There were reportedly no Israeli comments on Zaher Raddad’s death.
Ramallah:
An injured Palestinian prisoner has died in an Israeli hospital, two Palestinian organizations said.
Zaher Raddad, 19, from the town of Saida in Tulkarm in the northern West Bank, died in Israel's Meir Hospital, according to a statement by the Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Authority, part of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Palestinian Prisoners Club.
Raddad was arrested on July 23 after the Israeli army shot him and used him “as a human shield during the military operation by placing him on the front of one of the Israeli military vehicles in the city,” Sunday's statement said.
With Radad's death, the number of prisoners who have died in Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023, has risen to 23, the statement said.
There is no Israeli statement on Raddad's death, the Xinhua news agency reported.
Since October 2023, Israel has been waging a large-scale war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has already claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians. Previously, Hamas had carried out an unprecedented attack on Israeli towns bordering the Strip, killing about 1,200 people.
The statement added that Raddad was held in Meir Hospital in a critical and unstable condition and was on a ventilator after undergoing several surgeries. Despite his serious condition, Israeli authorities kept him in custody until his death on Sunday.
The two Palestinian organizations condemned the actions of the Israeli occupation forces as a crime on several levels, starting with the arrest and shooting of Raddad, through his use as a human shield, to his continued detention despite his serious health condition.
They described this incident as part of the unprecedented scale of the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation forces since the beginning of its genocidal campaign against the people of the Gaza Strip and its ongoing aggression against Palestinians in all the occupied territories.
Since Israel launched a military offensive against the Gaza Strip, in which more than 40,400 Palestinians have been killed since last October, the situation throughout the West Bank has been tense.
Since then, at least 641 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 5,400 others injured in the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
In a groundbreaking opinion on July 19, the International Court of Justice declared Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all existing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
