When Dana Joudeh, 35, went into labor in mid-September, she was six months pregnant and being held at Israel’s Damon Prison. Her daughter, Lia, was born premature, and her family says she gave birth shackled to a bed, with a rifle pointed at her.
Joudeh spent almost her entire pregnancy in Damon prison, held under a six-month administrative detention order. There she endured the conditions Palestinian prisoners have described since October 2023: medical neglect, inadequate healthcare, food deprivation, and sharp cuts to hygiene supplies.
A day after giving birth, Dana and Lia were released from Damon Prison. Their time in detention exposed blatant Israeli violations, not only against women but even against infants.
BreakThrough News spoke to Maram Joudeh, Dana’s sister, to learn more about the circumstances of her sister’s arrest, conditions of detention, and how she gave birth amid it all.
Dana’s ordeal began when Israeli forces raided her family’s home in Iraq al-Tayeh village, east of the northern West Bank governorate of Nablus and arrested her during Ramadan 2026 (between February and March). Dana was still living with her family at the time before getting married a couple of weeks later.
According to her sister, Dana was detained and interrogated for one day. She was released after losing consciousness due to complications from a medical procedure she had undergone shortly before her arrest.
Around mid-April, an Israeli commander contacted Dana, asking her to head to the Huwara Detention Center for another interrogation session.
Although Dana had never been involved in any political activity, she felt intimidated by the phone call and did not go, especially as the Israeli commander, who was speaking to her, asked her about her recent marriage.
A few days later she received a couple of other phone calls. During one of the calls, the commander informed her that he knows that the wedding of one of her sisters would be held within days, so Dana avoided attending the wedding fearing that the Israeli forces would storm the ballroom and arrest her from there.
In another phone call, she was threatened that if she did not come to the interrogation, her father would be arrested. Therefore, Dana’s father decided to go to the Huwara Detention Center instead of her, but the Israeli commander insisted that she should come personally.
As a result, Dana went to the interrogation on April 19, hoping that she would spend hours there then be released, but she was transferred from there to Hasharon prison, where she spent one night that she described as a “nightmare”.
“The toilet had a stall door that did not provide any privacy. It was very dirty. I lost consciousness there, so they transferred me to a hospital, blindfolded, and shackled. They conducted a pregnancy test for me, and sent me to Damon Prison from there,” Dana told her lawyer, who managed to visit her in Damon Prison in early May.
It was then that Dana’s lawyer found out about her pregnancy, and the inhumane detention conditions she had endured since being imprisoned.
For six months, Dana was detained with five other female prisoners in a small cell, which should be allocated for two individuals only.
“There are only two metal bunks. The toilet has no door, and there is a lot of humidity as they do not open the vision panel.” Dana told the lawyer, describing the cell.
Dana also informed her lawyer that, despite her pregnancy, she was provided with a minimal amount of food, and that she lost weight and suffered from dehydration.
She added that only she and Amina Taweel, another pregnant prisoner, were sleeping on the bunks; the remaining four female prisoners were sleeping on the floor.
“Lina Naser and Tasneem Odeh used to give us their food, because they were expecting to be released soon,” Dana noted about other inmates, who shared the cell with her.
Dana said that the food was “inedible”, as they were sometimes given boiled eggs several hours after being cooked. Canned chickpeas soaked in water and lentils were among the limited options provided to them on almost a daily basis.
Dana also mentioned that their cell was violently stormed multiple times, with sound grenades being thrown. She said that sometimes they stormed the cell at midnight, when she and the other detainees were sleeping.
Whenever Dana fainted during those raids, prison security personnel dealt with the situation by asking other inmates to raise her legs and make her drink water, which she described as “undrinkable”.
During her detention, Dana also developed pimples between her fingers without knowing the diagnosis. Moreover, she wore the pajamas of Lina Naser after the latter’s release, as no other suitable clothing was available.
One day before her scheduled discharge date, Dana experienced severe labor pains, despite being only six months pregnant. This occurred after she had bled for approximately 10 days in Damon Prison before the Israel Prison Service (also known as Shabas) finally approved her transfer to Rambam Hospital.
