Administrative detention…the endless torture. A system that the English occupation used before 1948, and the Zionist occupation adopted and used it in a clear, widespread manner in 1967, and issued a thousand administrative arrests that included women and children. The administrative detention gives the leader of the military zone permission to arrest anyone, without a charge or a trial or any evidence that the arrested person did anything suspicious or illegal, from 1 month to 4 or 6 months, and it may even last for 5 years. The administrative detention can be repeated many times that it adds up to last for years. And some captives, a few days before the end of their detention or on the same day of their release, the occupation arrests them without anyone knowing the date of their release.
The administrative detainees, like all other Palestinian captives, face solitary confinement, torture, and suppression in investigation rooms, invasion of their sections and rooms, assault with batons and gas, withdrawal of their personal properties, and medical neglect. They are also denied family visits, all of this with no validity or proof of the reasons for their detainment. They can also take the administrative detainee farther away from his or her home, like what happened to the administrative captive, Hanaa Shalabi: they banished her from the West Bank to Gaza, away from her family for 3 years.
The administrative detainees also face psychological torture, as, after the detention time, the occupation put them under house arrest in a specific place, and they can be detained again after their house arrest. The administrative detainees express their refusal for the detention by “hunger strikes”, and their strikes are a form of resistance that pressures the occupation and forces it to release them. The occupation is the only one in the world that uses this form of detention, even though it has promised many times that it will give up the system of administrative detention, especially after the agreement after the strike that the captives entered in 2012, but nothing changed until today.
