Ramallah: Thousands of Palestinians across Gaza and the Occupied West Bank rallied on Thursday in solidarity with Israeli-held prisoners, as peace talks inched closer to a collapse after the Jewish state refused to free long-serving inmates.
To mark Prisoners Day, Palestinians were to take to the streets in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has his headquarters, and hundreds took part in early rallies in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip late on Wednesday.
In the southern West Bank city of Hebron, some 2,000 people marched carrying photos of prisoners and waving Palestinian flags, and another 1,000 protested in the northern city of Nablus.
“We support our prisoners!” read banners. The row over prisoners caused a new deadlock in US-brokered peace talks in late March, just a month ahead of their deadline, when Israel reneged on its commitment to release a fourth and final batch of Palestinian inmates. The Palestinians retaliated by seeking membership of several international treaties, breaking their own commitment under the talks which US Secretary of State John Kerry launched in July.
“Prisoners Day has extra importance this year,” said the Palestinian Prisoners Club head, Abdul Al Anani. “The prisoners issue has become one of global significance, since it is the reason that peace talks have almost collapsed,” he said.
Prisoners minister Essa Qaraqe said in an interview with Voice of Palestine Radio that the move to sign up to the international treaties, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, could pave the way to guaranteeing Palestinian prisoners’ rights.
Palestinian legal rights NGO Adalah listed “administrative detention without formal charge or trial, severe restrictions on family visits, collective punishments such as solitary confinement, (and) violent night-time raids on inmates” as alleged abuses carried out by Israel.
A one-day hunger strike was being observed by inmates to mark the annual show of solidarity with the nearly 5,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, Qaraqe said.
Around 30 of them have been held behind bars since before the 1993 Oslo autonomy accords with Israel, Adalah said. Israel has so far released 78 of the 104 prisoners it pledged to free during nine months of peace talks, most of them imprisoned since before the Oslo Accords.
According to Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Israel is holding 4,881 Palestinian prisoners, including 175 in administrative detention where they can be detained without charge for renewable six-month periods. Of that number, 183 are minors, B’Tselem says.