By Palestine Chronicle Staff  

The Prisoners Club accused Israel of transforming “the right to medical treatment over decades into a tool of abuse.”

The Palestinian Prisoners Club revealed on Tuesday that Israel’s occupation prison service employs scabies as a tool to torture Palestinian detainees.

“Scabies has emerged as one of the most significant health issues affecting prisoners, with visible effects on their bodies when they are released. Medical tests have confirmed that they suffer from other health problems as a result,” the Prisoners’ Club said in a statement as quoted by Anadolu news agency.

The statement added that the occupation prison service “use scabies as a means of harassment and torture, denying treatment to Palestinian prisoners which automatically transform “the right to medical treatment over decades into a tool of abuse.”

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The Prisoners’ Club quoted an unidentified Palestinian prisoner who was released from Israel’s Ramon prison as saying that “the prison administration classified his section as ‘zombie’ due to the effects of the scabies on their bodies,” Anadolu reported.

According to the group’s statement, the majority of Palestinian prisoners who are released suffer from “health issues, including chronic problems that require medical follow-up.”

The Palestinian group shared on Tuesday pictures of various released prisoners who had completed their sentences in Israeli prisons.

The pictures revealed “visible changes in their appearance due to what they endured from systematic crimes perpetrated by the (Israeli) occupation, specifically medical crimes and starvation, alongside the fundamental crime of torture,” the group said according to Anadolu.

Fifteen-year-old Iyad from Shuafat refugee camp in occupied East Jerusalem is one example that the prisoners’ group gave to demonstrate the extremely poor health conditions prisoners endure while in prison.  

The young Palestinian boy who was released from Israeli prison suffers from very poor health, which came as the result of scabies.

Systematic Torture Tool

On September 3, The Israeli prison authorities in Raman and Nafha Prisons told lawyers that scheduled visits to prisoners had been canceled on the pretext that a quarantine has been imposed due to the spread of scabies among inmates.

“This is as a result of the retaliatory measures imposed by the prison authorities on the prisoners and detainees since 7 October, which fall within the systematic torture and abuse of prisoners which are one aspect of the ongoing genocide against our people in Gaza,” the Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission and Palestinian Prisoners Society said in a statement.

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The organizations stressed that the prison administration “has effectively turned the disease into a tool of torture by deliberately committing medical crimes against the prisoners, depriving them of treatment, and failing to take necessary steps to prevent the disease from spreading.”

Several detainees, on rare occasions, were allowed visits long after contracting the disease, with their bodies showing severe deformities due to the disease, and sores from intense itching, they said.

The lack of sufficient hygiene products, reduced water supply, limited shower time for prisoners, and the confiscation of prisoners’ clothing, added to the situation.

“Most prisoners today rely on a single set of clothes, and some have been wearing the same clothes for extended periods, being forced to wash and wear them while still wet,” they said.

Spread of Scabies in Gaza

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza in October of last year, the Israeli occupation authorities have banned hygiene products from entering the besieged Strip, which caused the spread of various skin diseases with scabies being one of those.

The most vulnerable of the Palestinian population, children and elderly people, were the primary victims of these diseases.

Skin diseases that were registered besides scabies are chickenpox and rashes.

In the absence of a health system in Gaza since Israeli occupation forces targeted all hospitals and clinics during the ongoing 10-month-old aggression, modest makeshift health centers were set up to help people who suffer from these diseases and others.

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With extremely limited resources, doctors in these health tents try to meet the needs of children suffering from skin diseases.

“With the population in the camp increasing and the infrastructure in the area destroyed, wastewater has reached living areas, warning that sanitary conditions cannot be ensured in the region where access to water is limited,” Dr. Samih Ahmed, one of the few health workers working in the health tent, told Anadolu.

Consequently, skin diseases such as scabies, chickenpox, and rashes have significantly increased among Palestinians in the Strip, the physician added.

He went on to explain that the wastewater flowing from the streets and leaking into the tents has caused a rise in insects, resulting in various diseases and skin burns due to summer heat. 

(PC, Anadolu)