Jerusalem: The Palestine Prisoners’ Club (PPC) said, on Tuesday, that a full year has passed since the Israeli prison administration isolated the Palestinian prisoner Ahmed Manasra in solitary confinement cells.
The club explained in a statement that the Palestinian prisoner, Ahmed Manasra, had faced compelling and difficult health and psychological conditions throughout the year, which contributed to the aggravation of his condition.
Manasra was transferred several times to isolation sections in several prisons, the last of which was the isolation of Eshel prison, where he lies today.
Manasra entered his eighth year in the prisons of the occupation, which insists on continuing his detention despite his difficult health and psychological condition, as he was arrested at the age of 13, and today he is 20 and a half years old.
The media spokesman for the authority, Hassan Abd Rabbo, told Wafa News Agency, that the prisoner’s condition requires him to be among the prisoners and detainees, and not isolated from the whole world as he is doing with him, which would further complicate the matter in terms of health, psychological and neurological terms.
Abd Rabbo said that the policy of solitary confinement is a retaliatory punishment, and a very harsh measure against a prisoner when he is detained for a year or more in dirty cells in very miserable conditions.
He stressed that this matter requires more efforts to be made to release him, although the occupation refuses to do so, and there were demands and went to the occupation court with the aim of getting him out of solitary confinement, but he refused to respond to that.
As per media reports, Ahmed Manasra’s reports had confirmed that he had schizophrenia, as a result of the harsh treatment he was subjected to at an early age.
It is noteworthy that the prisoner Ahmed Manasra was born on January 22, 2002, in the occupied city of Jerusalem. He is one of a family of 10 members. He has two brothers and is the eldest male in his family, in addition to 5 sisters.
Before his arrest in 2015, he was a student in the eighth grade at the New Generation School in Jerusalem, and he was 13 years old at the time.
Israeli forces arrested Ahmed Manasra in 2015 from the occupied city of Jerusalem, for allegedly attempting to carry out a stabbing attack. The Israeli soldiers shot him and his cousin Hassan, who was martyred on the day of his arrest.
At the time, videos were published of harsh scenes of him lying on the ground screaming and injured. The occupation soldiers also tried to pin him to the ground and abuse him. His case later turned into a global one.
As per media reports, Ahmed Manasra was initially sentenced to 12 years in prison. This was subsequently reduced to 9 years and a fine of over $47,000 which his family struggled to raise.
It is noteworthy that cases suffering from diseases and psychological problems are on the rise inside the prisons of the occupation, as a result of the abusive and repressive policies that prisoners are exposed to, including the policy of isolation, which constitutes the most prominent and most dangerous of these policies.
