One million Palestinians detained by Israel since the 1967 Naksa: report

Over one million Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli forces since 1967, according to estimates by civil society groups released on Saturday.

Three Palestinian organisations a said in a joint statement they documented over one million arrests of Palestinians, including some 17,000 cases concerning women and 50,000 concerning children.

According to the Palestinian Society Prisoners Club, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees' Affairs and the Prisoners' High Council, around 5,700 people are currently held in Israeli jails.

Since 1967, when Israel began its occupation on Palestinian land, 226 detainees have died inside Israeli prisons, including 73 due to torture and 71 due to lack of medical care.

During the 1967 Six-Day war, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which was later returned to Egypt under the terms of a peace deal.

More than 54,000 administrative detention orders were recorded since them. The NGOs said all those detained experienced "some form of physical or psychological torture, moral abuse, and cruel treatment".

Commission of Detainees Affairs: One million Palestinians have been detained by the occupation since the 1967 Naksa, including 50,000 children. https://t.co/Sx7ZcFJPD6

— #SaveSheikhJarrah فرح (@frrhzl) June 5, 2021

Administrative detention, which allows Israeli authorities to extend the detention of a prisoner without charge, has resulted in lengthy detention periods with no due legal process.

In February, the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled that it has jurisdiction to investigate serious international crimes committed in the entirety of occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.  This includes adjudicating over possible crimes against humanity committed by Israel within that territory.

The EU’s representative for the Palestinian territories, Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff, called earlier this month for the lifting of Gaza’s crippling 15-year blockade.

Israel attacked residents in the sealed-off strip on May 10, 2021, killing 256 Palestinians including 67 children over 11- days of airstrikes.

Meanwhile, residents in the eastern Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah have been resisting attempts to forcefully expel them from their ancestral homes in the latest wave of evictions against Palestinian residents in the contested city.