Israel denies Palestine inmates sufficient health care: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Paul Larudee, a member of the Free Palestine Movement, about a former Palestinian prisoner, who reportedly died of the medical complications he suffered in Israeli jail.

Here is a rough transcription of the interview:

Press TV: This certainly is quite a disturbing case, isn’t it? We do not even know what this late prisoner had even been injected with.

Larudee: Yes, it is hard to know when you have no control over the situation and you are not being told by the people who do have control over it what has been happening, but it certainly is clear from plenty of cases and the experience of Palestinians in Israeli prisons that their treatment is severely deficient and that it is not as if they really care very much about Palestinian lives. That’s actually part of their general policy. They make things as miserable as possible for health not just for prisoners but for all Palestinians. They make it difficult to maintain decent health among Palestinians.

Press TV: And so why aren’t we hearing more of an outcry from international medical associations for example because certainly prisoners’ rights are something that is understood worldwide?

Larudee: There is an outcry from medical associations. The problem is that the outcry never gets beyond the door of where the crime takes place. I know many doctors that have experienced firsthand what is happening to Palestinians, they have tried to help out there and they have reported what is going on there but the places to which they report these things do not broadcast it, they do not spread it farther, and this is part of the control of Israel, the Zionist movement, their allied governments that protect them like the United States does in for example the United Nations and agencies all over the place. This information is suppressed in effect, it is not reported.   

Press TV: And so then what weapons or ammunition do the Palestinians have in their arsenal? Do you think things like hunger strikes which we know are taking place at this point as we are speaking on the part of many prisoners in Israeli jails, do you think that is a successful form of protest?

Larudee: The Israelis have always used the tactic of escalating the pressure and the pain upon the Palestinians in increments. You do not see a massacre of hundreds or thousands of Palestinians all at one time. What you have is pressure for Palestinians to die in numbers of one and two and maybe occasionally six or seven or something like this.

This is what they are doing. They are doing it in such a way that for news media there is nothing unusual about this. We have a situation where the treatment of Palestinians, the slow, gradual ethnic cleansing, genocide of Palestinians is taking place in such a way that we cannot expect the mainstream media to report them, even if they wanted to, they won’t report it on a daily basis, it is happening everyday and they do not want it in the news every day.

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www.presstv.co.uk