Israeli occupation authorities have issued 319 administrative detention orders for Palestinians since the beginning of 2015, a rights group said Friday, April 3, six times as many as they did the previous year. The statistics, released by the Palestinian Center for Prisoner Studies, suggests a massive increase in Israel’s incarceration of Palestinians without charge or trial despite repeated promises to limit the practice in line with international norms.
Palestinians protest in front of the offices of the Red Cross in the West Bank city of Nablus, calling for immediate intervention to release prisoners from Israeli prisons, especially women and children, Nablus, West Bank, March 12, 2015. (Photo: Activestills)
Spokesman Riyad al-Ashqar said that 45 new administrative detention orders had been issued in the first three months of 2015, in addition to the renewal of the detention of 274 others. Some of those detentions had been previously renewed up to six times, for periods between two and six months. Palestinians held in administrative detention are often held without charge or trial for months and without access to the evidence that led to their detention, even though international law stipulates this tactic only be used in exceptional circumstances.
The total figure of 319 represents a 500 percent increase over the same three-month period in 2014, which saw only 51 administrative detention orders issued. Of the total, 109 were issued in January, 89 in February, and 121 were issued in March. 133 of the orders, or nearly 42 percent, targeted individuals from the Hebron district.
The report comes nearly a year after around 125 Palestinians in Israeli prison launched a nearly two-month long hunger strike against Israel’s failure to end the practice of administrative detention. In 2012, Israeli authorities said they would limit the practice as part of an agreement to end a hunger strike of more then 2,000 Palestinian prisoners at the time. Despite this, Israeli failed to uphold the agreement and the practice continues until today.
In October 2014, the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem warned that the number of Palestinians in administrative detention had soared to 470, the highest number in five years and triple the figure only a year before.
The largest number of administrative detentions came in the wake of the massive Israeli “Operation Brother’s Keeper” against Hamas members in the West Bank in June 2014, during which more than 1,000 people were rounded up. Nearly a dozen were killed and more than 120 were injured during the raids, whose alleged purpose was to find those responsible for the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers taken near the West Bank settlement of Gush Etzion. Further arrests were carried out in July and August 2014, when hundreds were held amid widespread protests against Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza. Rights groups said at least 250 Gazans were also arrested during that time in the course of Israel’s brief land invasion.
Large numbers of those arrested have since been detained in the Israeli prison through renewals of administrative detentions, leaving them locked in jail with no chance of release or a fair trial. Statistics released by Israeli military courts in the West Bank in 2011 showed that they approved 98.77% of all requests to extend the detention of Palestinian prisoners being held without charge or trial.
99.74% of Palestinians brought before them have meanwhile been convicted of their crimes, a statistic that many watchdogs say underlines the lack of justice for those tried in the Israeli military courts. The Palestinian Center for Prisoner Studies urged the Palestinian Authority to present an urgent case against Israel in the International Criminal Court, which Palestine joined last week.
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