PPS: 47 Palestinian prisoners died in captivity due to medical neglect

[ 19/08/2009 - 08:38 AM ]

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- The Palestinian prisoners' Society (PPS) has said that 1,500 Palestinian sick captives are threatened with death in Israeli jails due to the deliberate medical neglect. The PPS, in a report on Tuesday, said that 47 prisoners died in the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) jails due to such intentional medical neglect while 70 were tortured to death in IOA dungeons and 73 were executed in cold blood. The report noted that IOA jails are void of specialized medical teams and some of them do not have a doctor at all or at best a doctor would be present for only two hours. The Society charged that medical neglect has turned into one of the weapons used by the IOA against those prisoners. The PPS appealed to all human rights groups to expose the IOA violations against those prisoners and to shed light on their suffering. Meanwhile, the Palestinian ministry of prisoners in the Gaza Strip said that the IOA released two Palestinians from its jails after nine years in captivity under the so-called detention of "unlawful combatants." It noted that seven other Palestinians from the Strip are still held under the same pretext in IOA prisons, describing the pretext as an attempt to circumvent the international law. The ministry explained that those Palestinians are essentially civilians and should be protected by the fourth Geneva Convention, while this pretext was exploited by the IOA to hold those citizens for unlimited periods and without any commitment to indict them. In the West Bank, Israeli occupation forces (IOF) at dawn Wednesday rounded up 12 Palestinians in the districts of Ramallah, Qalqilia and Tulkarem for questioning, local sources reported. The IOF soldiers on Tuesday launched a large-scale search campaign in Al-Khalil district that ended with kidnapping 11 citizens after claiming that a resistance cell was dismantled in the process.