The Portuguese Communist Party follows with deep concern and denounces the worsening situation of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners jailed in Israeli prisons, subjected to a daily life of violence and deprivation of their most basic rights.
At this time, more than 5,000 Palestinian resistants are held in Israeli prisons, including 34 women and 160 children.
In this general framework, the case of the hundreds of Palestinians subjected to administrative detention, a figure in the penal code of the State of Israel that gives cover to imprisonment, under the orders of a military commander, for an indefinite period, without prosecution or trial, is particularly serious. According to organisations that monitor Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons, around five hundred prisoners are currently in this situation, and during 2021, more than 1,500 administrative arrest orders were issued by the Israeli authorities, an increase of around 50 percent compared to the previous year.
As in the case of what takes place daily when houses are demolished or land is occupied, prisons have also been a ground of resistance and of building the unity of the Palestinian people in the struggle for the recognition of their rights. Several protest movements, in some cases with the participation of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, have constituted heroic actions of resistance that range from the refusal to appear before the Israeli military court to lengthy periods of hunger strikes. With its own historical experience in the struggle against fascism in Portugal, the PCP knows well the importance of resistance in prisons and the significant importance of international solidarity with that struggle.
Line of resistance of the Palestinian people for their inalienable national cause, the Portuguese Communist Party salutes the struggle of Palestinian political prisoners, men, women and youth imprisoned in Israeli jails, and demands respect for their rights and their immediate release.
The PCP calls on the Portuguese Government to intervene urgently and resolutely , in the international bodies in which it is represented and directly with the Government of Israel, demanding that Israel respect the just demands of the Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli prisons and strive for their immediate release, namely of those on hunger strike protesting the illegality of their continued arbitrary detention.
The PCP reaffirms its long-lasting solidarity with the cause of the Palestinian people and stresses its determination to continue to intervene, including at the institutional level, to defend their rights, against the occupation, for the right to a free State of Palestine, viable and sovereign, on the borders of 1967 and with East Jerusalem as the capital, inseparable from the right of return of the refugees and the release of all Palestinian resistants held in Israeli prisons.
