 Hello everyone and welcome to another issue of People's Health Dispatch. Today we are meeting with nurse Shaza Aouda. Shaza is a nurse and she's health activist from Palestine and she served for quite a while as a steering council member of People's Health Movement. Also she was the head of the board of directors of the Palestinian NGO Coalition. Shaza spent 11 months in one of the prisons of the Israeli occupying forces and this was between July 2021 and June 2022. We will talk today with her about her experience in the prison and health conditions in jail. Also we will discuss with her the reality of life in Palestine today. Welcome Shaza and thank you very very much for accepting to join us today. Thank you Hani and of course thanks for everybody's thanks for People's Health Movement, People's Dispatch for all the support that you gave you gave it to me during my arrest in the jail. Really it was admiring a campaign you did and I'm very thankful for that and really it's helpful and this will this kind of solidarity mean a lot for me at all level for my family for for me in person and for my community in general. I hope that the campaigns and next campaign will be for all the prisoners and for to improve their health conditions in general. Thank you very much. Thank you very much and as one of the co-chairs of the steering council of People's Health Movement right now I assure you that PHM is completely committed to continue to defend health activists from all over the world especially in Palestine who are subject to lots of oppression. So Shaza we heard from multiple sources already that civil society in Palestine has been under attack for a while right now. Can you can you please tell us more about that and provide us with some context and explain how this is connected to your arrest? Of course I mean being under occupation as a citizen and as an organization we are all our target for Israeli forces and so we are not protected whether we are working in civil society or in political parties or whatever. This is the first principle. Second that I mean there is an attack on the civil society organization mainly the organization that providing and giving services to the humanitarian services like health, education, agriculture, rights and so on. Part of these attacks also focused on the human right organization that work at international level that you know they expose the Israeli forces and government the violation against the Palestinian people in their rights about their rights whether the social, the political and everything and always they are asking for banishing and for the importance of respecting the international law that related and the Geneva Convention related to applied to Palestinian people. So and this is the work of this civil society organization is annoying for them and we noticed that the people who were under focus and attack the people who you need to awareness for our people do the try to steadfastening our population mainly who are living in a remote area in area consider areas and so on whether we provide services or other kind of services and they try to connect these civil society organization with as a tourist groups and organization that they help and the population to resist and under these you know conditions they attack our organization they arrest me and other employees in order to weaken the organization and to stop our work. You spend almost one year one full year in the jail when you share with us some of your experiences during this time and can you describe how is life in the presence of Israeli forces? My sentence was 16 months and I spent like 11 months almost to tomorrow it will be the occasion of finishing the year in 7 of July. My experience it was very hard at the beginning for me I was astonished that I why I should be arrested I mean I'm 60 years old I'm working since long time with with different organization and you know that people in Palestine who are active politically or you know they want to do some act of resistance they start young I mean I'm not young you know I'm doing my way and I believe that I'm contributing to our to my community and my society this is the beginning but I said okay this is an incubation and we are not any nobody protected from being in jail or being under inspection or whatever. Inside the jail I moved in two jails two places the first place it's called Hasharon and I slept in this kind of jail and this kind of jail in very very difficult condition it's mixed also with political prisoners and criminal prisoners I slept there but every day they moved me to another place for investigation I spent 21 days under long long hours of investigation starting three o'clock in the morning they I wake up and they they take me to this kind of place for investigation it took like three hours traveling in the morning and three hours or more in the evening and we spent like 10 hours 12 hours nine hours it depends on the people there and on the questions and the type of questions they in this place is very terrible one in terms of cleanliness in terms of the food food is very poor very smelly I can't eat from the food so that's why during this 21 year 21 day I lost around nine to ten kilo after we I finished the investigation and the they they released the sentence for me they sent me to the women presence called Damun it's in Haifa and in Haifa there the condition become much acceptable this doesn't mean that we are living in luxury condition because the jail itself it was built since of many era so it's very very very old and several time they did assessment the Israeli units engineers and others and the security part they did an assessment for the jail and they said it's not well or suitable for the human living and it's in security wise it's not that much I mean protected I mean there is always gaps here and here inside the rooms that they can run away from from the jail the room inside there is very hot and in winter is very cold you know it needs a lot of painting need a lot of work the water we are we can we can't drink the water a lot they bought a lot of high amount of chlorine that's why we buy all the time our water because there is a canteen there that the prisoners they can buy their stuff so we we were buying most of our stuff that mean we are inside the jail and we pay for our living inside the jail I noticed inside the jail that most of the prisoners there inside the girls and the others they have iron deficiency anemia and they have low storage of iron they have most of them they have vitamin deficiency like vitamin D B12 and others and any kind of uh uh uh request for our rights uh we we struggle a lot to uh to obtain it like uh we return back food uh we we don't any I mean we close our rooms and we don't want to go outside to for the break for that going out the room uh unless you fulfill our uh uh request and this took long long steps to obtain our uh rights uh and the the the things that we were asking is very elementary things and very very basic things like uh uh we want to improve the health side we want uh we want our medicine for example or we want to have a check up for uh elderly people every week for their blood pressure for their sugar or whatever I mean I'm giving like an example we don't want to be moved from our rooms because we uh this is our role that we want to stay with with our uh the prisoners that I choose so they were want to enforce who is should live with who and we we reject for example this decision and for that they did a big attack on uh on the on our rooms and prisoners and they bring uh units from outside to beat in us to take us from the rooms by force and they close their rooms and they they do not allow us to to take our bath for two days and this is I mean by international law it's not allowed I mean the prisoners every day they should uh take a bath and because our bathrooms is outside the rooms I mean we should work uh walk through the corridors and also we were like uh rejecting and that we have all around the place that we go for work or or play sports there is a camera all over so they we were always under uh they're uh you know monitoring so most of I mean we have a prisoners they are covered I mean they want to expose to the sun their hair their face they can't do that they can't play because they know that the uh the the the people you know running the prison most of them are male and but and there is also female so we feel always that we don't have our privacy in terms of going to the bathroom so all the the representative there they know that we are going to to take a bath or we want to walk or so this kind of pressure make a lot of troubles for prisoners and for our privacy for our needs as a woman the the the presence uh principle built on that the limitation of freedom of the people and not to move not to talk and in this in his way not to work whatever he wants in general this is the principle the idea of the limitation of your space and your freedom and part of that the isolation of the prisoners from the outside from their environment outside from their family from that's why I left the the damoon without any public phones inside the damoon hospital damoon sorry jail and it was the the women prisoners inside damoon the only prison they they do not have uh phones because in on other presence there is a phone that the prisoners they can talk to their family once a week at least so also we have we did certain steps of uh to to have a phone phone calls at least like we we can we call our families in our feast once every month like two times I called my family during the this period and when they want to punish us first thing they do stop the visits family visits stop the canteen to buy your things from canteens and stop seeing your uh lawyers because by our lawyers they come and visit us in uh regular basis so this kind of pressure they do it for for the prisoners