Prisoners of occupation
Dareen Tatour has spent several years in prison, or under house arrest, since October 2015. The Palestinian poet, who is a citizen of Israel, was arrested for posts she made on social media, including a poem titled ‘Qawem ya sha’abi, qawemhum’ (‘Resist, my people, resist them’). She was convicted of incitement to violence and support for terrorist organizations in 2018 and released from prison later that year.1
Now living in Sweden, Tatour’s heart aches for others still stuck behind bars. ‘They [the Israeli authorities] deliberately cut us [Palestinian prisoners] off from our families and the outside world,’ she says.
Human rights groups have documented Israel’s arbitrary detention of Palestinians, as well as torture and violence towards prisoners carried out with impunity. Tatour describes forced nudity, abusive interrogations, unhygienic conditions and attempted rape. The brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners has continued for decades, enabled by international appeasement of Israel’s settler colonialism.
