1070 Palestinians arrested by Israel since January

The Israeli occupation forces have arrested 1,070 Palestinian citizens since the beginning of the year, Director of the Department of Statistics at the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs Abdul Nasser Farwaneh said Monday. In a report marking Prisoner Day, which falls next Wednesday, Farwaneh added that more than 800,000 arrests and detentions of Palestinians had been reported since 1967, amounting to 20 per cent of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories. Of the abovementioned cases, 78,000 were reported since Aqsa Intifada (uprising) in September 2000. The number includes 2,000 women, 950 children, more than 50 members of parliament, former ministers and hundreds of leaders, the report said. About 533 prisoners are serving life sentences in Israeli prisons; 25 of them have already spent more than 25 years, according to the report. About 1200 prisoners are ill, while 204 have died while serving their sentences since 1967, due to torture, poor medical care, premeditated murders after arrest and in shootings.