The Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners' Club announced today, Wednesday, the martyrdom of the detainee Amro Hatem Ouda (33 years old) from the Gaza Strip, after receiving an official response from the Israeli occupation army confirming his martyrdom on December 13, 2023, in the "Sedieh Teiman" camp, described as one of the most prominent sites of torture against Gaza detainees since the start of the extermination war.
The institutions explained that Ouda was arrested along with his family members from their home in a village east of Gaza during the early days of the ground invasion of the Strip, specifically on December 7, 2023. He was married and a father of three children.
With the martyrdom of Amro Ouda, the number of martyrs among detainees since the beginning of the Israeli aggression has risen to 70, including 44 detainees from Gaza whose identities were recognized, while the documented number of martyrs from the prisoner movement since 1967 has reached about 307 martyrs, making the current stage the bloodiest in the history of the Palestinian prisoner movement.
The Commission and the Club affirmed that the official statements coming from the occupation army about the fate of the detainees remain confined to their narratives, without revealing the real circumstances of the martyrdom, amid ongoing retention of bodies and attempts to manipulate information. In some cases, approaches have been made to Israeli courts to get final responses regarding the fate of the detainees.
The two institutions pointed out that torture crimes are the main reason behind the martyrdom of most detainees after genocide, along with medical neglect, starvation, physical and sexual assaults, and imposing harsh detention conditions that lead to the spread of dangerous and infectious diseases, the most prominent being scabies.
The two institutions considered that Amro Ouda's martyrdom falls within the framework of the systematic crimes carried out by the occupation state against Palestinian prisoners, which represents another facet of the ongoing extermination war, noting that testimonies from Gaza detainees who were released are among the harshest in terms of the level of violations.
The institutions emphasized that the continuing rise in the number of martyrs among the detainees portends grave risks, while more than 10,100 prisoners are held, including 39 female prisoners, more than 400 children, and 3,577 administrative detainees, in addition to 1,846 detainees from Gaza classified by the occupation as "unlawful combatants", noting that this number does not include all detainees from the Strip held in army camps.
The human rights organizations held the occupation authorities fully responsible for the martyrdom of the detainees, renewing their demand for an urgent and independent international investigation into the circumstances of the prisoners' martyrdom, and to take legal actions against the leaders of the occupation, in a way that restores respect for the international legal system and ends the state of impunity enjoyed by the occupation state.
