Israeli Prisons and Detention Centers: Medical and Pharmaceutical Research Laboratories

Palestinian Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a lecturer in law at the Hebrew University, revealed during her lecture at Columbia University in New York last month (February 2019) that the Israeli occupation authorities issued permits for major drug companies to conduct clinical trials and tests on Palestinian and Arab prisoners. According to what she stated in her lecture, and earlier in a lecture in Amsterdam in January, Shalhoub-Kevorkian was able to collect data confirming this while she was carrying out a research project at the Hebrew University. What was from the Hebrew University except that it issued a statement declaring that what was brought by Professor Chalhoub does not represent the university and does not adopt any of it.

Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian's statement is not the first of its kind in this context. In the 1990s, the Minister of Science in the enemy's country revealed that more than a thousand permits were issued to pharmaceutical companies to carry out tests for drugs undergoing testing on "prisoners". This was followed by a speech published by the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper in July 1997 to the then Speaker of the Knesset, Dalia Itzik, praising the move, noting that the equivalent of 5,000 tests were conducted until the date of its declaration.

According to the previous year, the Palestinian prisoner and prisoner expert, Abdel Nasser Farwana, stated that the Knesset approved an increase in the allocations of the Israeli Ministry of Health to experimental medicine, and that this is mainly practiced in prisons and detention centers. Farwana documented his statement in numbers, as three thousand Palestinian prisoners, or about 45% of the total number of prisoners in the Nafha, Raymond and Negev detention camps, are subjected to collective drug experiments, in addition to the exposure of the Negev detainees in particular to toxins due to their presence near the Dimona reactor. Farawneh also stated that these practices are carried out with a legal cover from the Israeli Ministry of Health that supervises, follows up and prepares scientific studies on the extent of detainees' response to the drugs, injections and chemicals they are exposed to. During periodic medical examinations to investigate the possible effects of any drug and clinical trials that have been applied to them.

With reference to the international human rights law approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations, Article 13 of it stipulates that no prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation, medical or scientific experiments or otherwise.

On the other hand, it is a requirement globally, to participate in any clinical or pharmacological study, that the volunteer enjoy the free will, and the complete freedom to leave the study at any moment and that his written consent to join the study is null and void. The volunteer is given sufficient time to think and make decisions based on detailed information related to the study that is provided to him in advance by a specialist, with adequate explanation of all the study aspects and possible risks. It is also required for any study to obtain, in addition to scientific and medical approval, the approval of committees specialized in the protection of the rights of individuals after verification that the scale is in favor of the benefits compared to the assumed or potential damages, with absolute prevention of any study that could cause permanent injury or damage for volunteers.

Historically, Epocrat, the father of medicine, has been rejected since 400 BC. Conducting experiments on humans, as it was common at that time to conduct a live autopsy on "slaves" for scientific purposes. Modern history has witnessed a series of documented violations, which spread in Newgate prison in the United States of America in 1721 barter by prisoners to reduce the length of their sentences for entering into experiments involving vaccination with pathogens. These violations were repeated many times in the nineteenth century, mainly in America, in addition to incidents recorded in Britain in 1875, and in Austria in 1899, and they were children. As for the most famous violations in this context, they were associated with Nazism, as they conducted tests on prisoners and victims, especially those with intellectual disabilities, because they were considered to be inferior to healthy citizens. It also included conducting experiments of drugs they are developing on Jews, the most famous of which was done by the Nazi doctor Joseph Mingle at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and others in Dachau in the 1940s, and their practices and trials were revealed in the well-known series of well-known trials In the name of “Nuremberg Trials” (relative to the German city), which took place from 1946 to 1947. Contemporary history has been replete with incidents of similar violations, as the American detention centers in Iraq have been the scene of tests for American pharmaceutical companies that were being conducted on the detainees.

The cost of conducting experiments in developing countries is several times lower than that in developed countries. According to an article by French journalist Philippe Chibou entitled "Africa is a field of experiments" published by the French newspaper "Le Monde", the cost of conducting experiments in Africa is five times less than its cost in Europe or America, in addition to the fact that developing countries are incubators for epidemics and diseases that are not present in developed countries, which makes them living laboratories to conduct a wide range of tests and experiments.

