In support of Palestinian ‘administrative detainees’ on open-end hunger strike
Over one hundred and twenty five Palestinian prisoners (ninety of whom are administrative detainees) have entered the fifth week of an open-end hunger strike to protest Israel’s practice of administrative detention, a procedure under which a person is detained without charge or trial under ‘secret evidence’ that neither the accused nor their lawyer is allowed to see. Military orders to prolong administrative detention can be extended indefinitely; some Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel for more than 10 years with no charges against them.
Detainees in Ofer, Meggido, and the Naqab prisons began their strike on 24 April 2014 and will continue until their demand for the end of the policy of administrative detention is met. New prisoners are joining the hunger strike on a regular basis. Today there are 183 Palestinians under administrative detention, nine of whom are members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
This strike is in response to a previous prisoners hunger strike against administrative detention carried out in 2012. Israel agreed in 2012 to end the widespread use of administrative detention, but has refused to carry through.
Hunger strikers have faced severe abuse in Israeli prisons, including solitary confinement and separation from non-striking prisoners. Strikers are not permitted to have visits from their families, and visits from lawyers have been almost entirely curtailed. Prison guards have increased raids on the hunger strikers, confiscated all belongings other than clothing, and in some cases have physically assaulted prisoners. Prison officials have also denied strikers salt – the only form of sustenance besides water – that the strikers have been taking. Prison doctors have tried to coerce strikers into eating.
The rampant use of administrative detention is prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory. Attempts by physician to force-feed, or coerce hunger strikers to eat are in violation of the World Medical Association’s Malta Declaration, of which Israel is a signatory.
As international human rights organizations supporting Palestinian non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation, we stand in solidarity with the hunger strike and the Palestinian people who are carrying it out in Israeli prisons.
We condemn the abuse visited on them by the Israeli Prison Service, as well as Israel’s violations of international law regarding the treatment of hunger strikers and administrative detainees.
We demand that the Israeli Prison Service adheres to the international treaties and declarations of which Israel is a signatory; respects the human rights of all Palestinians it holds prisoners, administrative detainees and all the hunger strikers in particular; and that it keeps its promises and ends the illegal practice of administrative detention immediately.
We call on the world’s human rights organisations, prisoners’ rights organisations, and people of conscience all across the globe to put pressure on the Israeli authorities to stop administrative detention and instead respect universal principles of human rights and justice.
24th May 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Awarta, Occupied Palestine
On March 22nd 2013, Mohamad Walleed Qwareeq was near the local school in the northern district of the town of Awarta, located approximately 8 kilometers southeast of Nablus.
Mohamad, 22 at the time, was with a friend eating almonds, in a grassy field, when he came across a foreign object that would alter his life forever.
Mohamad opened what appeared to be a covered box which was triggered to explode. “They [the Israeli military] put them there in spring because they know all the kids play in the fields,” says Mohamad.
This box is apparently a common phenomenon in Awarta during the spring season, with two other serious incidents apparently being recorded last March.
As a result Mohamad sustained a multitude of serious injuries: charred legs with lacerations, tinnitus (constant ringing/buzzing in the ears), ageusia (loss of taste), the maiming/ loss of his right hand, a decreased sense of smell, and a loss of sight approximately described as a 70% and 60% loss in the left and right eyes respectively. He can only see one meter out of his left eye.
Mohamad was brought to a hospital in Nablus to be treated; however with insufficient supplies to perform an operation on his eyes, the medical staff suggested he apply to have the operation in Jerusalem.
After what has become the standardized modus operandi from the DCO (District Coordination Office) to refuse proper medical treatment to Palestinians, Mohamad’s request was denied. Instead he was suggested to visit Ramallah hospital and it is now too late to consider a full recovery.
Due to his tinnitus, most nights Mohamad cannot sleep from the buzzing in his ears. Mohamad has been struggling financially and has received almost no support. He is forced to pay for the vast amount of medication himself, with the only cost covered being that of the eye operation.
Mohamad doesn’t have the money to do a proper check-up on his eyes, and his family is poor. He cannot read Arabic since he was often leaving school to go work whatever jobs were available; therefore finding work now is extremely difficult. In addition, his father suffers from an intestinal illness that forced him to stop working; Mohamad has four sisters and two brothers all living in the same house.
To add to the torment, Mohamad, his brother, and a friend were walking on the main street in Awarta two months after the event, when they passed a temporary Israeli military checkpoint in the form of a military jeep. All three were detained on false grounds, with his friend and brother being interrogated for four hours, and with Mohamad remaining in custody for 18 days.
Apparently suspicious of his injuries, during his interrogation he was asked, “What happened to your hand?”
