Diala Ayesh
Diala Ayesh is a Palestinian woman human rights defender and lawyer. She has dedicated her work to advocating for the freedom and fair treatment of Palestinian political prisoners, focusing on ensuring fair trial guarantees and promoting freedom of expression. Additionally, she has actively engaged in monitoring and documenting the conditions of Palestinian political prisoners within the Israeli military prison system.
Diala Ayesh has faced arrests, threats, and harassment from both the Israeli occupation forces and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as a consequence for her work.
Previously, Diala Ayesh worked with Lawyers for Justice, a Palestinian non-governmental organization that provides free legal aid and monitors human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Human rights defenders in the OPT are subjected to acts of harassment, restrictions on freedom of movement, stigmatisation, abductions, long periods of arbitrary detention usually under administrative detention orders, illegal searches of their homes and offices and killings. Many of the violations are state-sanctioned, or if not sanctioned at the highest levels of the Israeli political and military establishment, then condoned by the ongoing policy of impunity which permeates the military and judicial system in relation to the OPT. In some instances Israeli settlers have also been the perpetrators of violence against human rights defenders.
