Iqbal Tamimi – Israeli authorities imprison Palestinian women even after their death
By Iqbal Tamimi • Jun 17th, 2008 at 18:21 • Category: Features, Israel, Newswire, Opinions and Letters, Palestine, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance
Israeli occupation forces have arrested more than 10,000 Palestinian women of various backgrounds and ages since 1967.
720 Palestinian women were arrested during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, 102 of them are still detained to this date.
Arresting mothers, wives and sisters of wanted persons or detainees is one form of collective punishment, and it is aimed at forcing Palestinian men to confess or surrender under pressure. In many incidents Palestinian women were threatened in prisons to detain their children in order to force the mothers to cooperate. A report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (April 2008) reported 6 cases of Israeli forces threatening Palestinian prisoners to detain their family members this year. There are documented reports of detaining members of families of Palestinian prisoners without any valid legal reason to do so. This report has been submitted to the Knesset. The president of the Israeli International security service (Shin Bet) confirmed that one incident at least was confirmed by the Investigation Unit during the hearing of the case.
Some of the detained women have husbands or brothers held in other prisons too, but the administration of prisons in Israel refuses to grant them to exchange visits with their family members.
The Ministry of Prisoners confirmed in its reports that all women arrested were subjected to psychological or physical torture and in some cases to both. Some were sexually harassed too. Different female prisoners were subjected to different degrees and methods of torture. The women were kept in cells and chambers of investigations for several months, and then transferred to the dark prisons to live the hard conditions; some were freed without any compensation or even an apology.
102 female Palestinian prisoners are still detained since the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
98 of those women are from the Northern provinces of Palestine and Jerusalem, 4 are from the southern provinces. This includes 4 under-age female prisoners.
Dr.Mariam Saleh Deputy of the Palestinian legislative Council and Minister of Women Affairs was one of those detained women.
51 of those prisoners have been sentenced, some have been sentenced to lifetime imprisonment, others are sentenced several lifetime sentences. 45 of them are have suspended sentences, 6 are detained in administrative detention centres. 4 gave birth in prison without adequate medical or health care, deprived of being accompanied by any relatives during delivery. Those mothers are:
Mervat Taha, Manal Ghanem, Samar Subaih and Fatima Alziq. Other mothers delivered their babies in similar conditions before the Intifada.
The suffering of Palestinian women inside Israeli prisons has increased; the conditions of the prisoners is deteriorating continuously in a dangerous way, besides their subjection to repressive campaigns by the Israeli prisons department without any regard to their gender special needs. Such treatment has affected their mental health severely, especially for those who were kept in solitary isolation for periods extending from months to years.
Solitary confinement after death too
The punishment of detention of Palestinian women is not practiced only against living people, the Israeli occupation authorities have arrested several Palestinian women after their martyrdom, and as a punishment for them, their bodies are imprisoned in refrigerators, or in numbered mass graves, refusing to let go of their bodies, or handing them to their families for proper burial. Some of the names of the dead women prisoners detained after death are:
Ayat Alakhras
Dalal Almughrabi
Dareen Abu Eshah
Wafaa Edrees
Hanadi Jaradat
Hiba Daraghme
Israel is the only occupation country in the world that punishes people even after their death, contradicting all ethical universal norms and laws. Especially since they know how important it is to bury the dead body of a Muslim from a religious point of view.
Faked Arrests
One of Israel’s manipulative procedures is to fake arresting a family member so as to pressure the prisoner to confess or cooperate. Women mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters are used in such devious schemes to exert more mental and psychological pressure on them. One of the prisoner’s mothers said she was once handcuffed before meeting her son to give him that impression that she was going through hardships because of him. Another prisoner named Mahmoud Alswaiti was detained in the West Bank city of Hebron because he was suspected of joining an armed group. Alswaiti was told that his wife and his father had been arrested, to put him under strain, and to make their story believable, the Israeli guards forced his wife and father to walk near his widow where he could see them surround by heavily armed guards. And to make their story even more believable, they forced his father to wear a shirt similar to those worn by prisoners.
