Bruises and broken ribs – Israel's unexplained prison deaths
By Shaimaa Khalil and Mohamed Madi
A few days after Hamas attacked Israel and war erupted in Gaza, Umm Mohamed in the occupied West Bank received a telephone call from her son in an Israeli prison.
“Pray for me mum,” Abdulrahman Mari said. “Things are getting harder here. They might not let me speak to you again”.
It would be the last time she heard his voice.
Conditions deteriorated for Palestinian prisoners in Israel after 7 October last year, when Hamas mounted its deadly assault on Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip, according to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Commission of Detainees Affairs.
Thirteen Palestinian prisoners have since died in Israeli prisons, “the majority of them as a result of beating or denial of medication”, the commission’s head, Qadoura Fares, told the BBC.
Abdulrahman was one of the first to die.
A carpenter in the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan, he had been on his way back home from work in Ramallah in February last year when he was arrested at a mobile checkpoint. He was taken into administrative detention – under which Israel can hold people indefinitely without charge – in Megiddo prison.
His brother Ibrahim said the charges against him were minor, such as taking part in protests and possessing a firearm, but said he was also accused of belonging to Hamas although there were no specific charges about any activities within the group.
