The British occupation of Palestine from 1916 to 1948 left behind too many loopholes that are only found in the British Archives and to a certain degree in the National Library of “Israel”.
Our duty is to research archives, documents, and information pertaining to our national history through the different phases of the Ottoman, British, and Zionist occupation.
We lack information covering the British occupation of Palestine between 1916 and 1948. It does not have much information about the British prison system, courts, detainees, administrative detention, and death penalties. Most detainees were denied due process and spent long sentences including the death penalty without trial.
However, some historians, political science professors, and biographers point out that the military courts of the British Mandate authorities issued fifty thousand administrative detention sentences in 1938 and more than two hundred life imprisonment sentences, in addition to 148 death sentences that were actually implemented.
We do not have enough data about Acre Prison, which was considered to be a major prison during the British occupation and where Shaikh Hasan spent over 30 years in total isolation.
Therefore, it is important to research and document this era from its sources, which are British public records, to shed more light on the policy of detention and the death penalty used by the British occupation forces and on the close cooperation between them and the Zionist gangs against the Fedayeen and detainees and the policy of collective punishment against Palestinian civilians.
This also applies to the 675 destroyed and depopulated villages of 1948, despite the fact that some prominent historians covered some of it but not in-depth, for example, we lack information about the settlement movement before and after 1948. There are only Israeli sources and documents which is hard for us to reach.