Palestinian leader serves 23 years in Israeli prisons

Marwan Barghouti, one of the most popular Palestinian leaders in Gaza and the West Bank, completed today 23 years imprisoned in Israeli prisons.

The Palestinian Prisoners Club noted in a statement that the anniversary comes as Israeli aggression against the occupied territories, especially in the Gaza Strip, increases.

“Since the beginning of the war of extermination, prisoners and leaders of the prisoners’ movement, including Barghouti, have been subjected to unprecedented acts of abuse, isolation, theft, torture and attacks,” the body denounced.

Barghouti, along with his comrades, is subjected to repeated transfers and, according to the latest information, is now being held in solitary confinement in Ramon prison, it warned.

The Club said that during his repeated transfers and solitary confinement, he was subject to repeated attacks by Israeli repressive units.

Born in 1959 in the West Bank town of Kobar, the member of the Central Committee of the governmental Fatah movement was arrested in 1976, 1978 and 1983, the year he entered Birzeit University, where he was elected president of the student council for three consecutive years. On April 15, 2002, after a long persecution and assassination attempts during the Second Intifada (uprising, in Arabic), Israeli security forces arrested him in the Al-Irsal neighborhood of this city, and two years later he was sentenced to five life sentences and forty years in prison.