About 55 Detainees Killed by Medical Neglect Behind Israeli Bars

Nablus, 16 Dzulqa’dah 1437/19 August 2016 (MINA) – Over 207 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli jails, 55 among whom due to intentional medical negligence. Human rights groups slammed the preplanned medical negligence perpetrated by the Israeli prison service (IPS) as part of a policy of psycho-physical torture against Palestinian detainees.

Recently, on Tuesday evening, former Palestinian prisoner Naim Shawamreh, who developed muscular dystrophy while serving his sentence in Israeli jails, succumbed to his illness three years after he was released in 2013.

Ex-prisoner Jawad al-Faroukh, 30, said in an affidavit that he had been left without treatment for the severe inflammation he caught as a result of the heavy beating to which he had been subjected by the occupation troops during his abduction from his own home in December 2015.

“Israeli medics at Ofer and Negev prison clinics provided me with pain soothers during the six months I spent in administrative detention,” said Faroukh, The Palestinian Information Center (PIC) was quoted by Mi’raj ISlamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.

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He added that the IPS had been dragging their feet over his need of an urgent surgery prescribed by medics at an Israeli hospital “My name was registered on the waiting list but I was released without undergoing the surgery.

“I am still suffering due to the medical negligence I had been made to endure in Israeli custody,” he added. “Now I am barely able to move my hands as a result of the unbearable pains I am enduring,” al-Faroukh further stated.

The wife of the cancer-stricken Palestinian detainee Bassam al-Sayeh urged the human rights institutions to translate condemnation into action and urge the Israeli occupation to provide Palestinian detainees with the needed medical treatment.

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She spoke out against the medical neglect endured by her husband in the Ramla prison clinic ever since he was arrested in October 2015. Despite the fact that Sayeh has been diagnosed with blood and bone cancers, along with cardio-vascular diseases, his name is still put on waiting lists in anticipation of urgent surgeries.

“Medics in the Ramla clinic are officers and wardens recruited by the IPS. It is no wonder that humanitarian criteria are the least of their concerns. They are treating prisoner patients in exclusively military, rather than humanitarian, terms,” Sayeh’s wife noted, raising alarm bells over the turn for the worse her husband’s health has taken pending a surgery that would never perhaps see the day.

Head of the Palestinian Prisoners Center for Studies, Osama Shaheen, said over 1,200 sick detainees are held in Israeli jails, including 24 cancer-stricken patients.

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“The Israeli occupation authorities keep sick detainees in detention until no chances are left for them to recover. As a result, they die shortly after they get released from jail,” Shaheen noted.

He condemned the silence maintained by the international community and the Palestinian Authority (PA) as regards the case of sick Palestinian detainees. Shaheen urged the PA to file a complaint at the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the tragedy endured by Palestinian detainees.

“The only hope left for sick detainees and their families are the deals struck by the Palestinian resistance, otherwise their fate would not be so much different from those who breathed their last behind prison bars,” he further stated. (T/P008/R07)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)