Palestinian female detainee enters 8th year behind Israeli prisons bars

Occupied Palestine (QNN)- Palestinian female detainee Shorouq Dweiat entered today her eighth year behind Israeli occupation prison bars, according to a Palestinian prisoner advocacy group.

The Palestinian prisoner’s Society (PPS) said that 25-year-old Palestinian female detainee Shorouq Dweiat serves today her eighth consecutive year of detention in Israeli occupation prisons.

Dweiat, a resident of Sour Baher village, south of occupied Jerusalem, was shot by an Israeli settler and arrested by Israeli occupation forces on October 7, 2015, in the eastern part of occupied Jerusalem and was allegedly accused of attempting to stab an Israeli settler. Witnesses reported that she was harassed by the settler before the alleged incident.

She was severely injured by the four bullets lodged within her body while the Israeli settler suffered no serious injuries.

She was sentenced to 16 years in Israeli prisons by an Israeli occupation court on December 25, 2016, and was also fined 80,000 NIS (approximately $21,000.)

Dweiat has since been moved through several Israeli prisons and is currently held in the Damon prison.

Following the court’s ruling, the Israeli occupation Interior Ministry stripped the Dweiat of her Jerusalem residency, claiming a “breach of trust,” using the case as a mechanism to further the Israeli state policy of attacking Palestinian existence in Jerusalem. Amjad Abu Assab of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Committee in Jerusalem said that “this is a racist policy…with the aim of killing the spirit of challenge by Jerusalemites and preventing any manifestation of rejection of occupation in the occupied city of Jerusalem.”

Dweiat is a student at Bethlehem University who was studying history and geography. She graduated from high school, achieving a result of 90% in the national secondary Tawjihi examinations in 2015. Classes at the university were cancelled for two days after her shooting and arrest in October 2015.

Dweiat is one of 31 Palestinian female detainees held in the Israeli Damon prison where the female detainees are suffering from harsh conditions since the moment of their imprisonment, including medical negligence, denial of education, denial of family visits, including for mothers with young children, solitary confinement, overcrowded cells which are often filled with insects and dirt, and lack natural light, according to prisoner advocacy groups.

The female detainees have also been subjected to some form of psychological torture and ill-treatment throughout the process of their arrest and detention, including various forms of sexual violence that occur such as beatings, insults, threats, body searches, and sexually explicit harassment.

The groups say these techniques of torture and ill-treatment are used not only as means to intimidate Palestinian women detainees but also as tools to humiliate Palestinian women and coerce them into giving confessions.

The Damon prison is located in Northern Palestine in the forests of Carmel in Haifa. It was established during the British mandate, thus it lacks modern day infrastructure. These facilities, designed for and by men, consequently rarely meet the gender-specific needs of women prisoners, the groups note.