Ramallah -

In 1967, Bashir Khairy was taking his first steps in the legal profession, but the setback and the subsequent occupation of the rest of Palestine by Israel did not allow him, and he who announced from the first day his boycott of working in the Israeli courts that raise the Israeli flag, was one of the The charges brought against him upon his arrest the following year.

He was sentenced at the time to 15 years in prison, during which he refused to acknowledge or deal with the Israeli courts, a position that he still adopts even now after 54 years. He is administratively detained in the occupation prisons;

"My father boycotted all the courts that were held for him recently. He believes that they are sham courts and that they are useless," his daughter Hanin told Al Jazeera Net.

Khairy, 80, was last arrested in October 2021, and despite the absence of a specific charge against him, the occupation intelligence insisted on his detention despite the release decisions obtained by his lawyer, and he was transferred to administrative detention for a period of 6 months.

Simultaneously, a court session has been scheduled for him on a charge that will be presented to him at the end of next May, which indicates the intention to renew the administrative detention order for him, which ends this month.

His daughter says that his administrative detention is "to gain time from the occupation intelligence until a charge is prepared for him."

Khairy during his successive arrests since 1967 until now;

He was arrested in 1968, 1988, 2003, 2011 and 2021. He kept pace with all stages of the development of the Palestinian captive movement, and moved between all the old Israeli prisons and those that were created later.

His daughter says, "My father is transferred in all prisons, but his detention in Ramle prison had an impact on his heart, because it is his city from which he was displaced in 1948, and he used to say that he felt at home."

Bashir Khairy after his release from the first arrest (Al-Jazeera)

Articulated stations 

If the first period of Khairi’s arrest was the beginning of the formation of the organized captive movement, the policy of arrests dates back to the years before the 1948 Nakba, to the British Mandate period, and it was a response to gifts and disturbances, as was the case in 1920 and during the 1936 revolution, when the arrests were wholesale, The treatment of prisoners was characterized by extreme violence and a policy of executions.

With the occupation of Palestine by Israel in 1948, it practiced mass arrests linked to the mass displacement of the population of historic Palestine, targeting activists of the Palestinian national movement, revolutionaries and anyone who was able to bear arms, as well as field executions, and bargaining for exit from the country.

The arrests at the time were unorganized. The prisoners were held in difficult conditions in the prisons that Israel inherited from the British Mandate. The prisoners worked there as forced labor and were subjected to torture, murder and rape during the interrogation.

In 1967, the arrests seemed more organized by Israel, and on the other hand, the prisoner movement inside the prisons was more organized, drawing its strength from the Palestinian street with the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the resistance operations.

In the first period, the arrests took on a mass character, as in the year of the Nakba. The occupation forces arrested everyone they saw on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

These arrests were accompanied by an increase in the level of torture and the deprivation of prisoners of all rights.

Khairy was one of those who was subjected to severe torture at the time, and "the traces of cigarette butts are still on his body until now," according to his daughter Hanin.

In response to these policies, collective strikes emerged as a tool to respond to these policies by the prisoners, and 8 strikes were recorded during the years between 1967 and 1977, the most prominent of which was the 1976-1977 strike, during which prisoners achieved their rights to treatment, increased time outside the courtyards, and a sponge mattress for sleeping. , improving the quality of food, opening a canteen, getting books, increasing the radio time, and some sports.

Also during this period, prisoner exchanges took place;

The most famous of these was Operation Galilee in 1985, which was carried out by the Popular Front (General Command), in which 1,155 prisoners were released.

During this deal, Bashir Khairy was to be released, but he refused, as there was not much left in his reign, and demanded that the name of a prisoner with high judgments be included in his place.

A recent photo of the prisoner Bashir Khairy (Al Jazeera)

Hamas and Jihad..a new transformation

Most of the prisoners were released in these deals, but two years later, with the outbreak of the 1987 Stone Intifada, the arrests returned again, and for the first time, the arrests included prisoners from Islamic movements (Hamas and Islamic Jihad), which constituted a new transformation in the history of the captive movement.

Although the captive movement at the time was more powerful and organized, the occupation was trying to restrict the prisoners as much as possible, and it was a series of open hunger strikes, the most famous of which was in 1992, when it was the most famous strike in the history of the captive movement, during which it was able to achieve all its demands.

Editor Fakhri al-Barghouti (he spent 34 consecutive years in prison and went through these strikes) says that many factors were the reason for the strike's success;

Including that all prisoners in all prisons participated in it, and the popular support outside the prison was great."

He continued to Al Jazeera Net, "The captive movement achieved all their life demands in prisons, as the prison administration was depriving prisoners of the most basic necessities of life."

With the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, the policy of mass arrests returned, especially during the incursions that included the entire West Bank cities.

numbers and data

According to the Palestinian Prisoners Club, Israel is now holding 4,450 Palestinian prisoners, including 32 female prisoners, 160 children, and 530 administrative detainees.

The club said that since the beginning of this year, Israel has arrested 1,500 Palestinians, most of them during March and with the beginning of the month of Ramadan.

Among the prisoners, 600 are in a medical condition, 200 of whom are in a chronic condition, and 20 prisoners have cancer and tumors of varying degrees, the most dangerous of which is the case of the prisoner Nasser Abu Hamid.

The number of prisoners since 1967 has approached one million arrests, including 227 martyrs, in addition to hundreds of liberated prisoners who were martyred as a result of diseases they inherited from prison.

549 prisoners are serving life sentences, the highest of which is Abdullah Barghouti, who has been sentenced to life 67 times.

The number of former prisoners detained prior to the signing of the Oslo Agreement reached 25, the oldest of whom were Karim Younis and Maher Younis, who have been detained since January 1983, and the prisoner Nael Barghouti, who is serving the longest period of detention in the history of the captive movement after entering his 42nd year in prison.


Prisons in 2022

Returning to the conditions of the prisoners at present, the prisons are living in difficult conditions in light of Israel’s attempt to withdraw all the achievements of the prisoners that they were able to impose through the strikes that the captive movement has waged throughout these years, by restricting them in the sections, reducing the periods of exit to the yards (the break), and isolation for long periods. Reducing the canteen items, in light of the poor quality of the meals served to them, and so on.

The spokesman for the Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission, Hassan Abd Rabbo, says that "the conditions of the prisoners at this stage are getting worse, as the occupation is trying to deprive the prisoners of all their rights."

According to what Abd Rabbo told Al Jazeera Net, Israel has a clear decision not to deal with prisoners as prisoners of freedom, and seeks to change their legal status by treating them as terrorists and moral and legal values ​​do not apply to them, including international conventions.

The restrictions also include the families of the prisoners, who are being pursued with threats, home demolitions, financial fines, and targeting the prisoners' salaries.

This harsh treatment of the occupation with the prisoners is not new. Rather, it is a reproduction of the old policies of the occupation in dealing with the prisoners since 1948 until now, says Amani Farahneh of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, who dedicated a master's thesis to talk about the captive movement and its struggle.

According to Farajneh, Israel uses the same policy of violence against the prisoners, which is based on extreme violence that is closer to the policy of colonial colonialism.

During her speech to Al Jazeera Net, Farahna said that the overall policies related to the structure of violence practiced by the occupation in prisons are fixed, and develop into invisible violence, so we do not witness direct torture or shooting of prisoners as it was in 1948, but rather a psychological exhaustion of the prisoner.

For example, the process of controlling and monitoring the prisoners used to require a confrontation with the prisoners by the jailer, but now the prisoners are controlled and monitored through electronic control rooms, which gives the jailer an edge in controlling prisons and prisoners.