The Ministry of Prisoners' Affairs has revealed that 700,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned in Israeli prisons since 1967. This means that 25% of the total population of the occupied Palestinian territory has been held in Israeli jails over the last 29 years.
In a report, the ministry pointed out that 50,000 of them were arrested during the current, Al Aqsa Intifada (which began in September 2000) and 10,300 of them are still in Israeli prisons.
Today, the Ministry has updated the figures, saying that about 800,000 Palestinian Arabs have been arrested since 1967.
We have already looked at how Addameer inflates their statistics on arrests, pulling their numbers out of thin air.
Now let's look at the Ministry's numbers.
Let's say that 50,000 were really arrested between September 2000 and September 2006, during the height of the intifada, as they claimed in 2006.
If that is true, is it remotely credible that more than double that amount has been arrested in the 5 years since then, when things have calmed down considerably?
If 100,000 were arrested in the past 5 years, that would be 20,000 a year or about 55 a day. Yet an already unreliable study published at the end of December claims only 3,300 were arrested last year, and the most arrests were in 2007 when some 7,000 were alleged.
Even those numbers seem grossly exaggerated, as the only group that seems to keep tracks of actual arrests is PCHR, and they only record about 1000-1500 arrests a year. Last week, for example, they recorded 31 arrests and 29 the week before.
Since 2006, the number of Arab prisoners in Israeli jails has decreased from about 10,000 to under 4,000.
While all available evidence shows that the number of arrests is far less than the Ministry of Prisoners Affairs is reporting, no one is questioning them (or Addameer) for their absurd inflation of these statistics.
These ridiculous numbers get accepted by the UN and by the mainstream media.
This is not some NGO without any oversight issuing these numbers. This is the Palestinian Authority, funded with billions of dollars from the West, and using that money to issue ridiculous lies back to those same Western countries.
Isn't it time that someone calls them on these fabrications?