Gaza /PNN /
Fifty-one-year-old Palestinian detainee Ashraf Mohammad Fakhri Abu Warda, from Gaza, has died in mysterious circumstances in the Israeli Soroka Hospital.
The Palestinian Prisoners' Affairs Commission and the Palestinian Prisoners' Society (PPS) announced that they were informed of Abu Warda's death after he was transferred from Naqab Prison to Soroka Hospital on December 27, 2024. He had been detained since November 20, 2023, and, according to his family, had not suffered from any pre-existing health issues.
In a joint statement, the commission and the PPS confirmed that with Abu Warda’s death, the number of fatalities among Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails has risen to 50 since the beginning of the ongoing genocide. This marks the highest number of fatalities in the history of Palestinian prisoners, making this period the deadliest in the history of the prisoners' movement since 1967.
The statement described Abu Warda’s death as a new crime in the Israeli system of brutality, which has reached its peak since the start of the ongoing genocide. The commission and the PPS emphasized that the treatment of prisoners is another face of the genocide, with the intent to carry out more executions and targeted killings of detainees.
They warned that the number of victims among prisoners will continue to rise, exacerbated by the ongoing conditions of systematic torture, hunger, assaults, medical neglect, sexual violence, and the deliberate imposition of conditions that lead to severe and contagious diseases, along with unprecedented levels of theft and deprivation.
The Palestinian Prisoners' Affairs Commission and the PPS held the Israeli occupation fully responsible for Abu Warda's death. They renewed their call for the international human rights system to take decisive actions to hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes and to impose sanctions that would isolate Israel on the international stage.
They also urged the international community to restore the primary role of human rights organizations and put an end to the exceptional immunity granted to Israel by colonial powers, which has placed Israel above accountability.
