“The Palestinian prisoner, Hussein Masalma, is suffering from a critical health condition in the Israeli Soroka Medical Center after he was diagnosed with leukemia,” the Palestinian Prisoner Club said.

“According to Masalma companions, the Israeli prisons administration procrastinated taking him to the hospital over the past months and he suffered severe stomach and abdominal pain and after his health condition worsened, he was transferred to the Israeli Soroka hospital,” The club added on Tuesday in a press release.

Yesterday, Israel allowed his parents to visit him in the hospital, separately, for only 7 minutes for both of them under special procedures after nearly two years of being deprived from visiting him.

The prisoner Msallama is a new victim of a set of policies that target the lives of the prisoners through systematic methods of abuse that fall under the policy of slow killing, including deliberate medical negligence and procrastination in diagnosing disease and providing treatment.

Since the beginning of this year, the number of sick prisoners has increased compared to previous years, including Hussein Masalmeh from Bethlehem, two prisoners from Hebron, and one prisoner from Ramallah.

Despite the increase in disease cases in the Israeli prisons with the continuing spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, which exacerbated the conditions of detention for prisoners and the escalation of risks to their lives, the Israeli prison administration has systematically exploited the epidemic to turn it into a tool of suppression and abuse against them, in addition to its continued detention for more Palestinians and put them in detention and investigation centers that do not meet the minimum conditions for human life.

The Palestinian Prisoner Club called on the international human rights institutions, led by the World Health Organization, for urgent and serious intervention to release the sick prisoners in the Israeli prisons and to send a neutral medical committee, as one of the current basic demands with the spread of tCOVID-19 among them.

It is noteworthy that 700 prisoners are ill in the Israeli prisons, about 300 of them suffer from chronic diseases and in need of urgent health treatment and at least 11 prisoners of them suffer from cancer to varying degrees.