Mohamad Walleed Qwareeq suffered severe injuries in 2013 (aged 22), when an explosive device placed by the Israeli army near Awarta exploded
23rd May 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team| Occupied Palestine
During the night of the 23rd of May, approximately at 02:00AM, the Israeli army raided several houses in the town of Kafr Qaddum and arrested two people. Ryad Mohamad Eshtewi (40) and Fadi Baseem Jomah (27), both of whom are Palestinian police officers.
Another two villagers were threatened during the same night raid. The Israeli army, numbering up to 50 soldiers, stormed into their houses, but the villagers were not there at the time. In one of the houses, according to a witness, the Israeli army left bullets underneath a bed “to send a message”. The other villager who was not at his house during the raid found a police order.
Ryad was sleeping at one of his brothers’ house when he was arrested at 02:00AM. Israeli soldiers forced Ryad back to his house, where they broke into his home and threw a stun grenade inside, searching Ryad’s property. Ryad asked the soldiers why they were being violent if he was already arrested, but no reply was given. No personal items were stolen nor any reasons given for his arrest.
On the morning of the 23rd of May, Ryad’s family received a call from an Israeli captain informing them that he was being held at the Israeli military base of Huwwara. The whereabouts of Fadi are still unknown since his family have not yet received any calls from the Israeli authorities.
According to a villager, this month there have been up to 30 arrests in Kafr Qaddum although 15 of them have been released on bails. These bails, however, could reach as much as 9,000 NIS (over 1,800 euros). Some of these arrests have already been documented, among them is also Murad Eshtewi who is the media coordinator for the weekly demonstrations in Kafr Qaddum. Murad was arrested along with another four youths from the village on the 29th of April. Three of them have recently been released but Murad and Reslan remain under custody almost one month after their arrest.
“What do you want from me?” a 70-year-old lawyer and professor of economics asked the Israeli military when they arrested him last year. “You are very dangerous,” was the explanation. Recalling his reply, the man laughs, his kind face lighting up: “I am dangerous to one of the most powerful armies in the world?! I am a danger to the only nuclear power in the Middle East?! I only have my pen, my notebook, and my mind.”
Exactly.
Following his arrest, the professor spent 6 months in Israeli administrative detention, an illegal practice of indefinite incarceration without any legal process, no charges let alone trial, and under ‘secret evidence’ that is never revealed to the prisoner nor their lawyer, and may or may not exist. As of 1 March 2014, Israel was holding 183 Palestinians under administrative detention.
On Thursday 24 April this year over 100 Palestinian political detainees went on an open-end hunger strike demanding the end of administrative detention. That was four weeks ago today (21 May); more prisoners have joined the strike along the way, bringing the total number to over 140; and even more are expected to follow.
“No-one wants to be hungry,” says Raed Amer, Nablus chairperson of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, an organization that supports prisoners and their families. But what other methods do people held incommunicado in occupation dungeons have, to fight for their rights and their dignity?
In an attempt to break the hunger strike, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) has tried a diversity of tactics except for one: meeting the strikers’ demands. The repressive measures include both physical and psychological violence and abuse: isolation; severe beatings (in some cases prisoners lost consciousness for several hours, during which no medical assistance was allowed); denial of water and salt which are essential for human survival; denial of lawyer and family visits; violent raids and searches during which prisoners are made wait in an overcrowded cage while handcuffed; mass transfers from one prison to another, designed to disrupt and isolate; and dehumanizing treatment and conditions – e.g. confiscation of all personal belongings, denial of basic hygiene products and change of underwear, filthy toilet facilities, and cells of a size that violates IPS’s own regulations.
Even IPS medical staff are collaborating with these increasingly repressive actions against the hunger strikers. The Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, Addameer, reported recently that after Mahmoud Shabaneh fainted as a result of his hunger strike, prison staff waited for 3 hours until they finally transferred him to the prison clinic. Doctors there then tried to offer him food as a provocation, which is in direct violation of the World Medical Association’s Malta Declaration on Hunger Strikers, of which Israel is a signatory. The Malta Declaration specifically states that “physicians must try to prevent coercion or maltreatment of detainees and must protest if it occurs“.
Additionally, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) is currently debating a bill that would legalize force-feeding, a practice the World Medical Association considers “never ethically acceptable“. Force-feeding in Israeli dungeons already has a tragic precedent: in the early 1980s, after a lengthy hunger strike in Nafha prison, Ali Ja’fari and Rasem Halawi died after doctors inserted the tubes in the wrong place.
Nablus protest in solidarity with the hunger strikers. Currently 24 of the hunger strikers are from Nablus (photo by IWPS).
