Woman in the Damon prison video is held without charge
Her family recognised Hanaa Tahaineh, 49, by her weight loss. She has scabies and no treatment, her husband says, and was arrested a week before he was released.
One of the Palestinian women filmed inside Damon prison in footage that Israel's national security minister published at the weekend is Hanaa Tahaineh, 49, from Silat al-Harithiya near Jenin, her family said. She is being held in administrative detention, the renewable form of imprisonment that carries no charge and no trial, and has six children, the eldest 24 and the youngest 10.
Her husband, Sharif Tahaineh, said the family had been waiting to see the video and knew her at once when it began to circulate. What struck them was how much weight she had lost. A second prisoner, Yasmin Shaaban, appears beside her, and it is Shaaban who can be heard putting the conditions in the section to the minister.
Hanaa suffers from rheumatism and migraines and has since contracted scabies, her husband said. At her lawyer's most recent visit she had rubbed toothpaste over her skin to take the edge off the itching, no treatment having been provided.
He was himself released on 8 June after 22 months in Israeli prisons, and had expected her to be there when he came out. She had been arrested a week earlier. "There's no life there, no basic necessities," he said of the prison he had left. "I feel her suffering deeply."
Through the lawyer, he said, she recounted what the minister had told the women from the Jenin area as he passed through: "Tell Jenin that the prisons have gone from bad to worse." Her husband reads the release of the footage as an attempt to humiliate the women in it.
As the video spread, international campaigners and Israeli peace activists gathered outside Damon in a vigil for the women held there and against the conditions the minister was describing.
The sequence is worth noting on its own. Family visits to Palestinian women in Israeli prisons have been curtailed, so what this household knows of a woman held without charge arrives through her lawyer, weeks apart — and, this week, through a film made by the minister who runs the place holding her. It was the state's own camera that told a family in Silat al-Harithiya what a summer in Damon had done to a member of it.