Ramallah, December 11 (RHC)-- A Palestinian prisoners’ rights group says a large number of Palestinian detainees at the Israeli Etzion Prison in the southern occupied West Bank are suffering from severe food poisoning after consuming spoiled food provided by the detention center’s administration.
The Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, citing its lawyer who faced challenges visiting the detainees, reported that the prisoners experienced severe abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting, weakness, fatigue, facial yellowing, significant fluid loss and an inability to stand after consuming the meals. Many even fainted.
The commission accused the prison administration of “deliberately subjecting detainees to harsh punishment since the start of the [Israeli] onslaught on Gaza. This includes prolonged hunger, providing poor-quality meals in both quantity and quality, and subjecting those who protest to severe beatings and solitary confinement.” It called on all international organizations to “intervene urgently to alleviate their suffering and ensure their protection in Israeli prisons.”
For its part, the Palestinian Prisoners Society said this is not the first instance of food poisoning at Etzion Prison, as similar cases have been recorded multiple times over the past few years.
Amani Sarahna, the media coordinator for Palestinian prisoners’ right group, said Etzion serves as a temporary detention and investigation center, where prisoners are later transferred to other facilities. It currently holds 111 detainees. She noted that the poisoned prisoners did not receive any medical treatment.
Almost 70 Palestinians, many of them unidentified, have been tortured to death by the Israeli regime in its prisons since October 2023 amid the genocidal war on Gaza.
Back in late July, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs said Palestinian detainees imprisoned in the Israeli prison of Etzion are enduring severe and inhumane conditions. It urgently called on all relevant authorities, particularly international institutions and human rights organizations, to intervene and save the detainees from this brutal treatment, which violates basic human rights guaranteed by international laws and regulations.
Israel keeps Palestinian inmates under deplorable conditions without proper hygienic standards. Palestinian inmates have also been subject to systematic torture, harassment, and repression.
Human rights organizations say Israel continues to violate all rights and freedoms granted to prisoners by the Fourth Geneva Convention and international laws.
According to the Palestine Detainees Studies Center, around 60 percent of the Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli jails suffer from chronic diseases, a number of whom died in detention or after being released due to the severity of their cases.
Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes in an attempt to express outrage at their illegal detention.