Repeating such actions forced Alswaiti to try to commit suicide, the committee wrote upon evidence of one of the interrogators that Alswaiti tried to strangle himself using his own shirt, and he kept banging his head in the wall and the table, because he felt he had no power to help his wife or his elderly father, who are supposed to experience humiliation because of him.
What one Palestinian mother can hope for
Usually mothers have hopes and dreams as all mothers do, like witnessing a child’s graduation or marriage. But Palestinian mother s’ dreams are wild… different … extravagant.
One of those dreamers is a mother from the town of Qufor Qleel south of the city of Nablus.
Ribheeyeh Alquni is 59 years old and her dream is to have her 5 imprisoned sons all in one prison so that she can visit them all at once.
Ribheeyeh suffers heart problems and diabetes; hence she can’t go to visit more than once a week. That’s why she only visits one son at a time, cancelling visiting the remaining four.
Her children are Mazin, 30, arrested by the Israeli occupation forces five years ago. He is in prison even though he has a disability in his legs, and he is still not charged. He is detained in Megiddo prison.
His brother Samir is 29, sentenced 40 years and ten days, he was arrested 6 years ago and suffers from kidney problems. Samir is detained at Rimon prison.
Buraq, 23, was imprisoned initially for 3 years then released, then arrested again 17 months ago; the Israeli investigators are demanding his imprisonment for 7 years. He is detained at the moment at Megiddo prison.
Hazim is 27 and he has been serving a life sentence at Jalbooa prison since 6 years ago. Mohammad his younger brother aged 20, was detained about a year and a half ago but still has not been convicted.
Their mother is in pain for she is not able to enjoy her children’s presence in one place not even if it was in a prison. She smiled while crying and said that her children Mohammad and his brother Hazim met once in one room at Jalbooa prison, but could not identify each other, because when Hazim was detained Mohammed was very little, besides Mohammed had a swollen face because of severe torture which made him look different anyway.
The mother is hoping to meet her children all at once, she said she has not set eyes on three of her sons since they were imprisoned, Mohammad, Buraq, and Mazin.
She prays that they will be put together in the same prison; at least she can see them for once. “My home now is empty,” she said.
References:
Arab Media Internet Network / Amin
Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners
Director of Bureau of Statistics Awni Farawana
Public Committee against Torture in Israel
Reporter Ahmad Budairy BBC- Jerusalem
Arab Media Internet Network / Amin
Iqbal Tamimi is a Palestinian journalist and poet from Hebron. She is the creator of a vibrant and important activists' network Palestinian Mothers, open to all who share the vision of peace and justice, men and women alike. She is working now in UK.
Email this author | All posts by Iqbal Tamimi
سلمت يداك يا اقبال فعلا انت تحدث عن حقائق تجري في فلسطين وتطال المراة الفلسطينية استمر فقلمك به نبض الخير والامل في التغير
Another revealing piece Iqbal, how grotesque! Can I just remind people there is a petition for Palestinian Prisoners: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/release-11000-palestinians-in-israeli-jails
& I'll add this piece to the Supporting Palestinian Prisoners Facebook Group, 606 members now.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26648894184
When I wrote the article.. people asked me the same question.Why did they punish dead people?
The answer is we all know that you would imprison somebody to hurt him or humliate him, or cause him pain.
But when one imprison a dead person, the pain is inflected upon his living loved ones. It is part of the unfair collective punishment. Punishing the relatives and the loved ones since a dead person can experience the pain no more, and that is unfair. Justice is about punishing who does wrong, in this case many people are punished for no valid reason at all.
The second part is to break the peple from within regarding their spiritual beliefs. It is most important for the dignity of the dead person from Islamic relegion's point of view to be burried as soon as possible, and the Israeli forces know that well. They detlebrately do show disrespect to people of other faiths.
The problem of prisoners in Israeli jails is more than numbers and torture. It all about the many meanings of prison. Israelis want to make a social gap by imprisoning of fathers and mothers and even children. But I have to raise one question: Do Arab people and authorities care about the prisoners? They don't even care about those killed.
