The Martyrdom of Prisoner Samir Al-Rifa'i from Jenin After 7 Days of His Arrest

SadaNews - The Civil Affairs Authority informed both the Palestinian Prisoners' Club and the Palestinian Prisoners Affairs Authority about the martyrdom of the detainee Samir Muhammad Youssef Al-Rifa'i (53 years old), from the town of Rummana/Jenin.

This adds to the list of the martyrs of the prisoners' movement who have risen as a result of the organized crimes practiced by the Israeli occupation prison system in an unprecedented manner since the beginning of the ongoing genocide, primarily including torture, medical crimes, and starvation.

The authority and the prisoners' club clarified that the detainee Al-Rifa'i was married and a father of five children, and that the occupation forces had arrested him from his home on the 10th of July. He was supposed to have his first session today in the "Salem" military court. According to medical reports provided to us by his family, the detainee had been suffering from heart issues before his arrest and needed urgent medical follow-up.

They added that with Al-Rifa'i's martyrdom, the number of martyrs among prisoners and detainees since the beginning of the genocide has risen to 74, whose identities are known, amid the ongoing crime of enforced disappearances, making this phase in the history of the prisoners' movement the most bloody. Thus, the number of martyrs among the prisoners whose identities are known since 1967 has reached 311 martyrs to date.

The authority and the club emphasized that the increasing rate of martyrdom among prisoners and detainees has become a predictable outcome and is taking on a more dangerous trend as more time passes while thousands of prisoners and detainees remain held in the occupation's prisons, subjected momentarily to systematic crimes, the most prominent of which are torture, starvation, assaults in all forms, medical crimes, sexual assaults, and the deliberate imposition of conditions that lead to them contracting serious and infectious diseases, notably scabies, in addition to unprecedented policies of dispossession and deprivation.

The authority and the club confirmed that the martyrdom of detainee Al-Rifa'i constitutes a new crime added to the record of the Israeli brutal system, which exercises all forms of crimes aimed at killing prisoners, representing another face of the ongoing genocide and its extension.

They held the occupation fully responsible for the martyrdom of detainee Al-Rifa'i and reiterated their demand to the international human rights system to proceed with effective decisions to hold the leaders of the occupation accountable for the war crimes they continue to commit against our people, and to impose sanctions on the occupation that would clearly isolate it internationally, restore the core role of the human rights system for which it was established, put an end to the terrifying state of paralysis that has crippled this system during the genocide war, and terminate the exceptional immunity granted to the occupation state by the countries of the world, considering it above accountability and punishment.