Ramallah: Israeli occupation forces Tuesday evening detained two Palestinians from the occupied West Bank governorates of Ramallah and Qalqilya, according to security sources. The occupation soldiers manning the permanently-staffed An-Nabi Saleh checkpoint, located at the junction between the Halamish colonial settlement, the village of an-Nabi Saleh, and Route 465, northwest of Ramallah, stopped and detained an undergraduate student enrolled in Birzeit University. Meanwhile, the forces at a checkpoint on the road from Ramallah to Qalqilya detained a woman who works as a psychiatrist with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society branch in Qalqilya.
According to Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA, in the predawn hours of Tuesday, the occupation forces conducted multiple raids across the occupied West Bank, detaining at least 15 Palestinians. These raids frequently occur almost daily across the West Bank, purportedly in search of “wanted” Palestinians, often leading to clashes with residents. The raids,
conducted even in areas under full Palestinian Authority control, occur without the need for a search warrant, reflecting the military’s broad arbitrary powers.
Under Israeli military law, army commanders have comprehensive executive, legislative, and judicial authority over 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, leaving Palestinians with no say in the exercise of this authority. Addameer, the Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, reports there are currently 10,100 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centres, including 270 children and 95 female prisoners.
This figure includes 3,398 Palestinians under ‘administrative detention’, which permits detention without charge or trial for renewable periods of three to six months, based on undisclosed evidence inaccessible even to the detainee’s lawyer. The mass arrest of Palestinians is a longstanding issue, with Addameer reporting in 2017 that over the past 50 years, more than 800,000 Palestinians have been
imprisoned or detained by Israel, a figure now believed to be closer to 1 million. This means approximately 40% of Palestinian men and boys living under military occupation have experienced imprisonment, with almost every Palestinian family having suffered the detention of a loved one.
