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Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)

Closure of Gaza Must Be Lifted as Shalit’s Pretext Diminished

Jeudi, 13 octobre 2011 - 15h50

Thursday 13 October 2011

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The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) welcomes the prisoner swap deal between the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), under which over a thousand Palestinian prisoners will be released from Israeli prisons in exchange for the release of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who has been held captive by the Palestinian resistance for more than five year. PCHR appreciates the role of mediation played by Egypt and related efforts exerted to achieve the deal. PCHR wishes that the coming period will also witness further Egyptian contribution to the implementation of the Palestinian reconciliation agreement that was signed last May between Fatah and Hamas in Cairo.

According to Israeli and Palestinian statements on the deal made in the media, 1,027 Palestinian prisoners will be released from Israeli prisons in exchange for the release of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza. Under this deal, all of the 27 female prisoners as well as 300 children will be released from Israeli prisons. The deal includes two phases; the first one will be completed within a week, during which Shalit will be released in exchange for the release of 450 Palestinian prisoners, including 279 prisoners serving life sentences and 27 female prisoners. The second phase will be completed within two months, during which 550 Palestinian prisoners will be released, but the IOF determines the conditions under which they will be released. Under the deal, 203 Palestinian prisoners will be deported; 40 of whom will be exiled overseas and 163 expelled to the Gaza Strip. PCHR expresses reservations on deporting the Palestinian prisoners and is concerned over this decision, as it is considered forced migration in violation of international law.

With the completion of this swap deal, over 5,000 Palestinian prisoners, including approximately 400 people from the Gaza Strip, will remain detained under cruel and degrading conditions. In the past five years, their detention conditions have deteriorated in an unprecedented manner following the capture of Shalit by the Palestinian resistance in June 2006. Such cruel conditions include denial of family visits for Gazan prisoners; prevention of hundreds of families from visiting their imprisoned sons in the West Bank; naked body searches; night raids; solitary confinement; and medical negligence. Two weeks ago, hundreds of prisoners began an open-ended hunger strike protesting against additional punitive measures that had been taken against them by the Israeli prisons administration. The prisons administration responded to the hunger strike by imposing even more punitive measures, including the transfer of a large number of them to other prisons; confiscating salt which maintains the salt balance in the prisoners’ bodies, due to which these prisoners’ health conditions have seriously deteriorated; confiscating electrical appliances; and attacks on the prisoners’ rooms and firing tear gas inside them.

PCHR is gravely concerned over the continued deterioration of prisoners’ conditions inside the Israeli prisons. PCHR calls upon the international community to exert pressure on the IOF to release more than 5,000 Palestinian prisoners, who have been detained in the Israeli prisons so far, to treat them humanely in conformity with the international law, particularly article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners 1955, and to refrain from the punitive measures they have imposed on prisoners for more than five years now.

On the other hand, PCHR reminds that the Israeli closure imposed on the Gaza Strip in June 2006 was a direct result of the attack carried out by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza on 25 June 2006, in which Shalit was captured. Later, IOF tightened the closure in an unprecedented manner, including closing all border crossings designated for the movement of persons and commercial purposes. Those collective punitive measures have a destructive impact on all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip.

Thus, with the ending of Shalit’s case and the end of the pretext used by the IOF to maintain the closure imposed on the Gaza Strip, PCHR calls for immediately lifting of the closure and an end to all collective punitive measures imposed on the civilian population. Additionally, PCHR calls upon the international community to intervene in order to end the suffering of the Palestinian civilians and lift the closure of the Gaza Strip.

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