Palestinian detainees have spent 1,000 days in isolation, body says

The Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs said on Sunday that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have now passed 1,000 days held in isolation, without family visits and without a dependable channel through which relatives can learn anything about them.

And it said the isolation has run alongside a standing refusal to admit the International Committee of the Red Cross, which leaves no independent body able to see how detainees are being kept or to report on it.

A research paper covering conditions during July put the total number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons at about 9,400. Of those, 94 are women, 350 are children, and 3,244 are held under administrative detention, an order that permits imprisonment without a trial or a conviction.

Around 1,320 detainees from Gaza are held under Israel's "unlawful combatant" designation, which Palestinian rights organisations say removes the due-process protections a criminal charge would otherwise carry.

Palestinian prisoner organisations put the number detained since the start of the war on Gaza at more than 24,600. That figure counts passages through the system rather than people held at any one moment, which is why it runs so far above the 9,400 currently inside.

For families, the effect of the two restrictions together is silence. With visits barred and no monitor admitted, a relative has no way to establish whether a detainee is ill, injured, or has been moved to another facility.

The commission called for international access to the prisons without further delay, independent monitoring of the conditions inside them, and an end to the isolation orders.