More prisoners, less contact

A table from B’Tselem follows the main article.

A Palestinian detainee. Photo by Eyal Warshawski

Number of Palestinian prisoners up 26% since 2011

Figure released at Knesset meeting as government backs request to ban security detainees from making phone calls to families.

By Jonathan Lis, Ha’aretz
July 02, 2015

The number of Palestinians being held in Israel’s prisons has grown 26 percent since 2011, according to new government figures.

The numbers were revealed yesterday during a Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee session, which decided that Palestinian security detainees will no longer be allowed to make telephone calls to their families while in detention.

Ehud Halevy, the Israel Prison Service’s legal adviser, presented the committee with up-to-date information about Palestinian prisoners at the meeting. “As of this morning, the IPS holds 5,686 prisoners, of whom 1,610 are detainees,” he said. After the swap deal that freed Gilad Shalit in October 2011, the Prison Service held some 4,500 Palestinian prisoners.

At the end of last week, there were 379 people being held in administrative detention in Israel for security reasons, and an additional 1,432 security detainees being held until the end of legal proceedings against them, 97 of them minors.

Public security minister Gilad Erdan, photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

The Knesset committee adopted a request from Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan to change existing regulations and cancel the telephone privileges for detainees. The decision does not affect prisoners who have been tried, convicted and are serving their sentences in prison. Every convicted prisoner in Israel has the right to make phone calls to their families, and this right is set in law – as opposed to other privileges, such as leave from prison or conjugal visits, which are within the authority of the Israel Prison Service to grant or deny.

The Prison Service denies these detainees such telephone calls today, even before the change in regulations, said Halevy. “This is crime that acts from ideological motives, and the motivation does not end with detention,” he added. These detainees continue to direct terror acts from within prisons – and sometimes even succeed, Halevy told the committee.

Committee chairman MK Nissan Slomiansky (Habayit Hayehudi) told the panel, “There is great importance to stop terror in any way, and certainly not to provide an option for prisoners to be involved in terror from inside the prison walls.”

The defence establishment attributes great importance to preventing security detainees from using the telephone, as in recent years they have been using the phone to pass on operational knowledge for carrying out attacks against Israelis.

Until now, the authority to prevent security prisoners from using the phone was in the hands of the public security minister, a process that bypassed existing law. Now the committee has approved new regulations that list over 30 security offences, including attempted murder or kidnapping, that will allow the Prison Service to deny prisoners the right to make phone calls.

In addition to using the regular public telephones in prisons, terrorist groups have tried in recent years to smuggle cell phones into facilities. This has been in an attempt to enable continuous communications between the leadership and others who have information that could help in carrying out attacks, and members in the field. The Prison Service has been working constantly to foil such efforts.

Statistics on Palestinians in the custody of the Israeli security forces

B’Tselem
Updated: 16 Jun 2015

At the end of April. 2015, 5,554 Palestinian security detainees and prisoners were held in Israeli prisons, 357 of them from the Gaza Strip.* An additional 1,028 Palestinians were held in Israel Prison Service facilities for being in Israel illegally, 16 of them from the Gaza Strip. The IPS considers these Palestinians – both detainees and prisoners – criminal offenders. A few dozen other Palestinians (we do not have precise figures) are held in IDF facilities for short periods of time. The following data were provided by the military and by the IPS.