Bulletin N°63 2026 Key points to be reviewed on the occasion of Palestinian Prisoners' Day
Every year on April 17, Palestinian Prisoners' Day, a tragedy resurfaces with all its gravity, supported by figures that bear witness to it. At the beginning of the month, more than 9,600 Palestinian prisoners were languishing in Israeli prisons, including 86 women and 350 children, not counting the thousands of administrative detainees and the hundreds of people classified as "illegal fighters."
This reality has resulted in heavy human losses. Since 1967, approximately 326 prisoners have died, including 89 victims of massacres, according to their identities. Furthermore, many detainees in Gaza remain enforced disappearances, in an atmosphere of opacity and lack of accountability.
The various testimonies reveal similar cruelty, and the details paint a common picture: that of a brutal detention system that goes far beyond the confines of a traditional prison. In this context, testimonies continue to be given by released prisoners, revealing systematic patterns of torture and violations that extend from the moment of arrest through the various stages of detention.
For Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, detention is not simply an arrest, but a reality that extends far beyond the prison walls. It transforms into a system of systematic oppression within cramped, dark cells, cut off from the world. There, methods of physical and psychological torture intertwine, and interrogation rooms become places of intense pressure. Prisoners are deprived of sleep for long hours, exhausted physically and mentally, and subjected to humiliating and painful conditions with the constant aim of breaking their will and extracting confessions at any cost.
The question of Palestinian prisoners is not a mere passing political issue, nor a subject for negotiation that can be postponed. It is an open wound in the Palestinian conscience, an indelible scar on the collective memory. It is the daily testimony of a suffering that transcends physical limits, strikes at the soul and dignity, extends to the realities of families living with forced absence, and to the memory of a homeland being reshaped behind bars.
The Zionists continue to kill in Gaza
Despite the officially agreed “ceasefire” between Israel and the Palestinian Resistance, which came into effect last October and slowed two years of genocidal war waged by the Zionist colonial state against Gaza, the colonial army continues to strike the territory daily, killing more than 765 Palestinians since the truce was concluded. Just last week, these killings were almost daily occurrences.
On Tuesday, April 14, the Zionist occupation army opened fire on a police vehicle on Nafaq Street in Gaza, killing at least four people, including a three-year-old child. The following night, the Al-Shati refugee camp was also targeted by a Zionist bombing, killing five Palestinians.
On Thursday, April 16, two brothers were killed in an Israeli drone strike targeting the vicinity of the Abu Tammam school in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. Another Palestinian succumbed to injuries sustained in an earlier Israeli strike. That evening, Israeli forces shot and killed a nine-year-old boy in the Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza. He was killed instantly before being taken to Al Shifa Hospital; his name was Saleh Badawi. On Friday, April 17, Israeli soldiers opened machine-gun fire on tents sheltering displaced people in the Tal al-Dhahab area of Beit Lahia, killing one civilian and wounding several others. That same day, they bombed a desalination plant in the Shujaeyya neighborhood, killing at least two Palestinians. Another bomb, targeting the same area, killed two more Palestinians, who were driving a vehicle carrying water for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
On Sunday, April 19, a young man was murdered by Israeli army bullets in the Halawwa refugee camp in Jabalia. Later that evening, a Palestinian child was killed by Israeli occupation forces east of the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, and another Palestinian was killed by an Israeli drone on Salah al-Din Street, northeast of the Al-Nuseirat refugee camp.
On Monday, April 20, a man was killed in a Zionist bombing in the Bureij camp, located in the center of the enclave, while another bomb killed one person and injured several others in Gaza City.
On Tuesday, April 21, a child died from injuries inflicted by gunfire from the occupying army, sustained a few days earlier in the Jabalia camp.
On Wednesday, April 22, a bombing followed by heavy gunfire killed three Palestinians in the al-Amal neighborhood, west of Khan Younis. One of them had just gotten married.
The annexation of the West Bank continues, and the murders along with it.
