ISTANBUL, (Palestine Foundation Information Center), Palestinian ex-prisoner Nael Barghouti, the dean of Palestinian prisoners and the longest-held prisoner in the world, detailed the “silent extermination” taking place inside Israeli prisons, and the ways to stop it at the legal, humanitarian, and political levels.
In an emotional intervention during the second session of the second day of the “Covenant for Jerusalem” conference on Sunday, Barghouti stressed that “the Al-Aqsa Flood did not come only for the prisoners or for Al-Aqsa Mosque, but for the Palestinian cause, which is being erased day after day due to waves of normalization with Israel.” He emphasized that what prisoners are facing today is “a real extermination carried out under the cover of the international community,” warning that “the approaching Zionist danger will not be limited to Palestinians, but will extend to all peoples who support them.”
Having spent more than 44 years in captivity, Barghouti presented shocking details about systematic abuses and extermination methods, dividing them into three main categories:
- Physical
This includes severe beatings, kicking, slamming prisoners’ heads against walls, releasing attack dogs on prisoners, with metal tools fixed to the dogs’ mouths to cause maximum injury, alongside tying them up for long hours and denying sick prisoners medical care and medication.
Female prisoners have also been subjected to grave physical and psychological violations, including harassment, rape, and forced removal of their hijabs, abuses he said are carried out “with shocking deliberateness and brutality.”
- Psychological
This consists of prolonged solitary confinement in darkness for days or weeks, total disconnection from the outside world, and exposure to terrifying sounds and sudden assaults while blindfolded, all intended to break their will.
- Starvation
A systematic policy, one Barghouti said “destroyed his body beyond repair,” according to medical testimony, implemented through calculated deprivation of sufficient food and through the extremely poor quality of what is provided.
Barghouti criticized the silence of international institutions, explaining that Israel “works through its representatives to falsify human rights reports or manipulate them.” He called on the international community to show greater vigilance and fairness, while stressing that Arab and Islamic nations must shoulder their responsibility in confronting the systematic extermination of prisoners and the Palestinian people.
He pointed out that more than 3,500 administrative detainees are subjected to continuous arrest, beating, and torture, in addition to cases of prisoners “with no names and no numbers,” whose conditions are completely unknown. He also revealed that Israel “mutilates the bodies of martyred prisoners and steals their organs” before handing them over to families after a long delay, making identification nearly impossible.
Barghouti also discussed the pressure exerted by Israel to prevent some Arab countries from receiving released prisoners, while Western countries have agreed to host them. “There are prisoners who have been in jail for decades, used as bargaining chips to extract political concessions,” he said, noting also the challenges prisoners face after release, including depriving their children of education and the suffering of those exiled abroad.
He concluded by affirming that the prisoners’ cause is “a humanitarian cause before it is a political one,” calling on the world to take urgent action to stop these violations, which he described as “a full-fledged extermination.”
