Palestinian Prisoners Are Low Priority for PA

There are more than 4,800 Palestinian prisoners currently held in Israeli jails. Of these, 236 are children under the age of 18, 12 are women, and 178 are under administrative detention, meaning they are being held without charge or trial and can have their detention renewed indefinitely.

There are 109 prisoners who have spent more than 20 years behind bars, as they were imprisoned before the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords between officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government, which held more than 12,000 Palestinians prisoner at that time. As a report from the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association shows, these prisoners were not a priority for PLO officials, which included the late president Yasser Arafat, de facto Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and unelected chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.

The collusive nature of the PLO prior to signing the Oslo Accords and the resultant fledgling PA was evident from the start, given the secret meetings with Israel. Prisoners at the time had directed a letter to the PLO, demanding that their cause be one of the issues sorted out before signing the accords.

The Palestinian leadership admitted that a “mistake” had been made, and the result was the Jericho Agreement, signed a year later, in 1994, in Cairo, in which Israel  released 4,500 prisoners from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a far cry from their vow to release all of them. Prisoners from Jerusalem and the 1948 territories with Israeli citizenship remained incarcerated, as Israel deemed them an “internal matter.” As a condition of release, the prisoners were made to sign pledges that they would reject all forms of violence and terrorism. In addition, 500 prisoners were released on the condition of spending their remaining sentences in Jericho prison under the charge of the newly created PA.