The Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Commission and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society confirmed the death of the administrative detainee, Mustafa Mohammad Abu Ara, 63, before dawn on Friday.
They stated that Abu Ara was transferred from the Ramon prison to the Soroka hospital, where he died after a severe deterioration in his health.
They added that Abu Ara, a citizen of the town of Aqaba, north of Tubas governorate in the northeastern part of the West Bank, was last abducted by Israeli forces in October 2023, serving a total of 12 years in occupation prisons.
He was a married father of seven children; his son, Zain al-Din Abu Ara, is an administrative detainee in Israeli prison, while his brother, Alam Abu Ara, was killed by occupation forces during the first intifada.
Before his arrest, Mustafa suffered from many chronic health conditions which needed medical management; in prison he was subjected to torture and starvation, in addition to medical neglect, responsible for many of the deaths of detainees.
The prison advocacy groups held the occupation prison administration fully responsible for the death, of the detainee Sheikh Abu Ara, as well as for the fate of all Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
With the death of Sheikh Abu Ara, the number of prisoners and detainees who have died in Israeli prisons, since October 7, 2023, has risen to 19, while the number of detainees exceeds 9,700; this data does not include all of the Gaza detainees.
The data only includes those whose identities have been announced, however the occupation continues to evade disclosing the identities of dozens of Gaza detainees who have died in its prisons.
On Thursday, the Detainees and Ex-Detainees Commission, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS), and the Addameer Foundation for Prisoner Care and Human Rights said that at least 18 detainees were killed in the occupation jails after October 7.
The prisoner institutions affirmed that the occupation forces withheld the bodies of at least 16 detainees since the beginning of the aggression on the Strip.
