Young Palestinian prisoner dies in Israeli jail: Prison service

A 23-year-old Palestinian prisoner has died in an Israeli jail, the prison service said Monday, adding it was looking into the circumstances of the inmate’s death.

The prison service in a statement said the man from Nablus in the occupied West Bank had died in Meggido prison, in Israel’s north.

He was arrested in June 2022 and later sentenced to jail time for “security offences”, the statement said without naming the prisoner.

“As in all such incidents, the circumstances (of his death) will be examined,” it said.

The Palestinian Authority’s detainees commission confirmed a prisoner had died but was unable to verify further information.

The prison service said the inmate was affiliated with Fatah, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s movement.

Last month Israeli police said they have questioned 19 prison guards as part of an investigation into the death of another Palestinian inmate following allegations of torture.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, 38-year-old Thaer Abu Assab, from Qalqilya in the West Bank, died in

November after being beaten by Israeli prison guards.

The Public Committee against Torture in Israel said Abu Assab’s death “raises serious suspicion that the IPS (Israel Prison Service) is being transformed from a professional incarceration body to a vindictive and punitive force”.

“Six prisoners have already died in prison,” the advocacy group said at the time, adding that “all the instances of abuse and death must be investigated immediately”.

Israel’s prison service announced on October 7, the day a deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel triggered all-out war, that it had imposed new restrictions on Palestinian detainees.

Authorities said inmates can no longer leave their cells, there would not be allowed visits, or permitted to buy food from the canteen, nor would they have power in their electrical outlets.

As of early December, Israeli prisons housed some 7,800 Palestinian detainees, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, an advocacy group that keeps a tally of detainees from annexed east Jerusalem and the West Bank.