Ramallah, April 17 (RHC)-- Palestinians are marking the annual Prisoner’s Day holiday with marches demanding the release of political prisoners.  Rights groups say there are nearly 10,000 Palestinians currently held in Israeli jails.  Four hundred of them are children.  More than one-third are being held without charge under Israel’s so-called administrative detention policy.

On Wednesday, a lawyer for the jailed director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, said his client had experienced beatings, mistreatment and torture inside Israel’s notorious Ofer Prison.  The lawyer, who was last able to visit Dr. Abu Safiya on March 19, said: “He is suffering greatly.  He is exhausted from the torture, the pressure and the humiliation he has endured to force him to confess to acts he did not commit.”

Another Israeli crime against medical workers also happened when Dr. Adnan Ahmad Al-Bursh, a Palestinian surgeon who worked with the Palestinian national football team, lost his life as a result of torture at the Israeli-run Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank.

Palestinian Prisoners Affairs Committee and the Palestinian Prisoners Club said in a joint statement that the head of orthopaedics at al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in the besieged Gaza Strip, died in what has been termed as "deliberate assassination” by the Israeli regime.