Description

by IMEMC News & Agencies

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), Sunday, said that the Israeli military court of Ofer has issued administrative detention orders against another five Palestinian prisoners.

PPS said that prisoners Abd al-Rahman Hammad, from Qalandia refugee camp to the north of Jerusalem, and Osama Ida’ais, from Hebron, received detention orders without charge or trial for a period of six months.

Meanwhile, WAFA further reports that prisoners Joma’a al-Jojo and Ahmad al-Hrimi, both residents of Bethlehem, received administrative detention orders for four months, whereas prisoner Ahmad Rae’e, from Qalqilia, received a two month imprisonment sentence without charge or trial.

Administrative detention is the imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or trial, while relying on secret evidence for up to six month periods, indefinitely renewable by Israeli military courts. The Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network stated that, “Israel’s use of administrative detention violates international law; such detention is allowed only in individual circumstances that are exceptionally compelling for “imperative reasons of security.”

Israel uses administrative detention routinely as a form of collective punishment and mass detention of Palestinians, and frequently uses administrative detention when it fails to obtain confessions in interrogations of Palestinian detainees.

There are around 500 detainees curretly serving administrative detention in several Israeli jails. Jarrar is not the only lawmaker to be imprisoned; 18 of the Palestinian Legislative Council members are currently held in Israeli detention without charge or trial.

Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes as a way to protest their illegal administrative detention and to demand an end to this policy which violates international law.

In a press release published on Saturday, the European United Left/ Nordic Green Left group in the European Parliament (GUE/NGL) MEPs condemned Israel's use of imprisonment without trial as a weapon against Palestine.

The group expressed its utmost condemnation of ‘Israel's use of administrative detention as a way of silencing any kind of resistance to the occupation.’