A female Palestinian prisoner, facing the camera, is greeted after disembarking from a bus following her release from an Israeli prison, in the West Bank city of Beitunia, early Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Unpublished letter sent to various Irish newspapers – Dear Editor,
as Palestinian-Canadian lawyer Dianna Buttu reminded us in an interview on MSNBC News on Monday, the 90 released Palestinian prisoners – aka hostages – as part of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas should never have been in Israeli prisons in the first place. The vast majority are women, 21 are children and 80, i.e. 89% have never been convicted of any crime. The ten prisoners who are convicted have been convicted of specious crimes such as incitement or stone-throwing. One of them is 15 years old, having been incarcerated at the age of 13. Another, Palestinian journalist Rula Hassanein, was abducted from her home in Bethlehem in March 2024 due to social media posts and was separated for the last 9 months from her 9-month-old breastfeeding baby girl.
Israel operates a system of mass incarceration for Palestinians known as Administrative Detention with a nearly 100% conviction rate and where 50% of all Palestinian men spend time in prison having been tried in an arbitrary, unjust military court system. Long since documented by multiple human rights groups the comparison with apartheid South Africa is beyond obvious, even for deniers or slow learners.
Until this, and other apartheid structures of the Israeli state are fully dismantled, resistance by Palestinians is both inevitable and morally justified.
JIM ROCHE,
PRO Steering Committee, Irish Anti-War Movement,
PO Box 9260,
Dublin 1.
