Abbas: Palestinian prisoners should be treated as POWs

The Palestinian Authority will ask signatory nations to demand the application of the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday.

“We will demand that [Israel] regard prisoners as POWs, and that they receive the individual rights accorded to them” in the Geneva Conventions, which deal in part with the treatment of civilians during wartime, and international humanitarian law, he said in a speech given to mark Palestinian Prisoners Day.

During a visit to the Maldives, Abbas addressed directly the Palestinian prisoners who announced a hunger strike saying, “the prisoner issue is of utmost importance” to him.

“We won’t rest until you will all go free and not a single prisoner will remain in Israeli prisons,” he told them.