How Israel treats Palestinian women prisoners

In the early hours of October 26, 23-year-old Ruqaya Amr and her family woke up to the sound of their house door being blown up in Dura, a town south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

“Army, army,” her mother shouted and ran to wake up her sleeping children. She didn’t expect her daughter would be the target of this raid to arrest her.

The soldiers brutally searched the house, smashed the furniture and vandalised the family’s belongings without mercy. They asked, “Who is Ruqaya?” When the Hebron University student answered, the soldiers rushed to handcuff and blindfold her.

That night, the Israeli army began adding Palestinian women to the extensive list of daily arrests it has carried out in the occupied West Bank since October 7.

But prior to October, Israel was already detaining dozens of women in its prisons, including wounded, minors, and mothers.

After announcing a seven-day temporary truce, which included an exchange deal between Hamas and Israel, many Palestinian female prisoners were released and have given heartbreaking testimony about the treatment they received there.

According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Authority, three female prisoners from Jerusalem and the occupied territories remain in Israeli prisons, in addition to an unspecified number of women from Gaza who were randomly arrested during their displacement through the so-called safe corridor on Salah al-Din Street.

Ruqaya Amr was transferred to a detention centre near Kiryat Arba settlement, east of Hebron, where she remained in the open with Maryam Salhab, another university student who was arrested in her home at the same time.

“I saw them throw her to the ground, walk on her back, and stomp on her head with their shoes. She was crying silently while she was tied to the back,” Amr told TRT.

For many hours, the two women remained at the mercy of Israeli soldiers. They were subjected to insults, threats, and spitting all the time.

After that, Amr was transferred via a bus with iron seats to Ofer Prison. The soldiers didn’t allow her to sit on the seats, but rather threw her on the floor while she was bound and blindfolded.

“All the way I was lying on the floor of the bus and didn’t see anything. I felt something hitting me hard on my arms, back and neck. I didn’t know whether the soldiers were beating me or I was hitting the iron seats,” Amr said.

When she arrived at Ofer Prison, Amr was interrogated and accused of participating in union activities at the university. She was then transferred with the rest of the detainees to a detention room in Hasharon Prison. There, she recalled decrepit conditions:

“The situation there was very bad. The food was old and there was no water. They put us in the room of an Israeli criminal prisoner who had left it hours before we entered it. He was sick and there were instructions according to the doctors' not to touch his belongings. We found vomit on the mattress and they didn’t even allow us to clean the room,” she said.

After she was transferred yet again and she arrived at Damoun Prison for female prisoners, she could see the bruises on her body.

“The hardest thing was the strip search. They forced us to literally take off all of our clothes under the pretext of searching us, even though they knew we were not carrying anything. It was a humiliating situation and I almost cried during it,” she added.

Harsh treatment was the hallmark of arrests against Palestinian women, at a time when Israeli medical and family sources confirmed that the women who were taken hostage by Hamas in the besieged Gaza and released in the exchange deal, weren’t subjected to ill-treatment.

Suhair al Barghouthi, 65, was arrested from her home in the town of Kober, north of Ramallah, on the night of October 26.

She told TRT that Israeli soldiers treated her harshly and searched her house, where she lives alone, as two of her sons are detained in Israeli prisons and a third was killed by soldiers’ bullets in 2018.

“I suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure, but they prevented me from taking my medication with me. They pushed me hard towards the military vehicle and tied my hands so tightly that I felt like my hand would be cut off,” she said.

Al Barghouti faced many of the same challenges as Amr. She was also prevented from using the bathroom for long hours despite informing prison guards of her diabetes, in what she described as “deliberate teasing.”

During her stay in Damoun Prison, Al Barghouti asked the prison administration to give her medicine, but the response was always that the clinic was closed or another excuse.

“The conditions were very harsh. They put 11 female prisoners in a room that contained only three beds - no covers, no mattresses, and not enough food, one egg for a number of prisoners. They closed the sections most of the time,” Al Barghouti said.

Two days after her last arrest, she was transferred to administrative detention for six months, renewable without any charge, before she was released in the exchange deal.

Many of the female detainees were beaten, and some of them still have marks from iron sticks on their bodies, but have been afraid to speak to the media for fear of returning to prison, Al Barghouti said.

Before October 7, there were more than 40 Palestinian female prisoners in Israeli prisons, the oldest of whom was arrested in 2015 on charges of attempting to carry out stabbing attacks and was sentenced to 16 years.

Prison conditions have always been difficult for female prisoners, but they seemed to have worsened after October 7, specifically starting on that day.

Fatima Shaheen, 33, was arrested last April on charges of attempting to carry out a stabbing attack north of Hebron. Israeli soldiers opened fire, wounding her with several bullets and leaving her to bleed, causing her to become partially paralysed.

Shaheen was released in the exchange deal in a wheelchair. Her five-year-old daughter “Ayloul” was waiting for her, without realising that her mother could no longer walk without assistance.

She told TRT that on October 7, news began to spread about the arrival of Hamas fighters to the settlements surrounding Gaza, so the female prisoners gathered to watch the small TV in their rooms.

“At that moment, the prison administration’s suppression units stormed the rooms. They beat us, separated us, and took everything from our rooms: the TV, radio, clothes, belongings, everything,” she said.

The jailers also fired gas bombs into the prisoners’ rooms, causing them to suffocate without allowing them to go out to breathe fresh air.

Some of them fainted, and the representative of the female prisoners, Marah Bakeer, was taken to solitary confinement, where she remained for 50 days before she was released in the exchange deal.

Since that day, the female prisoners have been isolated from the outside world and prevented from contacting their families. Unprecedented restrictions have also been imposed on their daily lives.

Some who were released in the hostage exchange deal were not even informed of their release in advance. Jailers would enter the rooms and take some of them, and the rest would think that they had been taken for investigation, Shaheen said.

Despite her injuries and throughout her detention, Shaheen didn’t receive adequate treatment in prison. Whenever she asked for it, they told her that they had no treatment for her.

Now, after her release, hospital visits are giving her hope of returning life to her legs.

“I was hoping to get out of prison to get treatment. Even this simple right was denied to us. I am now partially paralysed, but I have hope that I will return to walking on my feet. I want to play with my daughter and make up for my absence,” Shaheen said.