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Israel has arrested around 22,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, since the start of what has been described as a war of genocide, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Prisoner’s Club.
The rights group said the figure covers all cases of arrest during this period, including those who remain in detention and those who were later released. It described the number as an unprecedented record for arrests over just two and a half years.
The Prisoner’s Club stressed that the total does not include arrests in the Gaza Strip, which it said amount to thousands, nor arrest campaigns in the territories occupied in 1948.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the group added that arrest operations in the West Bank are continuing at an increasing pace. It said that at least 40 Palestinians were arrested between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning, including four women, one of them a child, as well as former prisoners.
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The organisation said the arrest operations have been accompanied by what it described as serious and unprecedented violations. These include severe beatings, organised intimidation against detainees and their families, widespread damage to homes, and the seizure of vehicles, money and gold jewellery.
It also accused Israeli forces of destroying infrastructure, demolishing the homes of prisoners’ families, taking relatives hostage, using detainees as human shields, carrying out field executions, and using arrest campaigns as cover to expand settlements in the West Bank.
The Prisoner’s Club further stated that extensive field interrogations have affected thousands since the start of the war, adding that soldiers committed abuses during these interrogations which it said were no less serious than torture carried out in official detention and interrogation centres.
READ: Prisoners’ office reveals assault on Abdullah Barghouti in Israeli jail
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
