Junaid Prison and Nablus Prison

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Nablus Prison used to consist of spacious, high-ceilinged rooms built in the old vaulted style our ancestors once used, made of mudbrick and stone. The Ottomans built several rooms to the east of Nablus and turned them into a prison for the region and a security center. Although the purpose of the building ranged between the condemnable and the necessary, the structure itself was historic and deserved to be preserved. Nearby, the British erected the well-known government building called al-Saraya, which the Jordanian government later named al-Muqata’a.

I was detained twice in this prison during the period of direct Zionist rule, and I always felt it should be turned into a museum. The place is historic, its location beautiful, and its rooms well suited to displaying historical and heritage artifacts. But the place was disfigured by iron bars and barbed wire, and one of its rooms even had cells built inside it — cells that detainees used to call “the exes” — for cramming in those under interrogation. The important thing to note, however, is that none of the Israeli measures and alterations made to the building affected its overall structure and composition. That is, the cells were built inside one of the rooms without demolishing any walls or introducing concrete into the building’s core, and it would have been easy to restore all the rooms to their original state without any disfigurement.

The Palestinian Authority detained me in this prison once, and unfortunately placed me in a concrete room on the second floor, inside one of the prison’s rooms. I looked at the scene for a long while, and asked the officer in charge why the room’s walls had been disfigured and tampered with in this way. He said that he himself was the one who had suggested doing it. He explained that there had been a need for more rooms, that he saw no need for the spacious ones, and that he had easily persuaded the officials to make this change. As he explained it to me, he said the officials were stupid, and that had it not been for his own sharp insight, the idea would never have occurred to them.

The Jews bombed the prison in an attempt to kill the martyr Abu Hanoud, destroying one of the rooms completely and damaging the prison. After that, they bombed al-Saraya and inflicted severe damage on it as well. A short while ago, Nablus Prison was finally razed to the ground by the Palestinian Authority.

The building should have been preserved — first, for its historical value, and second, because it could have been put to a variety of humanitarian and social uses. It could have been turned into a museum, a place to receive visitors and tourists. But it seems the Palestinian Authority’s mind had no room for such a thing.

As for Junaid Prison, it was originally a military hospital built by the Jordanian government, and it fell into the hands of the occupation while still unfinished — a mere concrete skeleton. The Jews decided to turn it into a prison at the start of the 1980s, committing in the process a crime the world remained silent about. The Jews kept the building’s external form but made fundamental structural alterations to its interior, so that every trace of it as a hospital disappeared. I myself was held there by the Zionists for about a year.

The Authority took over the prison after the Taba agreement, and I was detained there twice, each time for a very limited period. The first thing I noticed was that the prison was not clean at all: cigarette butts, orange peels, and other refuse littered the floor, flies filled the place, and a foul smell hung in the air. None of this had existed under direct Jewish administration. I also noticed external structural additions, which turned out to be rooms for officers or officers’ children. The place is still a prison to this day, and inside it, Palestinians are being tortured at the hands of fellow Palestinians.

The Authority should have restored the place to its intended purpose — that is, to a hospital. It is true that the cost of rehabilitating the place is high, but whoever is willing to beg in order to build prisons and security headquarters can just as well beg in order to rehabilitate a hospital. The place embodies a great deal of pain and sorrow, and it must not be allowed to remain that way.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “سجن جنيد وسجن نابلس” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.