Longest-serving female Palestinian prisoner enters 15th year in custody

MA’AN NEWS  –   Lina Ahmad Saleh al-Jarboni entered her 15th year in Israeli custody on Monday — the longest prison sentence ever served by a Palestinian woman.Al-Jarbouni, 41, is currently being held in Israel’s Hasharon prison, the Gaza-based prisoner rights group Muhjat Al-Quds Foundation said in a statement.

Al-Jarboni was detained April 18, 2002 and sentenced to 17 years in prison. She was charged with being affiliated to the Islamic Jihad movement and with assisting and housing resistance fighters of the Islamic Jihad’s military wing, the al-Quds Brigades.

Al-Jarboni was born in the village of Arraba near the city of Acre in northern Israel. She has never been considered for release as part of any of the prisoner exchange or release deals made between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.Al-Jarboni has been a victim of the Israeli Prison Service’s (IPS) policy of deliberate medical neglect of prisoners, and suffered from an acute inflammation of her gallbladder and had to undergo a cholecystectomy operation.

According to prisoners’ rights group Addameer, the number of ill prisoners increased to over 1,000 in 2014 from 800 in 2013. Among them, 25 are suffering from cancer and 200 are suffering from chronic illnesses. Al-Jarboni has raised awareness of the plight of sick Palestinian prisoners in Hasharon prison, telling of the physical assaults and psychological pressure they endure in addition to medical negligence.

She told Addameer in a testimony earlier this year that five female prisoners in Hasharon suffer from various diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, inflammations, and ulcers, and therefore, require special health care.

The number of female Palestinians in Israeli prisons has almost tripled in six months, from 25 prisoners in September 2015 to 68 as of March, matching an intensification of human rights violations by Israel since a wave of violence spread across the occupied Palestinian territory in October.

Addameer documented a 70 percent increase in the detention of Palestinian women and girls increase between 2013 and 2015. More than 10,000 Palestinian women have been detained by Israeli forces since 1967.