The Zionist colonial entity has re-established a settlement in the Palestinian village of Sanur, twenty years after its dismantling as part of the Zionist withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four other settlements in the northern occupied West Bank. The inauguration ceremony took place on Sunday, April 19, in the presence of Defense Minister Israel Katz, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and the chairman of the North West Bank Settlement Council, Yossi Dagan, along with several settler leaders and Zionist officials. During the ceremony, the occupation army imposed strict security measures throughout the town, including the closure of secondary roads and increased movement restrictions for Palestinians from neighboring villages.
Addressing settlers attending the ceremony, Smotrich declared that the inauguration marked a " national holiday " and a " historical correction " of the " culpable expulsion " from the occupied territory, referring to the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. The Zionist government also decided to rebuild the three other settlements dismantled in 2005 in the West Bank. " We are putting an end to the shame of the expulsion, we are burying the idea of a Palestinian state, and we are returning to the settlement of Sa-Nur. This is a day of celebration for the settler movement and a national holiday for the State of Israel ," said Smotrich, himself a resident of a settlement deemed illegal under pseudo-international law.
This ceremony underlines the brutal acceleration of colonization, and the will of the Zionist colonizers to strengthen their presence in the "C" zones by reactivating previously evacuated outposts, with the aim of imposing new realities on the ground.
Since the beginning of its aggression against Iran, the government of the genocidal colonial entity has approved a record number of settlements in the occupied West Bank, with 34 new settlements added to the 68 already approved since 2022, as well as some 200 unauthorized outposts established during the same period. This creeping annexation of the occupied West Bank is illustrated, in the lives of Palestinians, by daily harassment from the armed forces, the judiciary, and Zionist settlers.
In the Ramallah area, four Palestinians were killed on Wednesday, April 22nd alone.
The Hebron Governorate has been a particular target of the colonial army's deadly operations. On the evening of Wednesday, April 14, armed settlers blocked Route 35, leading to the northern entrance of Hebron, setting fire to piles of tires to prevent civilian vehicles from passing, before smashing the windows of several Palestinian vehicles. On Friday, April 17, settlers set fire to two Palestinian vehicles in the town of Majd al-Baa, west of Yatta, south of Hebron. Furthermore, Zionist colonial soldiers blew open the doors of several shops in Yatta, entered them, and looted them, causing significant damage.
On the morning of April 18, a young Palestinian man was killed by Israeli occupation forces in Khirbet Salama, west of Dura, southwest of Hebron. He was 25 years old. His body was not returned to his family. Later that same day, settlers attacked residents of the Wadi Khneis area, west of the city, as they worked in their fields, beating and injuring them. An elderly Palestinian woman was wounded by the settlers, and occupation forces arrested three of her sons. That evening, a young Palestinian man was wounded by Israeli gunfire near the Meitar checkpoint, south of Hebron, in the southern West Bank. Four other Palestinians were injured after being sprayed with pepper spray by colonial army soldiers in the Wadi Al-Sharq area of Sa'ir town, northeast of Hebron.
On Sunday, April 19, two Palestinian teenagers from Yatta, south of Hebron, were wounded by gunfire from occupation forces in the Ras al-Joura area, near the northern entrance to Hebron. On Monday, April 20, the Zionist army conducted a series of raids in the city of Hebron and the towns of Yatta and Beit Ummar, arresting more than 50 Palestinians. The occupation forces also erected several military checkpoints at the entrances to Hebron and the surrounding towns, villages, and refugee camps, and closed several main and secondary roads using metal barriers, concrete blocks, and earth mounds.
Similar patterns of coordinated violence by settlers and the occupying armed forces have been observed throughout the occupied West Bank, and particularly in the past week in the provinces of occupied Nablus, Tulkarm and East Jerusalem.
In France, the proponents of the dominant ideology are doing their work
On Sunday evening, April 19, France 5 broadcast a three-part documentary on the history of Palestine from 1840 to 2025, focusing on the history of Galilee. The official propaganda of the "public service" presents this work, about " the most contested territory in contemporary history, " as follows: "For the first time, a series offers a perspective from the point of view of the Palestinian territory, thus providing the keys to understanding its historical, geographical, and political situation based on a considerable amount of previously unseen archival material, interviews with international historians, and individuals deeply rooted in the reality of the Palestinian territory. Supervised by a diverse scientific advisory board, the series targets a broad audience and will also appeal to young adults. It has a strong educational purpose: to offer a clear narrative so that the history of Palestine ceases to be the blind spot in the history of the Middle East."
