The Israeli Prison Service reported on Monday that it has received over 5,000 Palestinians who were arrested in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023. The Israeli agency said that 500 detainees were transferred from the Sde Teiman military facility at the army’s request last month. To accommodate the influx, the service initiated an accelerated construction project, adding 2,500 new detention spaces to security prisons. Among these, 900 places were allocated in the tent wings of the Negev Desert Prison.
In the same context, the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, Mohamed Abu Salamiya, spoke during a press conference after his release, about some of the conditions that prisoners suffer inside prisons, pointing out that prisoners are exposed to various types of torture daily, and are deprived of food.
He said that depriving the prisoners of food led to all the prisoners losing up to 30 kilograms of their weight. He confirmed that he was subjected to torture without charges being brought against him, without any visit from an international institution, and being denied access to any lawyer.
For its part, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) said that the condition of the prisoners released today and their testimonies confirm the criminal behaviour of the occupation government.
The movement called on the international community and the United Nations to protect the detainees and called on the International Committee of the Red Cross to reveal the fate of thousands of Palestinian detainees who were kidnapped by the occupation army from the Gaza Strip and is working to forcibly hide them in inhumane conditions.
In a related context, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that the Israeli occupation committed two massacres during the past 24 hours, including 23 dead and 91 injured in hospitals, raising the toll of the Israeli aggression since October 7 to 37,900 dead and 87,060 injured.
Also on Monday, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said that Israel’s severe restrictions on aid reaching the Gaza Strip make providing a humanitarian response very difficult, if not impossible.
On the ground, the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, announced that an Israeli force had lured an explosives-laden house that was used in the recent sniping operation east of the city of Rafah, and blew up the house immediately after the soldiers entered, which led to the force’s members being killed or wounded.
Al-Qassam announced that it had targeted two Israeli Merkava tanks with two Shaaz-type explosive devices in the Shuja’iya neighbourhood, east of Gaza City. The Brigades also said that they targeted an Israeli force holed up inside a house in Shuja’iya, east of Gaza City, leaving it dead and wounded. She added that she sniped an occupation army soldier inside a house in the Shujaiya neighbourhood.
The Al-Qassam Brigades published scenes that they said were from operations to confront vehicles penetrating Shuja’iya, east of Gaza.
The scenes show fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades mocking the occupation army, waiting for its vehicles to penetrate the neighbourhood, to engage in a confrontation with them.
For its part, the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement, announced that it had bombed “Kissufim, Third Eye, Nirim, Sufa, Holit, and the settlements in the Gaza Strip with concentrated missile salvos, in response to the crimes of the Zionist enemy against our Palestinian people.”
