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Help us campaign for the rights of Palestinian prisoners.
Since 1967 over 650,000 Palestinians have been detained, so that nearly all families have experienced the imprisonment of at least one male relative. Find out more in PSC’s Prisoners factsheet.
As the occupying power, and a signatory to the 4th Geneva Convention, Israel is under a number of legal obligations with regards to prisoners. These include:
- Not detaining prisoners outside the territory under occupation;
- Not subjecting prisoners to torture or to “physical or moral coercion… in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties”;
- Not sentencing prisoners without a proper trial, which includes the right to present evidence and call witnesses, to be represented by a lawyer “who shall be able to visit them freely and shall enjoy the necessary facilities for preparing a defence”.
Israel violates these legal strictures on a daily basis.
Administrative detention
Currently over 4,743 Palestinians are detained by Israel; 10 of them women, 193 of them children, and 178 of them held under administrative detention, a policy that Israel uses to hold Palestinians on secret information indefinitely without charging them or allowing them to stand trial.
We need your support to break their chains and the silence on administrative detention.
Today, Israel has outsourced security for prisons where Palestinians are held to G4S. Along with the Israeli Prison Service, G4S is responsible for the harsh conditions the prisoners faced during the historic 2012 hunger strikes that thousands of Palestinians participated in, including two hunger strikers that neared death in protest of their arbitrary detention, Khader Adnan and Hana Al-Shalabi.
G4S is also complicit in Israel’s detention of nearly one-third of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006, and for dozens of human rights defenders being arrested every year for participating in popular resistance.
TAKE ACTION
G4S provides:
- services for the Ketziot and Megiddo prisons in Israel to which Palestinians are transferred in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention
- the central command room at Israel’s Ofer prison in the illegally occupied West Bank
- systems at Israel’s Kishon and Jerusalem detention centres where there is evidence that Palestinians are tortured