The first two parts clearly demonstrate, without necessarily naming or criticizing it, the Zionist colonial operation (even though in Part 1, the role of the Histadrut is overlooked and that of the Haganah downplayed). But for the third part, we could say: "You can't change human nature!" And we know the true nature of the propagandists of the dominant ideology, namely the leaders and journalists of France TV.
Palestinian activist Muzna Shihabi offered a critique of this third part, covering the period from 1988 to 2025. Here are some excerpts. She begins: “ We thought they were finally beginning to read the names written on the stones of Galilee. We thought that France, this country that loves to talk so much about the Enlightenment, was finally accepting to look at the shadow cast by Zionism on the land of Galilee. The first two parts filmed our ruins and named our stones correctly. But the third part has arrived: the part of renunciation. ”
She continues: “ In a final cut intended to be ‘balanced,’ the director decrees that the blood of the wolf and that of the lamb are the same color. This is the triumph of the monotonous voice: the one that prefers neutrality to truth. They wanted to show ‘the extremes on both sides’: this formula is not pedagogy, it is a summary execution of thought. Can one imagine concluding the story of the Second World War by explaining that the anger of the survivors is the symmetrical mirror image of the madness of the exterminator? ”
Then she mentions the choice to invite "left-wing" Zionists onto the show and to exclude people like the UJFP or Tsedek: "We preferred to give the microphone to the 'technocrats of dispossession' to explain the 'complexity', and we excluded the Righteous. These Jewish voices that carry the rejection of Zionism as a sacred wound are considered too 'hard' for the comfort of television studios. "
She concludes: “ Zionism is not an ‘opinion’ to be balanced. It is a structure: a wall, an organized theft of land, water, space, and time. To claim otherwise is to transform a colonial crime into a mere neighborhood dispute. This ‘third part’ is anesthetizing the viewer. They are shown the crime in parts 1 and 2, then told in part 3 that the victim is somewhat guilty of remaining under the blade. It’s a strategy of exhaustion: ‘Your resistance is tiring us out. ’”
The last formula hits the nail on the head. All those tasked with developing propaganda for Western imperialism, as well as a significant portion of those who follow and believe them, share this idea of being fed up with hearing about, or being forced to talk about, Palestine, which they themselves do so little of. So, they try to defuse the situation, to promote a supposedly balanced vision, which allows itself criticism of the current government of the Zionist colonial entity, but equates a colonizing state with a colonized people. There are no extremists in Palestine, there are Zionist colonial oppressors, whose internal disagreements no longer mask their total agreement on replacement colonization and the Resistance, armed or not, of a people building its own national liberation. This documentary is ultimately just another piece of baggage in the large bag deployed by those vehicles of the dominant ideology who understood that it was necessary to abandon Netanyahu in order to better save the colonial entity and its Zionist ideology.
Yadan Law: no more victory than butter on a spit
It's quite impressive to see how easily opponents of the vile Yadan law fall for every trick in the book. The latest example: cries of triumph because the Macronist group in Parliament, to which the French Likud MP belongs, withdrew the nefarious proposal from the National Assembly's agenda. Let's give a bonus to the LFI parliamentarians who exult and present being duped as a great victory. Mélenchon, at a rally, can declare his victory: " We have defeated and removed the Yadan law from the National Assembly's agenda ." And Mathilde Panot adds: " This is a total victory for citizen mobilization, for parliamentary resistance. [...] We are forcing them to bury the Yadan law. "
The proposed law, it should be remembered, far from prohibiting all criticism of Netanyahu's government, targeted those who advocate for the national liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea, and for the dismantling of the Zionist colonial state. For Zionists and their French supporters, such a demand must be labeled an antisemitic crime, especially since these same individuals call for the creation of a "Greater Israel" in the name of a religious text. This text, in turn, serves as their justification for spending their time massacring their neighbors.
The prospect of the vote on the Zionist bill provoked a welcome reaction, and some timely protests. Along with, of course, and as usual, a great deal of socialist hypocrisy and cowardice. There was a risk that the National Assembly would reject the nefarious law, and even if it wasn't a foregone conclusion, it represented a significant political risk for those who support the Zionist colonial entity. The state repression underway since October 2023 might well have been somewhat slowed.
