The Committee for Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners' Affairs said on Thursday that the families of Palestinian prisoners at the Naqab detention camp reached an agreement with the prison’s authorities to start implementing preventive measures against the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease.
The Committee explained that detainees had recently rejected meals and closed sections at several central prisons in protest at the failure of the Israeli authorities to protect prisoners during the coronavirus outbreak.
So, the administration of the Naqab prison, which is located near the Egypt-Israel border, southwest of Beersheba, began sterilizing cells.
During a meeting held last Thursday, the prison’s administration pledged to also sterilize buses transporting detainees and to quarantine newcomers for 14 days before transferring them to a cell.
Detainees at the Naqab prison would also be checked twice a day, one time from outside their cells and another from inside, to prevent, as much as possible, contact between them and the guards.
The Committee for Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners' Affairs called on the World Health Organization (WHO) and other human rights and legal institutions to immediately intervene and pressure the occupation government to take the necessary health measures to prevent a virus outbreak among prisoners.
On Thursday, ten Palestinian political prisoners at Ofer detention camp, southwest of Ramallah, went on an open-ended hunger strike to protest the solitary confinement of two prisoners, as well as Israel's failure to provide the necessary conditions to prevent an infection among them.
The Palestinian Prisoner's Society (PPS) quoted the ten prisoners as saying that unless the Israel Prison Service (IPS) fulfills their legitimate demands, more prisoners will join the hunger strike.
The protest came against IPS's failure to examine prisoners who were in contact with an infected inmate released two days ago.
