Palestinians mark Prisoners' Day with calls for justice

By Kaamil Ahmed

JERUSALEM

Palestinians on Sunday marked annual Palestinian Prisoners’ Day at rallies across the occupied West Bank and the blockaded Gaza Strip by holding images aloft of longstanding prisoners and demanding justice for jailed loved ones.

In a statement issued for the occasion, Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah declared that Israel’s decades-long occupation had "transformed our homeland into one big prison".

He went on to assert that the frequent arrest of Palestinians by the Israeli authorities violated international law, calling on the international community to help the roughly 7,000 Palestinians -- including 400 minors -- currently languishing in Israeli jails.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)'s diplomatic wing, for its part, released a report Saturday highlighting the mounting number of Palestinian children arrested by Israel in recent years.

According to the report, there was a more than 70-percent increase year-on-year in the number of Palestinian minors arrested in 2015, with more than 1,500 arrested in the last three months of the year alone.

The Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC) has noted that more than one fifth of the entire Palestinian population has been arrested at one point or another since Israel first occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967.

"The issues of prisoners transcends one of individual human rights; it is also one of the collective rights of an entire people," read a PHROC statement signed by more than 11 human rights groups.

"The continued arrest and detention of Palestinians undermines the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination," the statement read.

"These arrests target women, children, Palestinian Legislative Council [parliament] members and civil society activists," it added.