RAMALLAH, (Palestine Foundation Information Center), Riyad Al-Ashqar, director of the Palestine Center for Prisoners Studies, said new instructions Israel is trying to impose on visits by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross do not constitute compliance with an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, but rather an attempt to circumvent it by maintaining restrictions in a new form.
In a statement on Wednesday, Al-Ashqar said Israeli authorities had imposed complete isolation on prisons since October 7, 2023, banning all forms of visits, including those by ICRC delegates, in order to isolate prisoners and prevent any international body from examining their conditions.
He said the Israeli Supreme Court had deemed the continued ban on visits unlawful, but the prison service quickly imposed new restrictions that emptied the ruling of its substance.
Allowing one visit every three months, lasting no more than 30 minutes, effectively means Red Cross teams would be able to visit only 20 prisoners over an entire year, despite the presence of around 9,400 prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons, Al-Ashqar said.
He accused Israel of working to turn the exceptional measures imposed on prisoners since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023 into a permanent policy, making the restrictions a fixed part of the prison system.
Al-Ashqar said subjecting ICRC visits entirely to decisions by the prison administration strips the committee’s humanitarian and rights role of its substance and reduces the visits to a formal procedure that fails to achieve their purpose.
He emphasized that the new restrictions aim to prevent the ICRC from monitoring prisoners’ conditions and documenting violations, adding that Israel fears exposing what detainees are enduring inside prisons if an independent international body is able to reach them freely.
Al-Ashqar warned that preventing direct and private meetings between prisoners and ICRC delegates would severely limit the organization’s ability to assess detainees’ real conditions or document violations against them.
He said this would affect efforts to hold Israel accountable before international bodies.
