LONDON: A 20-year-old Palestinian prisoner died on Sunday in an Israeli jail after nearly three months since his arrest, reported the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners Society.
Ahmad Said Saleh Tazazaa, from the town of Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank, was detained on May 6. He had been sentenced to administrative detention, a practice that allows Israeli authorities to hold individuals in prison without trial for several months, with the possibility of indefinite extensions.
The groups said that the circumstances surrounding Tazazaa’s death in the Megiddo prison “remain unknown.” His death brings the total number of identified Palestinian prisoners and detainees who have died in Israeli detention since October 2023 to 76 individuals, including 46 from the occupied Gaza Strip.
The last two years have been among the deadliest for Palestinian prisoners, according to the commission and the PPS. Since Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories began in 1967, 313 political prisoners have died while in detention.
Israeli authorities have arrested 18,500 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023.
