RAMALLAH, (Palestine Foundation Information Center), The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) has said that Israeli prison service’s decision to transfer elderly Jerusalemite detainee Mohammed Abu Tir, 75, to the underground Rakevet facility in Nitzan Prison amounts to a death sentence and reflects a systematic policy aimed at physically eliminating detainees, particularly prisoners from Gaza, who have faced the harshest abuses since the start of the genocide.
According to the PPS statement on Thursday, the Israeli occupation renewed Abu Tir’s administrative detention for an additional four months, just eight days after he was re-arrested during a raid on his home in Bethlehem, continuing what it described as a decades-long campaign of targeted retaliation against him.
Abu Tir has spent more than 44 years in Israeli prisons since the 1970s, most of them under arbitrary administrative detention without charge or trial. A former member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, he has been repeatedly detained, expelled from Jerusalem, stripped of his residency and today suffers from chronic health problems caused by prolonged imprisonment.
The PPS held Israel fully responsible for Abu Tir’s life and the lives of all detainees, noting that the Rakevet facility, reopened after the war, has become, according to documented rights testimonies, a site associated with torture, terror and slow death for prisoners from Gaza.
The PPS added that as of November 2025, Israel is holding 3,368 administrative detainees without charge or trial, including nine former lawmakers, underscoring a continued policy that violates basic human rights and international humanitarian law.
