Joseph, the fifteen-month-old Palestinian Prisoner

Fatima pleaded to meet her eight children to a lawyer during his visit to the prison, she suffers like all prisoners from the Gaza Strip, and she is disappointed of the lack of interested human rights organizations in Palestinian prisoners’ suffering. She said that the prisoners lack many basic needs, and that the Israeli prison administration refuse to provide them with the essentials, besides preventing them from gaining access to such needs sent to them by their families, besides being denied visits, she herself has not seen any member of her family for more than 20 months. Fatima was distressed because the prison administration confiscates the prisoner’s letters as well which are considered the only means of communication with their families considering the fact that the family visits are banned.

Fatima managed to send only one letter to her family when she was first detained: “the first cell they put me in is more like a grave under the ground, the sewage are overflowing, attracting lots of insects and the smell stinks. I developed skin infections and pimples all over my head, the place are a health hazard’ wrote Fatima.

Regarding the treatment she was receiving by the Israeli female prison wardens she wrote ‘the female soldiers used to ask me …since when I became a practicing Muslim, I told them since a long time when I was a little girl because I was raised in a practicing family…they used to shout in my face and call me a terrorist’ she wrote. ‘They tried to force me to miscarriage by offering me different medicines I refused to take, I told them babies are a blessing from God’ she explained in her letter.

Fatima and other Palestinian women prisoners have sent dozens of letters through the Red Cross to their families but none was delivered to their families they said, and they did not receive any letters sent to them by their families either, such procedures left the Palestinian women isolated totally suffering emotional distress. Such isolation was described by the prisoners as a tragedy. But Fatima’s tragedy is greater than any of the other women because her baby “Joseph” suffers the lack of many essentials that she could not provide him with in such state of total isolation, besides the fact that he was deprived of a normal life or enjoy seeing his father or any of his brothers being brought up in the most unusual way a child can be brought up in.

Ra'fat Hamduna Director of the Centre for Studies of prisoners called upon the authorities of the prisons and the legal system to facilitate a meeting between Fatima and her children, and is pressuring the occupation authorities to free her and her baby "Joseph", and ensure the essential needs of the prisoners must be met, especially providing them with the clothing needed, but until the writing of this article no accomplishments were made in this respect, and baby Joseph is still in prison with no contact of other children. I am worried, what kind of vocabulary he will pick up in prison. He never heard a bird, or giggles of other children, he is only used to hearing the doors of the cells slammed close.

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