The Commission of Prisoners' Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners' Club said that a health disaster is looming over the Negev prison, where thousands of prisoners are being held, due to the spread of scabies - or what is known as scabies - among hundreds of prisoners, causing them to suffer from difficult and complex health symptoms, while the prison administration continues to deliberately consolidate the basic causes that led to its spread, as well as deliberately depriving prisoners of treatment, and using it as a tool to torture them physically and psychologically.

The Commission and the Club continued that through several visits conducted by the Commission and the Club’s lawyers recently to (35) prisoners and detainees in the Negev Prison from October 27-30, the prisoners’ testimonies reflected the tragic detention conditions that degrade human dignity in which they live, which confirms once again that the prison system seeks to kill prisoners by any possible means, including contributing to the spread of diseases among them, in addition to a series of systematic crimes, the basis of which are torture crimes and medical crimes, especially since there are hundreds of prisoners in the aforementioned prison who are sick and have chronic and difficult health conditions.

The Commission and the Club pointed out that the prison administration has recently deliberately transferred many sick prisoners to the Negev prison, which has been and continues to be a site for crimes of torture, sexual assault, and the spread of diseases, specifically scabies, with the aim of killing them. Among the (35) prisoners who were visited in the Negev prison, there were (25) prisoners who were infected with scabies.

In this context, the Commission and the Club confirm that this is a small sample of hundreds of injured prisoners who are subjected to systematic medical crimes and torture around the clock, through the prison administration’s use of illness as a tool to torture them. The prisoners’ testimonies included all very harsh details about their suffering from the disease without receiving any kind of treatment, and without the prison administration attempting to address the causes that contributed and contribute to the continued spread of the disease, the most prominent of which are:

(Lack of cleaning materials, prisoners’ inability to shower regularly, lack of clean clothes, as most prisoners only have one change of clothes, lack of washing machines, as prisoners are forced to wash their clothes by hand, and the prison administration prevents them from hanging them out to dry, so they remain damp, which has contributed greatly to the spread of skin diseases among prisoners. The prison administration also does not respond to prisoners’ repeated requests to provide treatment or even take them to the clinic).