Shatha Hanaysha
Palestinian
prisoners in Israeli detention are subjected to conditions of torture,
starvation, and torment that are the worst they have been since 1967. My
brother has been imprisoned amid these conditions for over a year.
Demonstrators carry posters and portraits of Palestinian prisoners in
Israeli jails during a gathering to commemorate Palestinian Prisoners’
Day in the city of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on April 17,
2025. (Photo: Mamoun Wazwaz/APA Images)
Today is
Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. My brother, Assem Hanaysha, has been in
administrative detention — imprisonment without charge or trial — for over a
year now. During the month of Ramadan last March, a heavy piece of news reached
him in the cells of the Naqab prison: that I, his sister Shatha, had been
killed.
The news
reached my brother as he languished in conditions lacking the most basic
necessities of life, and with no means of verifying the information or
communicating with the outside world. Surrounded by isolating walls and cut off
from the news, with illnesses eating away at his body due to scabies,
malnutrition, and stomach and dental problems, Assem carried this news with him
and lived through hellish days believing that I was gone forever.
It was not easy
to verify the truth.
Every attempt
to deliver a piece of information to him became a long, difficult journey
punctuated by long stretches of waiting due to complications imposed by the
occupation on lawyers. These restrictions have at times made it nearly
impossible for prisoners to access their lawyers, who are the only source of
news they have about what is going on in the outside world, including news of
the progress of the war. But after protracted efforts, we managed to reach a
lawyer who was going to visit detainees at Naqab prison.
The plan was
simple: the lawyer would deliver a verbal message to one of the prisoners, who
would then pass it along through the sections and rooms, hoping it would reach
Assem after a few days. The message was equally simple: “Your sister Shatha is
well. She is alive.”
But even before
the message reached him, the lawyer discovered something grave. After finishing
his visit, he confirmed to us that every prisoner he met asked the same
question as soon as they saw him: “Do you have any information about the
journalist, the sister of the prisoner Assem Hanaysha? We heard that she was
martyred.”
The extent of
the terror that had been planted in my brother’s heart was evidenced by the
fact that he had asked any prisoner due to see a lawyer to ask about my fate.
It shows the depth of the pain endured by prisoners who are isolated from their
families and their worlds.
The news likely
reached the Naqab prison that the Palestinian Authority had killed a journalist
from Jenin named Shatha. That news referred to Shatha
Sabbagh, a journalist from Jenin refugee camp who was killed by the PA
security forces during a military assault on the camp they called “Operation
Protect the Homeland.”
The news
entered the prison: a journalist named Shatha from Jenin was killed. It then
spread from one section to another, with assumptions added on to it — that the
journalist named Shatha from Jenin was Shatha Hanaysha, the sister of Assem
Hanaysha. The occupation enjoys these kinds of mix-ups, perhaps even encourages
them.
What happened
was not just a mistake. The news was integrated into the systematic
psychological warfare that the Israeli occupation practices against Palestinian
prisoners, within a broader system of deliberate medical neglect, isolation,
and psychological repression. It is meant to do one thing: to break the
prisoners with doubt, to kill them with fear, to plant panic and helplessness
deep in their hearts, and to isolate them from the outside world.
The experience
that my brother Assem went through, and every moment of pain he lived through
believing he had lost his sister, is not just a personal story, and I do not
share it with people as such; rather, it is a reflection of the daily crime
committed by the occupation against more than 9,500 Palestinian prisoners,
including 350 children.
Since October
7, 2023, the situation in Israeli prisons has been the worst it has ever been
since the beginning of the Israeli occupation. Prisoners say that whoever had
been detained before October 7 had never truly seen prison. Just as the Israeli
occupation carries out a genocide in Gaza, it is aslo carrying
it out behind bars, using torture, deliberate starvation, sexual assault,
humiliation, and rape. Even Israeli doctors have notoriously
assisted in the torture of Palestinian detainees, sharing prisoners’
medical information with interrogators to “greenlight” torture, teaching
interrogators how to inflict pain without leaving physical marks, and sometimes
directly engaging in torture themselves.
Prisoners
released from the occupation’s jails are the clearest evidence of the
conditions inside. A large number of them are released having lost significant
weight, or suffer from serious health conditions such as scabies, requiring
immediate transfer to hospitals.
In recent
months, several prisoners have died in Israeli prisons. According to a
statement from the Palestinian Prisoners Club, the number of martyrs from the
prisoners’ movement has reached 64 since the beginning of the genocide on
October 7, 2023, and these are only the ones whose deaths have been officially
announced.
The death of
prisoner Musab Adeili, 20, from the town of Osarin outside of Nablus, was
announced today on Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, April 17. Among the 64 are at
least 40 martyrs from Gaza. But it has to be noted that the Israeli occupation
continues to conceal the fate of dozens of martyrs among the detainees from
Gaza.
According to
the Palestinian Prisoners Club, Musab Adeili is the 301st known prisoner to
have been martyred behind bars since 1967, and the 73rd whose body is being
withheld by the occupation. Among them, 62 have been held since the beginning
of the genocide. An unknown number of detainess from Gaza have been forcibly
disappeared.
In an interview
he gave with Arabs 48 before he was martyred during the genocide, Walid
Daqqa summarized the essence of Israeli prison. I leave you with his words:
“Prison is a terrible place. It is the
vilest invention humanity has created to punish a human being. Prison, as a
totalitarian institution, does not target the prisoner in general, but rather
the individual human being — his life details, features, and personal
characteristics. From the very first moment your foot steps inside, the system
tries to turn you into a number, to erase the features of your identity, and
transform you into the subject of your jailer. For this purpose, the jailer
engineers not only the place, but also time — dividing it into units to reshape
you completely.”
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