Returning to the occupied land, the crimes of the Israeli occupation authorities against the Palestinians are not limited to physical and psychological torture, but rather overtake them to test weapons on the Palestinians and try drugs on the prisoners from them, as they see in the Palestinian gatherings fertile soil for their tests. In 2009, the Sawasiya Center for Human Rights issued a report saying that a number of Palestinian prisoners had lost their sight due to medical tests conducted in Israeli prisons. The liberated prisoner, Muhammad Al-Taj, also stated that he had received anonymous drugs and makeup during captivity after he suffered damage to the lungs and heart muscle, while the freed prisoner Ziyad Shuaibat stated that he had received an unknown treatment for "disc pain" in his back during his captivity, and the next day the nurse whispered to him in a way Indirect side effects of this drug. After the bronchioles emerged from the families, tumors began to appear throughout his body, amid a medical inability to provide him with treatment. On the other hand, it was recorded that Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Aziz Dweik, who suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure, received an expired drug during one of his detention periods. According to Palestinian official TV, on October 6, 2011, the prisoners received injections that permanently caused their hair and faces to fall out, while others were infertile and others lost their health. This is only the tip of the iceberg of the occupation authorities' policy towards Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, which is based on the "slow death" system from the first moment of their families until their release, and perhaps the stage of conducting clinical and pharmacological tests on these prisoners is the most dangerous in this slow death system.

According to the statement of the Chairman of the Prisoners' Affairs Authority in the Palestine Liberation Organization, member of the Palestinian Parliament, Issa Karaki, on March 31, 2015, after one of his visits to the prisoners, the patients among them are victims of severe crimes committed against them in prisons. Karaki followed this statement with another on April 12, 2015, in which he announced that Israel was carrying out medical experiments with the prisoners, and that it was estimated that he was poisoning them as well. This statement was followed by a statement issued on Palestinian official television the next day stating that Israeli prisons have become a focus for the cultivation of epidemics and diseases, including AIDS, in the bodies of Palestinian prisoners and spread among them.

In the same year, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, accused the Israeli security forces of stealing members of the bodies of Palestinians who had died at the hands of the Israeli forces, and that legal examinations documented by reports showed the disappearance of the cornea of ​​Al-Ain and other members. The occupation authority’s ambassador to the United Nations denied these accusations, placing them in the context of anti-Semitism, followed by a letter to the then United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, calling on him to condemn these accusations.

On the international level, Robert Vanderbijen, the cultural advisor for the Belgian Trade Union (ACOD) and a researcher at the University of Ghent in August 2018, warned that the people of the Gaza Strip are not only starved to death or poisoned, but it goes beyond kidnapping Children from them and then killed and removed their organs for sale or experiments. This was not the first statement by Vanderbijkn in this regard, as it was preceded by another statement in 2009 in the Swedish newspaper “Aftonbladet,” which was considered a widely anti-Semitic statement, which the occupation government described as one of the new methods of tarnishing the entity’s reputation. As for Clas Smelik, Founder of Vanderbijn and a former professor in the field of Hebrew and Jewish studies at the University of Ghent, he told the Belgian-Jewish “Joods Actueel” that the “claims” of Vanderbijn were unproven or supported by evidence, and that they had returned to the old anti-Semitic propaganda front that accuses Israel By poisoning wells and killing children to use their blood to perform religious rituals. After "De Wereld Morgen" published an article by Professor Vanderbijn in this regard, he returned to follow it by what he called "correction" of the previous article, requesting that no link should be made between the kidnapping and killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli occupation army and the removal of organs for later planting.

The list of violations, documented and undocumented, is long, and the strategies of the international community in covering up these violations vary since the announcement of the establishment of the Israeli entity and before that. Ascending becomes every minor violation with him and is not worth mentioning if compared relatively to the last one. Perhaps it was written for us forever and ever that we bear the consequences of "Nazi practices" against the Jews, accompanied by a farce that attributes every arrow aimed at Zionism to a historical anti-Semitism. Perhaps the first distress that this policy began to receive is the hint that anti-Zionism in France is a crime that falls under the anti-Semitism clause. Perhaps we have also written that we remain in the position of silent spectators, who are nailed to the "Al-Farajah Box" and the puppet theater that is printed with the occupation, whose number of blood that has risen to the stage has exceeded by far the number of technicians and directors who run the show behind the scenes. After all this, I wonder if public opinion is still convinced of the "angelic" of Israel and its "humanity" after the spread of the news of its development of a "magic" and effective treatment to eliminate all types of cancer in record time, or is it also the curse of science fiction films that we have grown until we believe it In our subconscious.