The Commission of Detainees Affairs in the Gaza Strip announced that it has monitored the arrest of 76 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip during the year 2020, including an elderly woman, noting that these arrests took place in all months of the year, the highest of which was September, which recorded 15 arrests.

The head of the commission’s management committee in the Gaza Strip, Hassan Quneita, indicated that the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) forced many Palestinians who moved through the Beit Hanoun / Erez checkpoint, in the northern Gaza Strip, to wait for countless hours, sometimes detaining them for interrogation or attempted blackmail.

Quneita considered these arrests a part of the Israeli Occupation’s policy, which does not require solid grounds in its arrests. No Palestinian is immune to this.

In turn, the head of the Studies and Documentation Unit and a member of the commission in the Gaza Strip, Abdel Nasser Farwaneh, confirmed that 10 citizens, who were arrested during the year 2020, were arrested at the Beit Hanoun / Erez checkpoint while traveling to and from the Strip.

Among them were five merchants, while the others were medical patients, travelers, and businessmen, in addition to another citizen who was arrested via the Karama crossing while returning from a medical trip in Jordan.

Farwaneh added that the arrests from the Gaza Strip during the past year also included 56 citizens who were arrested after crossing the eastern and northern borders of the Gaza Strip, in addition to nine other citizens working in the fishing sector who were arrested at sea.

The commission stated that about 250 prisoners from the Gaza Strip are in occupier prisons, including 27 prisoners serving life sentences. Diaa Al-Agha, who has been detained since October 1992, is considered the oldest of the Gaza Strip prisoners.