Number of Prisoners
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, from the Six Day War (1967) to the First Intifada (1988), over 600,000 Palestinians were held in Israeli jails for a week or more. Rory McCarthy, The Guardian's Jerusalem correspondent, estimated that one-fifth of the population has at one time been imprisoned since 1967. On 11 December 2012, the office of then Prime Minister Salam Fayyad stated that since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians, or roughly 20% of the total population and 40% of the male population, had been imprisoned by Israel at one point in time. About 100,000 had been held in administrative detention.
According to B'Tselem, there was a decline, starting in 1998, in the number of Palestinians held in administrative detention. Less than 20 were held from 1999 to October 2001. However, with the start of the Second Intifada (2000), and particularly after Operation Defensive Shield (2002), the numbers steadily rose. According to the Fédération Internationale des ligues des Droits de l'Homme (FIDH), from the beginning of the Second Intifada to April 2003, more than 28,000 Palestinians were incarcerated. In April 2003 alone there were more than 5,500 arrests.
In 2007, the number of Palestinians under administrative detention averaged about 830 per month, including women and minors under the age of 18. By March 2008, more than 8,400 Palestinians were held by Israeli civilian and military authorities, of which 5,148 were serving sentences, 2,167 were facing legal proceedings and 790 were under administrative detention, often without charge or knowledge of the suspicions against them. In 2010, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that there were "over 7,000" Palestinians in Israeli jails, of them 264 under administrative detention. Most of the prisoners are held at Ofer Prison in the West Bank and Megiddo and Ketziot prisons in Israel.
In April 2008, Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel stated that 11,000 Palestinian prisoners were in prison and detention in Israel, including 98 women, 345 minors, 50 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and 3 ministers of the Palestinian National Authority. Of these 11,000 Palestinian prisoners, 8,456 were from the West Bank, 762 from the Gaza Strip, and 694 from within Israel itself (including 552 from Jerusalem). In October 2008, Haaretz reported that 600 Palestinians were being held in administrative detention in Israel, including "about 15 minors who do not know even know why they are being detained."
Read more about this topic: Palestinian Prisoners In Israel
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