Ma’an reported that Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad abducted a Palestinian man in Egypt where he was receiving medical treatment, a source close to the family told Ma’an on Sunday, June 23.

The source said Wael Abu Reida, 27, from the Khan Younis refugee camp, was taken to an Israeli detention center following the abduction.

The family received several phone calls saying Abu Reida had been taken by Mossad and was being held in Israel, the source said.

Abu Reida was in Egypt with his wife for medical treatment and was taken from Sinai, the source added.

The family have notified the International Committee for the Red Cross to locate Abu Reida to verify his locations.

The Palestinian Information Centre reported that the family of a Palestinian prisoner appealed to international human rights organizations to shoulder their responsibilities and take serious action to save captive Adel Shanyour, aged 64, who may lose his eyesight at any moment.

Shanyour family, from the town of Dhahiriya in the southern West Bank district of al-Khalil, called on Doctors Without Borders, the WHO and other human rights bodies concerned with Palestinian prisoners affairs to immediately intervene and exert pressure on the occupation to compel it to stop the deliberate policy of medical neglect against prisoners in its jails.

Captive Shanyour has lost sight in his right eye in 2009 in the Israeli jails, and now he started to have problems in his other eye and needs a surgery, while the prison administration continues to refuse to offer him the necessary treatment.

The occupation arrested the elderly man on November 21, last year, and directly moved him to the administrative detention. Shanyour had earlier served 12 years in the Israeli jails.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Center reported that detainee Bahaa Hisham Sorour, from al-Khalil, has started five days ago an open hunger strike, in protest against his administrative detention.

Sorour, held in Ashkelon jail, is a liberated prisoner who spent five years in Israeli administrative detention. He was re-arrested on the 10th of this month.

The Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut recently released a new book in Arabic on Palestinian detainees and the first Israeli prisons, 1948-1949, by professor Mustafa Kabha and writer Wadih Awawdeh. The book deals with the documentation and analysis of the detention camps created by Zionist and then Israeli forces who captured Palestinians and Arabs during the Nakba and the occupation of Palestinian towns and villages in 1948.

The book includes original research as well as archival materials from the Israeli archives and the Red Cross archives, books and diaries by some of those who were in prison, and dozens of oral histories and interviews with detainees who were still alive during the research.

The book examines the labour camps created by Israeli authorities for the detainees as a starting point and a landmark in the relationship between Palestinians in ’48 and the institutions of the state since this critical phase.

The book documents the arrests of thousands of Palestinians, including those who participated in military resistance and those who did not, as well as the motivation of the incoming Zionist state to establish a structure of prisons, attempt to suppress Palestinian resistance, and attempt to break the will of the Palestinians that remained on the land after mass displacement and ethnic cleansing, through forced labour. The prisoners’ testimonies carry a heavy burden of pain and psychological wounds from their experiences; the testimonies recall beatings, abuse, hunger and deprivation. Despite the importance of the issue, these testimonies have not been prominent in Palestinian narratives and have been largely ignored by Israeli historians, old and “new.” The book aims to fill a gap in this awareness and document Palestinian oral testimony as the primary source in the writing of Palestinian history.