May 22, 2025
Ramallah, occupied Palestine - The Commission of Detainees’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) have received a response from the Israeli occupation army confirming the martyrdom of detainee Amr Hatem Odeh (33), who was abducted from the Gaza Strip.
He lost his life on December 13, 2023, while he was being held at the Sde Teiman military camp, according to the military, only days after he was arrested on December 7, 2023. He was a husband and a father of three.
Sde Teiman military camp has become a prominent symbol of the widespread torture, abuse and maltreatment of Palestinian detainees arrested from Gaza following the genocide, in addition to many other documented atrocities reflected in testimonies of released detainees.
The Commission and the PPS noted that Odeh was arrested along with several of his family members, from their home at the beginning of the ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
With the martyrdom of detainee Amr Odeh, the number of identified martyred Palestinian political prisoners killed both directly and indirectly by occupation prison authorities, has now risen to 70 people. Among those, 44 were abducted and detained from Gaza. The total number of identified martyred Palestinian political prisoners since 1967 has now reached 307 people, making this the deadliest period in the history of the movement.
The Commission and the PPS explained that the responses they receive from the Israeli army are limited to the army’s narrative, while the bodies of the martyrs are still being withheld and the circumstances of their murder remain undisclosed.
The army has repeatedly attempted to manipulate these responses by providing different versions. Some institutions have resorted to court orders to obtain decisive answers regarding detainees' fates.
The case of Amr Odeh's martyrdom is yet another addition to the record of crimes committed by the Israeli machinery of brutality, which operates continuously through a series of systematic acts aimed at killing prisoners and detainees. These crimes represent another face of the ongoing genocide. In this context, prisoner defense groups stressed that testimonies from Gaza detainees documented so far reflect some of the most severe and brutal crimes witnessed.
The number of martyred detainees is likely to rise as time passes and thousands of detainees remain in Israeli prisons, systematically subjected to systematic crimes, the most prominent being torture, starvation, physical and sexual abuse, deliberate exposure to severe and contagious diseases (notably scabies), and unprecedented levels of deprivation and denial of basic rights.
The institutions held the occupation fully responsible for these deaths and renewed their call for the international human rights system to launch an independent international investigation into the deaths of dozens of detainees since the start of the genocide.
Prisoner groups stress their demand for the international human rights system to move forward in taking effective decisions to hold the occupation leaders accountable for the war crimes they continue to commit against our people, and to impose sanctions on the occupation that would place it in a state of global isolation, and restore to the human rights system the fundamental role for which it was created, and put an end to the terrifying state of impotence that it has been afflicted with during the genocide, and end the state of exceptional immunity that the world has granted to the occupying state as it is above accountability, accountability and punishment.
As of the start of May 2025, the number of Palestinian political prisoners has exceeded 10,100 — a figure that does not include detainees held in military camps run by the Israeli occupation forces.Among them are 39 female detainees and more than 400 child prisoners. Meanwhile, some 3,577 people arrested in the occupied West Bank are being held without trial or charge under “administrative detention,” and 1,846 people arrested in occupied Gaza are also held without trial or charge under a different legal mechanism, the "unlawful combatants" law.