As part of the ongoing assault on the Palestinian prisoners’ movement leadership, one of the prominent leaders of the movement, Mohammed Arman, is being subjected to ongoing physical and psychological torture, starvation and medical neglect in solitary confinement in Megiddo prison. At least 66 identified Palestinian prisoners have been martyred in Zionist occupation prisons amid the ongoing Zionist-imperialist genocide in Gaza. Palestinian prisoners with high sentences who are priorities in a prisoner exchange with the resistance, like Arman, face particularly cruel and inhuman conditions as part of the “slow assassination” policy, part and parcel of the ongoing Zionist-imperialist assassination regime targeting the Palestinian national leadership and all resistance forces.
Mohammed Arman has been imprisoned since 18 August 2002, sentenced to 36 life sentences for his role in the Palestinian resistance during Al-Aqsa Intifada in the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades of the Hamas movement. Since Al-Aqsa Flood, he was transferred to solitary confinement in Megiddo prison. In his dark solitary cell, he faces repeated incursions and attacks by repressive units, who storm the cell, tie his hands and feet and beat him, accompanied by police dogs.
He has lost tens of kilograms in weight and now weighs around 65 kg, while being provided with very little food insufficient to sustain his life and health. Despite repeated injuries due to beatings and his ongoing health deterioration due to malnutrition, he is being denied medical care or treatment.
A number of leaders of the prisoners’ movement have been targeted, held in isolation, repeatedly beaten, starved and denied medical care, including Abdullah Barghouti, Hassan Salameh, Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh, Ibrahim Hamed, Muammar Shahrour, Abbas al-Sayyed, Marwan Barghouti, Mohammed al-Natsheh, Muhannad Shreim and Ahmad Sa’adat.
In a statement, the Prisoners’ Media Office said:
“In the depths of the dark cells, where light barely reaches, the symbols and leaders of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement in the occupation’s prisons are waging an unequal battle against a systematic machine of death, specifically designed to eliminate the remaining living consciences that embody the memory and will of Palestinian struggle…The leaders of the prisoners’ movement are not merely names topping prisoner lists. They are the nucleus of resistance consciousness and the symbols of this stage, and of Palestinian steadfastness behind bars. They face a vicious assault targeting their very human and revolutionary existence, under the cover of international silence and moral complicity…
These men were never mere numbers in the registers of captivity; they are lanterns that lit the path for an entire generation of strugglers, bearing the responsibility of preserving Palestinian human dignity inside the occupation’s cells…
We, at the Prisoners Media Office, are not merely warning — we are crying out to the world: the leaders are being killed slowly, and we are losing the pillars of patience and steadfastness one after the other.
The Media Office further stated, urging “immediate action”:
“The leader Mohammed Arman is being subjected to a slow assassination attempt in isolation, and today he stands between life and death, fighting hunger and resisting pain, alone in a narrow cell.
As we sound the alarm, we warn that the horrific violations committed against the leaders of the prisoners’ movement will lead to a destiny that may reach their martyrdom at any moment.
We hold the occupation fully and directly responsible for the lives of the imprisoned leaders, and we affirm that the torture and abuse committed against them is a full-fledged war crime that history will mark the disgrace of the silent international community.
We join the call of the Prisoners’ Media Office and urge all supporters of Palestine and the Palestinian cause to speak out actively and take action through demonstrations, mass actions and direct actions to confront the abuse of Palestinian prisoners. The imperialist powers, like the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands, that continue to arm, support and provide cover for the Zionist genocide in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine, are fully implicated in these inhuman actions.
Mohammed Arman
Born on 22 November 1975 in the village of Beitlu, Mohammed Arman is from a family forcibly displaced in the Nakba from the village of al-Burj near occupied Ramla in occupied Palestine ’48. His family now lives in the village of Kharbatha Bani Harith west of Ramallah. He has been imprisoned since 18 August 2002, sentenced to 36 life sentences for his role in the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Like other residents of Kharbatha Bani Harith, he daily passed through a checkpoint outside his village, where he witnessed the routine cruelty, assaults and abuse directed at his fellow Palestinians at the hands of the occupation forces, and was motivated to join the resistance.
He was arrested for the first time in 1994 as a university student, and held in administrative detention for four months; in 1998, he was arrested again and sentenced to 14 months in occupation prisons.
He worked as a technician in the Palestine Telecommunications Company, and escalated his involvement the ranks of the resistance with the emergence of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and soon began working alongside the leaders Ibrahim Hamed and Abdullah Barghouti to plan, execute and carry out resistance operations. They formed the Silwan cell of the al-Qassam Brigades, the resistance cell that the occupation described as “the most dangerous” to its security.
He was subjected to harsh interrogation for over three months after his arrest, and has repeatedly been held in solitary confinement; he was returned to the general prisoners’ population in 2012 in the Al-Karameh hunger strike alongside dozens of other imprisoned leaders.
Mohammed Arman is married and the father of a son, Bilal, and two daughters, Iman and Salsabil; his youngest was only a year old at the time of his arrest. Inside the prisons, he has been heavily involved with the prisoners’ movement, serving on multiple occasions as the head of the leadership council of the Hamas prisoners, or as a member of the leadership body. During his time in isolation, he wrote a book, “A View of the Resistance from Within.”
His father passed away in 2019 and Mohammed was denied the ability to bid him farewell; he was barred from visiting Mohammed for years.
The Palestinian prisoners and their leadership — and the entire Palestinian people — is under Zionist-imperialist genocidal attack. Our entire movement must respond collectively to such aggression by organizing even more loudly, clearly and effectively to shut down the imperialist-Zionist war machine, to support the Palestinian resistance and all forces of resistance in the region, and to ensure that the Palestinian prisoners are not now and will never be isolated from the Palestinian people, the Arab, Islamic and regional liberation causes, and the international movement for justice.
Freedom for all Palestinian prisoners in occupation jails! Victory to the Resistance!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
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