The Prisoners’ Affairs Authority and the Prisoners’ Club reported the death of Palestinian hostage Sakhr Ahmad Za’oul (26 years old) from the town of Husan, west of Bethlehem, who had been abducted in June and held hostage by Israeli authorities, with no charges filed against him, and tortured since then.
According to Za’oul’s family, he did not suffer from any chronic diseases, noting that he has another brother detained in the occupation prisons, Khalil Za’oul.
The death of Za’oul comes just four days after the death of another Palestinian hostage, Rahman Sabatin, from the same town, bringing the number of captured Palestinians whose identities have been announced since the start of the war of extermination to 86 tortured to death in the Israeli occupation’s prisons and camps, which is a terrifying, shocking and unprecedented escalation.
It is noteworthy that human rights organizations had recently revealed data acknowledged by the Israeli occupation itself, indicating that more than 100 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prison camps over the past two years, while Israel continues to hide the identities of dozens of Palestinians detained from Gaza, in addition to dozens who were executed in the field.
The two institutions added that what the Israeli system of savagery is practicing against prisoners and detainees is nothing more than systematic genocide carried out at the public and explicit calls of leaders and ministers in the occupation government, headed by the extremist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who raised a bill calling for executing Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). This is happening in parallel with the practice of slow execution against prisoners, through an integrated system in which various Israeli occupation agencies participate, in preparation for the final enactment of the death penalty law.
The institutions pointed out that what is happening inside the Israeli occupation prisons has gone beyond all descriptions and expressions, as the Israeli prison system and the occupation agencies, including the judiciary, are working to institutionalize a new reality after the war. This new reality is based on the physical and psychological destruction of Palestinian prisoners, through an integrated system of systematic crimes that constitute an integral part of the war of extermination.
These crimes include: torture, starvation, denial of treatment, sexual assaults including rape, and the transformation of prisoners’ basic rights into tools of oppression and torture through policies of deprivation and deprivation, in addition to the horrific conditions that led to the spread of diseases and epidemics, most notably scabies, which turned into an additional tool for torture and murder.
They stressed that the unprecedented acceleration in the deaths of prisoners confirms that the Israeli prison system is continuing to carry out slow, systematic killings, as hardly a month goes by without one or more martyrs rising inside the prisons. The Israeli occupation does not limit itself to killing prisoners, but continues to detain their bodies, continuing the crime through formal “investigations” in which the judiciary is complicit, with the aim of establishing policies that lead to the slow execution of prisoners inside prisons and camps.
As daily crimes continue, the number of deaths of Palestinian hostages is likely to rise, as thousands of prisoners are held in conditions that lack the most basic necessities of life, and are exposed to systematic violations that include: torture, starvation, physical and sexual assaults, medical crimes, and the spread of infectious diseases, most notably scabies, which has returned to spread on a large scale, in addition to policies of deprivation and deprivation that are unprecedented in their severity.
They added that the field executions that targeted dozens of detainees confirm the criminal nature of the occupation regime, as photos of the bodies of prisoners that were handed over after the ceasefire revealed the extent of the field crimes committed against them, in addition to dangerous and unannounced data about the numbers of those executed.
The Commission and the Prisoners’ Club held the occupation prison administration fully responsible for the martyrdom of detainee Za’oul, and renewed their call to the international human rights system to take effective measures to hold the occupation leaders accountable for the war crimes committed against prisoners and the Palestinian people.
The two institutions also issued an urgent appeal to the free people of the world to stop the systematic genocide against prisoners, release thousands of arbitrarily detained detainees, and work hard to impose clear international sanctions that isolate the occupation, restore the fundamental role of the international human rights system for which it was established, and end the horrific state of impotence that afflicted it during the war of genocide, in addition to ending the immunity that “Israel” still enjoys due to the support of international powers that treat it as an entity above the law and accountability.
It is noteworthy that the number of prisoners in the occupation prisons reached more than 9,300 prisoners, in addition to hundreds of detainees held in camps affiliated with the occupation army, including more than 50 female prisoners and about 350 children, while the number of administrative detainees reached 3,368 as of last November.
