Mohammed Mar'i Saudi Gazette RAMALLAH – The Palestinian inmates in the Israeli Nafha (Rimon) prison are on high alert following the relocation of dozens of their comrades, a Palestinian official said Monday. Qaddoura Faris, the head of Palestinian Prisoners Club (Nadi Al-Asir), said that the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) started since early Monday the relocation of some 120 Palestinian prisoners of Fatah movement from section 6 of Rimon to other jails in Israel. Faris said that the IPS carried out the move as punishment against the prisoners for resisting the wardens, who entered the section last Tuesday and conducted intensive search for cellular phones. The official said that the section's prisoners refused to undergo strip search. He warned that “clashes may erupt in the prison at any moment between the prisoners and the IPS.” Some 760 Palestinian prisoners are serving their sentences in Rimon, of whom 500 prisoner life sentences.” According to the official, the prisoners “may declare an open hunger strike to protest the relocation of their comrades and the Israeli suppressive measures against them.” The strip search is one of the detention measures some Palestinian prisoners have held hunger strike against. Stopping the illegal measure was part of the agreement reached in May to end 28-day hunger strike by some 1,500 Palestinian prisoners demanding improvements in their incarceration situation, including an end to solitary confinement and administrative detention. Faris said that the IPS is barring the prisoners, and mainly those in solitary confinement, from family visits and the right to conjugal visits, access to education, telephones and satellite channels. The prison authority, he added, blocks the entry of clothes into prisons and imposes financial fines on prisoners. He called on Palestinian people, political movements, local and international human rights organizations to “support the prisoners in their just resistance against the Israeli violations.” The wife of a Palestinian prisoner Ammar Al-Zabin delivered a baby early this month through artificial insemination after the father's semen was smuggled from his Israeli prison. Israel holds 4,423 Palestinians in 23 prisons and detention camps in Israel and in the West Bank. There are 7 females and 24 legislators from Hamas, Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had repeatedly said the Palestinians will not sign any final peace agreement before Israel shuts down all its prisons and releases all the Palestinian prisoners, which were rejected by Israel.
