At least 84 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023 after being subjected to systematic abuse, including physical and psychological violence, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation and denial of medical treatment, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says.Israeli authorities were still holding 80 of their bodies and refusing to return them to their families, the organisation said in a report released on Tuesday, which listed the names of the 84 deceased prisoners, including one minor, and the facilities in which they died.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listFifty of them were from the Gaza Strip, where Israel has been carrying out its genocidal war for more than two years and repeatedly violating an October ceasefire. Thirty-one were from the occupied West Bank, and three were citizens of Israel. The report noted that the numbers were likely to be higher because the organisation listed only the deaths it was able to verify.B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak said Israeli authorities had turned the prison system into a network of “torture camps” as part of “a coordinated onslaught on Palestinian society intended to destroy their existence as a collective”.“The genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank are the most blatant manifestations of this policy,” Novak said in a statement.B’Tselem said its findings were based on the testimonies of 21 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in recent months and on the work of Israeli and international human rights organisations that monitor prisons. About 9,200 Palestinians are estimated to be held in Israeli prisons. Advertisem …
