PRESS RELEASE
16 October 2011

Adalah, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Arab Association for Human Rights welcome the prisoners swap agreement recently announced between Israel and the Hamas movement. Although there is still little information available about the agreement, the three signatory organizations consider the release of 1,027 Palestinian and Arab prisoners from Israeli prisons a positive step, and hope that the agreement will lead to an end to the aggressive measures adopted by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) against Palestinian prisoners, which have escalated in recent months.

The three organizations call for an end to the campaign in the Israeli cabinet to enact laws aiming to impose harsher measures on Palestinian prisoners, which would further violate their rights. In response to the delays in negotiations over the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the Israeli authorities have sought to enact new laws that would impose harsher conditions on Palestinian prisoners as a means of collective punishment.

The three organizations also reiterate their support for the Palestinian prisoners who have been on hunger strike for 19 days, and express their support for the detainees' demands, foremost among them ending the policy of solitary confinement, allowing prisoners to pursue higher education, and retention of other rights that prisoners had achieved through more than ten years of struggle. The three organizations warn the IPS against harming the hunger strikers and call on it to allow independent physicians to visit, examine, and, if necessary, transfer detainees to hospitals.

The three signatory organizations reiterate their previous call for an immediate end to the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip. Israeli leaders have frequently connected the siege to the holding of the Israeli soldier. The signatory organizations emphasize that the Israeli siege - in the context of Israel's ongoing control over the Gaza Strip – a policy of unlawful collective punishment.