying state of Israel as it is above accountability, accountability and punishment.
