🔴 Palestinian Political Detainee from Jenin Martyred 7 Days After Arrest
17 July 2025

Commission of Detainees' Affairs & Palestinian Prisoner's Society 

Ramallah, occupied Palestine - A 53-year-old Palestinian political detainee, Sameer Mohammad Yousif al-Rifai, has been martyred in the Israeli occupation’s custody, just seven days after his arrest from his home in the village of Rummaneh in Jenin in the northern West Bank, on July 10. 

The Palestinian Commission of Detainees’ Affairs was informed of the development this morning, July 17. Al-Rifai was a husband and a father of five. He was scheduled to have his first Israeli military court session today, at the Salem military court near Nablus. According to medical reports provided by his family, he suffered from heart problems prior to his arrest and required continuous medical follow-up and care. 

Al-Rifai now joins the long list of martyrs of the prisoners’ movement, who have died or were killed as a result of the systematic crimes carried out by the Israeli prison system in an unprecedented manner since the start of the ongoing genocide in Gaza - foremost among them: torture, medical neglect, and starvation.

The Commission and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) hold the Israeli occupation fully responsible for his death. 

They added that with the death of detainee Al-Rifai, the number of identified martyred Palestinian political prisoners since the start of the genocide has now risen to 74 people. This number comes amid the continued crime of enforced disappearance, making this period the bloodiest in the history of the prisoners’ movement. Accordingly, the total number of identified martyrs of the prisoners’ movement since 1967 has now risen to 311 people as of today.

The Commission and PPS stress that the increasing number of prisoner killings and deaths has become an inevitable outcome, growing ever more dangerous as thousands of detainees remain imprisoned in Israeli jails and continuously subjected to systematic crimes, most notably: torture, starvation, various forms of assault, medical neglect, sexual violence, and the deliberate imposition of conditions that lead to the contraction of serious and contagious diseases, especially scabies, in addition to unprecedented policies of deprivation and abuse.

The death of detainee Al-Rifai constitutes a new crime added to the record of the Israeli system of brutality, which employs all forms of violence aimed at killing prisoners—a manifestation and extension of the ongoing genocide.

The Commission and the PPS renew their call on the international human rights system to move forward in taking effective decisions to hold Israeli leaders accountable for the war crimes they continue to commit against the Palestinian people. They also called for the imposition of sanctions on Israel to isolate it internationally, and to restore the credibility and core purpose of the human rights system, by ending its paralyzing failure during the genocide and revoking the exceptional impunity granted to Israel, which has placed it above accountability, justice, and punishment.