From the very beginning, the American crusade of surge and siege – with much of it predating the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; think to early 20th century agreements with Saudi royalty of protection for petroleum, or the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected nationalist leader, or CIA coups and installing of tyranny, or support for Saddam, or provocations of war, or fanning the flames of violence, or importation of billions worth of weapons – has been a catastrophe for the people of the Middle East. For years the United States has guided policy and fates in the region, with its unchallenged domination of and immoral support in the regimes of the Middle East causing a complete devolution of a dynamic, intelligent and proud amalgam of peoples, continuing a stagnation of a civilization that has given humanity so much, and which has so much yet to offer.
It has been the support of tyrants, dictators, generals, kings, princes and sheiks which has had the most profound effect in the lives of tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims, altering, perhaps indefinitely, the very foundations of a culture, and religion, that has for centuries been bombarded by the Judeo-Christian values of the western world. From Napoleon to Hitler, from the British Empire of old to the American Empire of today, from French domination of the Levant to the ceaseless criminality of Little Sparta in Palestine, the Middle East has been invaded, colonized, raped, pillaged, oppressed and exploited by western powers for decades.
It has been divided and torn apart according to the desires of colonial powers; it has been invaded countless times by Christian Crusaders seeking some combination of god and glory, power and control, hegemony and imperialism. Throughout European, and later American, interventions in the region, countless numbers of Arabs and Muslims suffered and died. It has been the west, and not the peoples of the Middle East, that have for centuries been the aggressors, the barbarians at the gates of Muslim cities, those doing the invading and occupying, those raping and pillaging, those with the messianic delusion to convert and civilize and control the Arab world.
It has been the west that thinks itself the superior race, thinking Middle Easterners inferior, sub-human heathens. It has been the west that ignores the plight of the dehumanized and the oppressed, all the while enjoying the spoils of plunder, over time becoming morbidly obese with the gluttony and greed cheap oil engenders.
The people of the Middle East were not, after all, the ones responsible for the Napoleonic Wars, nor the creators of two World Wars, nor the destroyers of entire cities, nor the barbarians giving rise to Holocausts, or thousand year old persecutions, nor the ones responsible for the death of tens of millions of human beings during the 20th century. The people of the Middle East were not planting puppet regimes throughout Europe and the Americas, nor were they wishing to convert, civilize and control the western world. They are not the ones in pursuit of imperialism and hegemony.
They were not bombing and killing and seeking vengeance outside their region until after the Second World War, after America, with help from her allies, decided the Middle East was to become part of its sphere of influence. Indeed, for centuries living in peace and respect, in the same lands, cities and neighborhoods, Arabs of Muslim, Christian and Jewish faith have long maintained a balance of tolerance between Muslim majority and Jewish, Christian minorities that has only been disrupted with the arrival, and the manipulations and gross injustice, of the western colonial powers.
For decades preferring to control the region by proxy, in a clandestine manipulation of populations and territory, the United States has become a catastrophe upon the peoples of the Middle East. Its vast assortment of puppets and castrated proctors have proceeded to decimate the lives and futures of millions, over the years maintaining a firm grip over nations through the devastation of freedoms and liberties and rights, along with the implementation of authoritarian and despotic policies. Unwavering in its support of these tyrants, America has condemned millions to the brutality of dictatorships, to the censorship by despots, to the corruption of incompetents, to the regressive policies of control, to the backwardness of monarchs.
Please do not forget to sign the following petition to release the prisoners
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/release-11000-palestinians-in-israeli-jails
For Christians, the burial of the body is also very important from a religious point of view… This is horrible!! And yes, it is to inflict more suffering upon the family of the deceased. How cruel and inhumane!
My heart really goes out to all Palestinian mothers. No mother should ever have to see her child go through such misery. I will post this piece on my network.
Hi Iqbal!
Good to see you here. I signed the petition.
I have also read of Western forces arguing to desecrate bodies by burying them with pork products.
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