ICSPR calls on the international community to pressure the occupation authorities to release the prisoner “Shatha Abu Fanunah”.

Ref: 140/2021

Date: 22 Nov 2021

Original Lang.: Arabic

Press release,

ICSPR calls on the international community to pressure the occupation authorities to release the prisoner “Shatha Abu Fanunah”.

The International Commission to Support Palestinians’ Rights (ICSPR) follows up with great concern and condemnation the continued detention of the Director-General of the Union of Health Work Committees, Ms. Shatha Odeh Abu Fanunah (60 years), where she has been arrested since July 7, 2021, without the slightest evidence or a clear and specific accusation, and was subjected to several investigation sessions and brought before the court in Ofer several times to intimidate her and extract confessions.

According to what was reported by the lawyer of the Palestinian Detainees Club, Abu Fanunah suffers from a difficult health condition, which is high blood sugar and colon problems, and she needs medical care and continuous treatment, and she also needs to undergo laser surgery in her eye, but that the prison clinic is stalling.

ICSPR holds the Israeli occupation authorities fully responsible for the lives of Abu Fanunah and all the Palestinian detainees in the occupation’s prisons, and stresses that the occupation’s practice of torture, cruel treatment, willful neglect and violation of fair trial standards is a full-fledged crime in accordance with the rules of international humanitarian law, especially the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, which requires the international community to seriously intervene to release Abu Fanunah, stop targeting humanitarian activists and hold the occupation accountable for its grave violations of the rights detainees, in line with the principles of full justice. Accordingly:

• ICSPR reaffirms that the international community must compel the occupation state to abide by international human rights standards and rules of the international humanitarian law, especially the conventions and charters on the rights of prisoners and other persons deprived of their liberty, such as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners of 1955, and the set of principles related to the protection of all persons who are subjected to any form of detention or imprisonment of 1988.
• ICSPR calls on the United Nations, its organizations, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to urgently intervene and put pressure on the occupation authorities in terms of releasing Abu Fanunah and all Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
• ICSPR calls on the Palestinian leadership to refer the file of Israeli violations against prisoners and detainees to the International Criminal Court, and urges it to open an immediate investigation into the grave violations that all Palestinian prisoners and detainees are subjected to in Israeli prisons, including working to internationalize the cause of detainees.

ICSPR