The Palestinian Authority (PA) Ministry of Prisoners' Affairs warned on Thursday that Israel plans to approve new legal procedures that could deprive Palestinian prisoners of access to their families.The head of the Statistics Department within the ministry said that the new law would “deprive thousands of Palestinian prisoners of visits from their families while incarcerated in Israeli jails.”
The researcher, Abed An-Naser Farawneh, told Ma’an that Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, made the request and presented it to legal advisors within the Israeli government.
Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz “gave Barak the green light to impose new methods of depriving prisoners of visits from their family members,” Farawneh said.
“This is about punishing Hamas members within the West Bank,” he added.
Farawneh also said that if the new procedures are implemented, “the suffering of the prisoners and their families” could be used as a bargaining chip, which he called “blackmail,” during negotiations over captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
“This is not the first time an Israeli minister has asked for legal cover to escalate procedures against Palestinian prisoners,” the ministry official insisted.
“Depriving them from visits is a collective punishment for capturing Shalit,” he said.
The Israeli Knesset had previously approved the plan at a preliminary review in January. The law was originally presented by a rightist member of Knesset (MK), Arieh Eldad. He said that “barring Palestinian political prisoners affiliated to Palestinian factions that are capturing Israelis” is an appropriate and legitimate measure.
“When a terrorist organization captures an Israeli citizen, preventing representatives of the Israeli government, the International Red Cross or the prisoner’s own family from visiting him,” Israel can do the same, Eldad insisted.
The draft law has maintained support among the Israeli government and its rightist opposition parties throughout 2008.
Farawneh said that under a law passed in 1996, first-degree relatives, such as parents, wives and children, are permitted to visit. Siblings over the age of 16 are barred, as well as any other family members of friends.
According to the researcher, other visits are barred “under the pretext of security reasons.”
“The lists of those barred for security reasons have increased substantially, particularly among relatives living in Jerusalem,” he said.
“Additionally, prisoners from the Gaza Strip are collectively deprived of their families, increasing the suffering of prisoners and families alike,” Farawneh added.
According to Farawneh’s research at the PA ministry, of the 9,500 Palestinian prisoners, about half are entirely deprived of visits whatsoever, while the rest are permitted contact with family “on an irregular schedule.”
Furthermore, when families attempt to meet prisoners, relatives are often humiliated at checkpoints and suffer “moral abuse, provocative acts and, sometimes, physical assault or harassment,” he said.
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