The Palestinian Detainee Club stated that 65 high school students—according to data from the Ministry of Education—are currently held in Zionist enemy prisons, having been deprived this year of their right to take their high school exams, matching the plight of hundreds of detained students from various educational levels.
Since the beginning of the genocide, these students have faced harsh conditions involving torture, abuse, and mistreatment, alongside being deprived of the warmth of their families and one of their most fundamental rights: the right to education. The Detainee Club added, in a statement issued this Saturday, that following the genocide campaign, the enemy entity's authorities escalated arrest campaigns targeting students across all educational stages.
The statement explained that this escalation came within the context of radical and dangerous shifts affecting the reality of prisoners and their detention conditions, including child prisoners. Zionist enemy authorities have targeted all the achievements that prisoners secured over long decades of struggle, foremost among which was the right to education.
The Club pointed out that for many years, the prisoners' right to education constituted one of the most prominent rights they fought to establish, despite repeated attempts by the prison administration to deprive them of it. Despite those policies, prisoners had managed to entrench and preserve this right. However, with the onset of the genocide crime, the prison system stripped them of all their rights and transformed the prisons into open arenas for around-the-clock torture and abuse.
The Palestinian Detainee Club emphasized that the prison system currently practices an integrated policy based on systematic torture, humiliation, and abuse aimed at breaking the prisoner both psychologically and physically—practices that directly impact child prisoners and detained students.
The Detainee Club called on international human rights organizations, United Nations bodies concerned with human rights and child rights, and the right to education to assume their responsibilities regarding the escalating crimes faced by detained Palestinian students. It urged them to act urgently to pressure the Zionist enemy entity's authorities to halt the policy of targeting students and depriving them of their right to education, to guarantee protection for child and student prisoners, and to end the systematic torture policies that blatantly violate the rules of international humanitarian law, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
