The Israeli High Court of Justice rejected a petition filed by the families of Palestinian prisoners against a ban on visitation keeping them from seeing their jailed relatives.
According to the court, Israel Prison Service was ordered not to permit Hamas prisoners to be visited by their family members until Israeli soldiers held captive in Gaza are returned.
It also stressed that the visitation ban is not collective punishment, but rather a measure enacted due to security concerns.
In 2017, Minister of Internal Security Gilad Erdan ordered the Israel Prison Service not to approve the visits of families of Hamas terrorists from Gaza who are incarcerated in Israel in order to exert additional pressure on the organization to return Israeli citizens and the bodies of IDF soldiers being held by Hamas.
In April, Hamas leaders held a strike in Israeli jails over lifting the ban on visits, yet with no avail. However, Israel prison authorities did install public payphones for prisoners to contact their relatives.
The family of Lt. Hadar Goldin, whose body is still being held by Hamas in Gaza joined as a respondent to the petition and welcomed the ruling, calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to toughen conditions on Hamas prisoners.
In a statement, the Goldin family said: “We now expect Netanyahu to toughen the conditions of the prisoners and put effective pressure on Hamas. If the Government of Israel implements and fulfills the Cabinet's decisions, we will be able to bring Hadar, Oron [Shaul], Avera [Mengistu] and Hisham [al-Sayed] back home in the best agreement since the end of the Yom Kippur War.”
“I welcome the High Court of Justice's ruling rejecting the petition against my decision... I will continue to act against the terrorists in prison until their prison terms fall to the minimum required by law,” Erdan said about the ruling.