The Prime Minister therefore devised a small operation to get his way. We were thus faced with a " proposed law ," that is to say, a parliamentary initiative. The best way to manage the risk of rejection was to transform it into a " bill ," meaning that the initiative would no longer come from Parliament itself but from the government, which could then use the significant prerogatives of the 1958 Constitution to manipulate the debate, even resorting to the " blocked vote " provided for in Article 49-3. Caroline Yadan's text was therefore withdrawn from the agenda, and the government announced that Parliament would soon be presented with a government bill!
The cries of victory, particularly within the ranks of La France Insoumise (LFI), overlook the fact that Prime Minister Lecornu had publicly pledged, during the CRIF dinner, to pass the highly controversial bill. They also obscure the fact that the withdrawal of Yadan's bill was accompanied by the announcement of the draft legislation for June, at the beginning of summer and during the World Cup, a tactic to carry out the deception while taking advantage of the media frenzy. And who was entrusted with this dirty work? Aurore Bergé, one of the most zealous supporters of the Zionist colonial cause. And it didn't take long. The very next day, the minister " in charge of combating discrimination " officially announced that she was taking charge of the deception. She further compounded this by including in the bill Macron's desire for a new tool for censorship and repression of his political opponents.
What is this all about? It's about establishing a system of automatic, permanent ineligibility for anyone convicted of antisemitism, racism, and, incidentally, advocating terrorism. Thus, the French justice system, which has long demonstrated its eagerness to repress those who support the Palestinian people and oppose Zionism, will have the means to sideline them. Normally, press offenses do not allow a judge to impose an additional penalty of ineligibility. But there are so many offenses included in the general penal code that it would be very simple. However, what Aurore Bergé announced is even worse. Even if the judge does not impose this additional penalty, the mere fact that the conviction involved racism, antisemitism, or advocating terrorism will result in automatic ineligibility.
For proponents of the rule of law, this is a major obstacle, since this provision is unconstitutional, as automatic penalties are normally prohibited. The principle is that any criminal sanction, and ineligibility for public office is one such sanction, cannot be imposed solely by a judge.
So, instead of a victory, we are reaping a possible worsening of the crackdown on voices expressing solidarity with the national liberation of Palestine. Not only is the government retreating only to regroup, but this new leap is even more dangerous than the last. The mobilization, exemplified by the rallies and the online petition signatures, must continue in order to put pressure on the Assembly and the government if we are to prevent the Yadan Law from being reinstated.
In conclusion
This relentless pursuit by our leaders to legislate against support for the national liberation of Palestine, even though the justice system is already doing an ample job of repression, demonstrates that, while weaker than elsewhere, the movement of solidarity with the national liberation of Palestine is very much present and considerably disrupts the established order. The Palestinian cause faces silence, disinformation, censorship, repression, and attempts at manipulation everywhere, but especially in France. But information, like the truth about the Zionist entity, is undeniable: despite threats, censorship, and pressure, the world knows. The struggle waged by Zionist leaders, our own imperialist leaders, and the subservient media to prevent the colonial situation, the true face of the Zionist colonial state, and its current state of decay due to Iranian missiles is utterly futile. The tireless pursuit of national liberation is the only way to advance our understanding of the colonial question and overcome all obstacles. Everywhere, against the falsification serving Western imperialism, the criminalization of anti-colonialism, in favor of defending the truth and the national liberation of Palestine, and for a clear discourse on colonialism, one will find the militants of the Revolutionary Communist Party. As Elsa Triolet said, barricades have only two sides: the national liberation of Palestine or submission, in one way or another, to the colonial order.
For the Revolutionary Communist Party, the struggle of the Palestinian Resistance, which directly confronts the vanguard of Western imperialism, is vital for the proletariat of the entire planet; the Palestinians are a people who are actors in their own history, fighting against Zionism, imperialism and reaction, for their national liberation, a long struggle whose centrality and strategic nature for our own emancipation we must recognize.
The Zionist colonial state will fall, that is the direction of history; and Palestine will be free from the sea to the Jordan!