RAMALLAH (Palestine Foundation Information Center) The two Palestinian pregnant detainees, Aisha Hilal Ghaythan, 34, and Jihad Mahmoud Ghawanma, 33, expressed concerns over giving birth in Israeli occupation prisons.
The two Palestinian women who are held captive for the charge of “incitement”, are so worried about giving birth behind bars, as detainee Aisha nearing the end of her seventh month of pregnancy and Jihad is in her fourth month.
Both captives are held in Al-Damon prison, amid “tragic conditions with no health care service, which is applicable to at least 80 Palestinian detained women, the majority of whom are held in the same prison.”
The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) indicated that despite the efforts made to demand their release, the Israeli occupation insists on keeping them in captivity, on charges of alleged incitement.
Israeli occupation authorities (IOA) have been using the charge of “incitement” against Palestinian prisoners since the beginning of its genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, as a pretext of arresting Palestinians based on no real charges.
The PPS explained that the captive Ghaythan is a mother of five children, and she is the sister of a martyr. She was arrested on April 4. On the same day, her sister was arrested before being released later on.
The IOA had previously arrested their mother, Khadra, before she was provisionally released. Two of her brothers have been arrested as well.
Captive Jihad Ghawanma, from the Jalazoun camp north of Ramallah, was arrested on April 26. She is a mother of four children, the youngest is only four years old. Based on medical reports prior to her arrest, the female detainee suffers from anemia and therefore needs special nutrition and health care service.
Ghawanma has four brothers detained in Israeli prisons, two of whom are wounded.
As all Palestinian female prisoners, the two captives Ghaythan and Ghawanma were subjected to all kinds of Israeli retaliatory procedures including humiliation, starvation, solitary confinement, isolation and deprivation of health care, strip searches, assault, and abuse operations right from the moment of arrest.
The PPS condemned the continued detention of the two pregnant detainees, Ghaythan and Ghawanma, describing it as a crime and holding the IOA fully responsible for the fate of all prisoners, especially women. It also called for immediate and urgent intervention to release the two captives.
The PPS urged international human rights organizations to “restore their key role and assume the responsibility they had been established for” in order to end the war of genocide that has been ongoing for more than seven months in the Gaza Strip.
The number of prisoners in Israeli occupation prisons have exceeded 9,300 prisoners by the first of May, including more than 3,400 administrative detainees.
