OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, April 17 (IslamOnline.net) - The families of Palestinians held prisoners by Israeli occupation forces marked the Palestinian Prisoner Day Thursday, April 17, with massive protests in different Palestinian cities.

"My son has been deprived of seeing his family and his young daughter Heba," the mother of prisoner Aymen Aref, 32, told IslamOnline.net.

It is the same story of some bereaved 8,000 Palestinian mothers, who were deprived of seeing their sons due the arbitrary measures adopted by the Israeli occupation authorities.

"We all feel imprisoned…The Israeli authorities go non-stop in detaining Palestinian youths," the mother of Nasr Zetawi from Tulkarm said.

Zetawi is one of four Palestinians from the Islamic resistance movement Hamas who were sentenced to 20 years in prison for masterminding the martyr operation in Park Hotel in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya.

Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are continuing their hunger strike for the third consecutive day, calling for improving the deplorable conditions inside occupation jails.

The Palestinian Al-Qanoon (law) non-governmental organization released a report, a copy of which obtained the London-based Al-Quds Press news agency, on the appalling conditions suffered by Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons.

Fahmi Shukiyrat, a lawyer for the NGO, paid a visit to Al-Ramla prison and met with four Palestinian prisoners, who told him about their tragedy.

"The prison officials opened a new cell that can accommodate up to 88 prisoners," they told Shukiyrat.

"Twenty prisoners were transferred to the new cell raising the number to 128, some of whom are bedridden due to such unspeakable conditions."

They said the prisoners also suffer from poor hygienic conditions with the prison officials denying them access to shaving tools, soaps and antiseptics under the pretext of a deficit in the prison's budget.

The NGO urged the "Semitic" countries, signatories of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, to activate such conventions, particularly the fourth one which obliges the occupying country to detain prisoners of the occupied one in jails inside the latter.

Chairman of the Palestinian Prisoner Club, Isa Karak', said in a press release on Thursday that 8,000 Palestinian prisoners were jailed in Israeli prisons.

"1400 are administrative prisoners, 700 juveniles, 61 women and 500 are critically ill and in dire need for intensive care and surgical operations," Karak' told IslamOnline.net.

He said the number of detentions have skyrocketed over the past thirty months, forcing Israeli authorities to open new prisons, such as Al-Naqab, Ufar and Salem, to accommodate them.

Karak' asserted that the number of detained Palestinians before the outbreak of al-Aqsa Intifada was only 1500.