15.000 PALESTINIAN WOMEN ARRESTED SINCE 1967

Gaza, 18 Jumadil Awwal 1436/9 March 2015 (MINA) – Since the Israeli occupation of Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, over 15,000 Palestinian women have been arrested by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) including minors, moms, students, and lawmakers, updated statistics revealed.

The statistics showed that 1200 females were taken prisoners since the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in 2000, The Palestinian Information Center (PIC), quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.

Today, 20 Palestinian females are held in HaSharon prison in very difficult detention conditions.

The longest serving Palestinian women prisoner is Lena Al-Jarboni who is serving a 17-year sentence since 2002. Lena was born in 1974 to a Palestinian family near Acre in 1948 Palestine.

The youngest female detainee is the 16-year-old Dima Sawahra, from Jabal al-Mukaber in occupied Jerusalem, a school student who was kidnapped on March 1, 2014 and sentenced to 18 months.

As the world marks International Women’s Day, Palestinian women are still subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, torture, and psychological abuse throughout the process of their detainment.

They have to endure weeks, sometimes months, of torture at one of Israel’s interrogation centers to extract confessions from them before being transferred to central prisons.

At HaSharon prison, Palestinian women prisoners suffer from beatings, insults, threats, sexually explicit harassment and sexual violence, and humiliation at the hands of Israeli guards. Often they are forced to undergo degrading body searches during the middle of the night for no reason other an as a punitive measure.(T/P008/R03)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)