Already facing a high-risk health condition for herself and her fetus, Dana had her hands and ankles shackled to the bars of a metal bed. She was surrounded by several female Israeli soldiers, who pointed their rifles at her and shouted: “Push harder, you saboteur!”
As the delivery got obstructed, Dana underwent a caesarean section, but even during the surgery the soldiers continued to shackle her hands and legs, surrounding her and threatening her with firearms.
When Dana finally gave birth to Lia, the soldiers shouted: “Another saboteur has just been born!'”
When Dana breastfed Lia before discharge, one of her hands would remain cuffed.
One of the nurses taking care of Dana dressed Lia with pink babywear. Dana said that the nurse was Palestinian.
Nevertheless, the Shabas insisted on treating the premature baby as a prisoner. On the next day, Dana was escorted by Israeli soldiers to a bus, blindfolded and shackled, but Lia was taken away from her for hours.
She described those as the most terrifying hours, fearing what destiny lay ahead for her premature baby. To her surprise, she was then sent back to Damon prison.
Dana then realized she had been brought there because the soldiers had taken Lia to dress her in the same gray pajamas that the Israeli Prison Service (Shabas) has forced all Palestinian prisoners to wear upon release since October 7, 2023. They made customized pajamas for the 1.5 kg premature baby and took photos of her before she and her mother were released from prison, according to Maram, Dana’s sister.
Even upon her release at the checkpoint, Israeli soldiers kept their rifles pointed at Dana as she struggled to walk, carrying Lia in one arm and her belongings in the other.
“Keep walking, don’t stop. Otherwise you will be shot,” the soldiers warned her.
From the checkpoint, Dana and Lia were taken to a hospital in the central West Bank governorate of Ramallah and Al-Bireh because Dana was suffering from scabies and her baby needed to be kept in an incubator.
Dana’s scabies had gotten out of control as she was denied necessary medication while in prison. Her sister told BreakThrough News that the prison authorities only gave Dana cornstarch to apply to her skin to ease the symptoms.
When Dana left detention, she left behind two other pregnant Palestinian women in Israeli detention.
As per the latest report released by Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association – shut down just a few days ago by the Israeli authorities – these pregnant women are among 90 Palestinian female prisoners currently held in Israeli prisons.
This article was originally published by Truthout on July 28, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
World-renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is 72 years old, suffering multiple health problems, and may die in prison, say legal advocates in a new request they filed today that asks the United Nations to support his release. Abu-Jamal’s legal team decided to appeal to the UN after having exhausted nearly every legal avenue for relief available in the United States.
Abu-Jamal was a Black Panther and journalist when he was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, and he has always maintained his innocence. His death sentence was overturned in 2001, and in 2011, Pennsylvania resentenced him to life without parole. Since then, “each attempt to secure Mr. Abu-Jamal a new and fair trial has been rejected,” argues a submission his lawyer Bret Grote and others made on his behalf to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
Grote told Truthout the filing, which UN rules limit to 20 pages, attempts to summarize nearly a half-century of the “failures of the criminal legal system” in Abu-Jamal’s case, including an “unfair trial, a biased appellate process, decades of surveillance and censorship, and a death by incarceration sentence that has been recognized by the United Nations as violating international human rights standards.”
The UN determination of whether someone faces “arbitrary detention” is interpreted “more broadly” than simply being “against the law.” It also considers “elements of inappropriateness, injustice, lack of predictability and due process of law.”
Abu-Jamal’s lawyers say he was in “continuous solitary confinement” from 1983 to 2011 on Pennsylvania’s death row, before being transferred to the general population in a state prison called SCI Mahanoy, where Abu-Jamal’s advocates say officials have denied him proper medical care. His legal team’s submission to the UN notes he was diagnosed in 2012 with hepatitis C, which caused cirrhosis of the liver, and he later “developed a painful, severe rash covering most of his body, potentially caused or exacerbated” by the disease, and then went into diabetic shock “due to untreated hyperglycemia” caused by steroid treatment for his skin condition. It also cites UN human rights experts who raised concern when Abu-Jamal was shackled to his hospital bed in 2021 while awaiting long-delayed heart surgery.
Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight.
Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight.
“I have been, for all intents and purposes, unable to read, unable to write, unable to see anything more than the masthead of a newspaper and not even its headlines; blurry television bursts of color,” Abu-Jamal revealed in a 2025 Prison Radio commentary called “Mumia’s Vision: A Message for the Movement.” He explained he had “been reluctant to talk about my eye problems” because “any sign of weakness is to be avoided at all costs” in prison, since it “brings predation.”
His legal team’s submission to the UN refers to medical records showing how in 2025 Abu-Jamal “began experiencing a common and easily treated complication of cataract surgery” that clouded his vision, and notes he continues to “suffer from multiple complex ophthalmological conditions, including proliferative diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, that pose a significant risk of permanent blindness.”
“He is old and he is sick,” Samah Sisay, an international human rights lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Truthout. “This is someone who should not be incarcerated.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Abolitionist Law Center, where Abu-Jamal’s lawyer Grote is legal director, have a track record of success in filing submissions before the United Nations. In 2023, they also asked the UN Human Rights Committee to review whether the U.S. was complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prompted it to call for “a moratorium on the imposition of sentences to life imprisonment without parole,” which opponents often call “death by incarceration” because of the lack of opportunity for review and release.
Grote acknowledged that the UN body lacks enforcement powers but said, “We are asking for a ruling because we think the truth of what has been done to Mumia in his case needs to be exposed in the light of day.”
In 2020, the same UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was asked by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School to review the case of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier, saying he — like Abu-Jamal — faced health problems after nearly 50 years of incarceration. It responded in 2022 by calling on the U.S. government to “immediately” release Peltier after concluding the “cumulative effect of the procedural deficiencies” he “suffered in parole proceedings are overwhelming, rendering his continued detention arbitrary.” In January 2025, President Joe Biden commuted the rest of Peltier’s life sentence to home confinement.
Unlike Peltier, whose conviction was in a federal court, Mumia has a state-level conviction, so Sisay says officials like the governor could ask the state for more information to address accusations made in the legal team’s submission to the UN. She notes how “international pressure, regardless of whether the U.S. claims to recognize international law, has always been crucial to movements for social justice.” For example, the U.S. has been slow to change its policies on extreme sentencing, but Sisay says “a lot of the work” that went into abolishing the juvenile death penalty or juvenile life without parole “happened through international advocacy as well as at the domestic state and federal level.”
Compassionate release for terminally ill prisoners is another path home, but “thankfully Mumia does not have a terminal diagnosis at this point,” Grote told Truthout.
In 2021, Pennsylvania granted compassionate release to Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, another former Black Panther Party member who was convicted of killing a police officer and spent decades in solitary confinement. But he lived just 52 days after release before he died from cancer at the age of 78, surrounded by his family. Despite his weakened state, a judge had argued months earlier Shoatz presented “an undue risk of escape or danger to the community.”
The UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms.”
Laura Whitehorn, a former political prisoner who was incarcerated more than 14 years and co-founded the group Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), told Truthout, “Mumia’s case fits squarely into why I started RAPP with three people who served long sentences and saw the damage, and were outraged at the lack of reasoning behind long sentences for older people.” She contrasted the U.S. approach to a landmark ruling earlier this month by India’s Supreme Court, which gives states three months to create a policy for the early release of more than 5,000 prisoners who are elderly or terminally ill.
Pennsylvania is not one of the 25 states that have enacted “second look” policies to allow judges to review a person’s sentence, so Abu-Jamal’s paths to release in the state seem limited to a request for an unlikely commutation given the politicized nature of his case, or an appeal “if new evidence justifies it,” Grote told Truthout, noting Abu Jamal’s case is 44 years old and “even more of a challenge would be finding evidence that courts would treat fairly.” Grote says the UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms” and “offer a catalyst to the campaign to bring him home to his family and community.”
Correction note: This article was edited to clarify that the petition for Leonard Peltier was filed by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and that the 2023 moratorium on LWOP recommendation came from the UN Human Rights Committee.
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