Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network warned of the dangers of the Zionist occupation’s announcement purporting to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to enter the prisons and detention centers where Palestinian prisoners are held captive, without allowing it to conduct direct, face-to-face meetings with them. This purported announcement of ICRC visits is nothing but a sham; it does not represent the restoration of the Red Cross’s humanitarian role in relation to the Palestinian prisoners, but rather an attempt to restrict it and transform it into a witness of only what the jailer wishes to be seen.
The issue of the denial of Red Cross visits to the Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners is not merely whether an international institution can enter prison buildings, but whether it can access the truth from its primary source, the prisoners themselves, who constitute the most important party in any humanitarian or human rights monitoring process. The network added that excluding them from the visit means that the occupation seeks to manage the scene rather than expose reality.
The network stated that the occupation is attempting, at this stage, to produce a political and media outlet that reduces the growing pressure against it amid wide-scale international condemnation and rejection, despite the ongoing support and cover provided by the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Britain and other imperialist powers, without paying any real price or making any serious commitment to stop the assaults and violations taking place inside the prisons. On the contrary, the occupation boasts about its crimes against the prisoners, with notorious fascist Itamar Ben-Gvir marking his birthday with a cake featuring a noose, as war minister Israel Katz openly celebrates occupation soldiers who raped Palestinian prisoners.
The announced step includes neither clear guarantees nor independent oversight, nor does it genuinely enable international bodies to know what is happening to imprisoned Palestinians — it is only the prisoners themselves who can accurately convey their experiences and reveal the truth of their suffering.
Any purported role for the ICRC that lacks independence, confidentiality, and the ability to listen to prisoners becomes a role stripped of impact, not merely unhelpful but actively harmful. In practice, this serves the occupation’s desire to manage the crisis instead of ending it, and containing international outrage while actively continuing and escalating the very genocidal actions that are the spark for that outrage.
The network added that treating prisoners as invisible people, unheard by anyone and unable to have their testimonies reach the world, is a direct extension of the occupation’s policy of isolation imposed upon them, a policy that extends beyond walls and prisons to silencing their voices and preventing their families and international institutions from learning the truth about their conditions.
Accepting any incomplete or restricted visits for the ICRC constitutes a dangerous precedent, allowing the occupation to impose new rules on international humanitarian work, whereby it determines who the Red Cross may see and who it may not see, what may be documented and what must be concealed. This represents a direct assault on the very concept of humanitarian oversight itself as represented by the ICRC.
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network urges the International Committee of the Red Cross to reject any arrangement that does not guarantee its full right to meet Palestinian prisoners directly and confidentially. This issue is a fundamental test of the credibility of its humanitarian role, rather than merely an administrative procedure or a protocol visit.
We also call upon all human rights forces, solidarity movements, and international institutions not to give the occupation an opportunity to use this step as a false message of reassurance. It stressed that what is required is real pressure to force the opening of the prisons to genuine oversight, expose the fate of the prisoners and the conditions of their detention, and put an end to policies of abuse, isolation, and deprivation – on the road to the liberation of all Palestinian prisoners, and the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
The freedom and dignity of prisoners cannot be reduced to arrangements determined by the occupation according to its own interests, and that any international action that does not begin with the voice of the prisoner and end with protecting them and holding their torturers accountable will remain incapable of fulfilling even the bare minimum of its humanitarian and human rights obligations.
source: Samidoun