The current hunger strike is yet another attempt of Palestinian political prisoners to bring Themis to the place she has been absent for so long. In 2012, after a mass hunger strike that started on 17 April, Palestinian Prisoners Day, and involved around 2,000 prisoners, an agreement was signed between IPS and the Higher Committee for Prisoners in which Israel promised to limit its use of the illegal practice of administrative detention to exceptional circumstances. Two years later, administrative detention is still systematic. Fake promises?
Exactly.
Hunger strikes have played an important role in the struggle of Palestinians held prisoner by Israel. “Every achievement in prisons for simple, daily things such as sanitation, bed, or radio have been reached through hunger strikes,” says Saed Abu-Hijleh, an activist, poet, and lecturer at An-Najah National University in Nablus. During the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, Abu-Hijleh says, Palestinian people were expecting all political prisoners to be released from Israeli jails, since a ‘peace treaty’ was being signed between Israel and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). However, such hopes never materialized and Palestinian prisoners became a bargaining chip in political negotiations – the so-called “peace process” – ever since.
Moreover, Jawad Boulus, chief lawyer of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, said in an interview with IWPS that the Israeli state is becoming more and more repressive: it places Palestinians in administrative detention simply because they resist the Israeli occupation. Some people have been held in prison without charges for 10-12 years; the list of administrative detainees includes highly educated people – doctors, lawyers, journalists, as well as political and community leaders. Boulus added that two administrative detainees started their hunger strike earlier and have now spent more than 80 days without food; the Israeli military court system rejected their appeal and ordered them to serve additional time.
According to Boulus, one of the most important achievements of Palestinian prisoners is that they’ve developed a prisoners movement with a code of conduct and a moral value system. “Officers and guards can see how detainees are engaged in a human struggle against injustice,” he says. Whether they choose to accept what they see or continue being complicit in the suppression of this struggle for human rights and dignity is another issue.
The current Palestinian hunger strike is to hit Day 30 on Friday 23 May. After 14 days on hunger strike, catabolysis – a biological process during which the body starts to break down muscle tissue and fat for survival – occurs. Physical implications are increasingly serious: people start having difficulty standing up and suffer from severe dizziness, weakness, loss of coordination, and shivers. After 3-4 weeks on hunger strike, or when more than 18% of body weight is lost, there is a risk of medical complications becoming permanent; among them – loss of hearing and vision, indifference to surroundings, and incoherence. This is when the body, having no other source of energy, starts consuming itself: first fat, then muscles, and finally vital organs.
It is generally considered that a healthy person who consumes water during their hunger strike would have an absolute limit of 60 days. However, many of the Palestinian ‘administrative detainees’ who entered the hunger strike were already in ill-health, due to Israel’s refusal to provide them with proper treatment while in prison.
What thoughts run in the mind of a person on hunger strike? “You don’t think about your body – rather, you think about your family, your loved ones, and what you can do for them,” says Amer from the Nablus branch of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, who himself went on a 20-day-long hunger strike during his time in Israeli occupation prison in the pre-Oslo period.
As if to echo his words, Boulous quotes from a poem: “I am ready to give half my life to somebody who can make a crying child laugh…” and adds that “every Palestinian prisoner case is a big issue”. Ending the occupation is a big issue. Helping families to visit their loved ones in prison is a big issue. National morality and resistance is a big issue. How to pass Qalandiya checkpoint without loss of dignity is a big issue. Israel’s crimes against human rights are a big issue. The fact that Israel tortures prisoners is a big issue.
“Prisoners on hunger strike cannot go back now,” Abu-Hijleh says. “It’s ‘Either I go home, or I go in a plastic bag’.”
“We don’t have an alternative. We cannot raise the white flag,” Amer adds.
Exactly.
“I am an administrative detainee…” – activists reading out stories of Palestinians held prisoners by Israel (photo by IWPS).
LATEST NEWS:
– The IPS has so far refused to take the hunger strike seriously and prefers to turn “a blind eye and a deaf ear” on the prisoners’ rightful, legal, and legitimate demands. Palestinian Minister of Detainee Affairs, Issa Qaraqe, said in a statement that “a state of alert is taking place inside of Israeli jails in anticipation of projected deaths among Palestinian hunger strikers. Instructions handed to all prisons and hospitals, where Palestinian hunger strikers are held, called for the complete shutdown of the strikers’ cells, including all gates and windows, and denial of any access out of or into cells, even for urgent medical check-ups, under any spur-of-the-moment pretext.”
– Waad Association for Detainees and Ex-Detainees warned of the serious deterioration of Palestinian administrative detainees’ health conditions after more than 3 weeks on hunger strike. Many of the striking prisoners are sick detainees denied medical treatment.
Tell the Israeli authorities and IPS in particular what you think of their crimes against Palestinian political prisoners. IPS general contact email is ips@mail.gov.il, telephone number +972 (0)89776666. Can also be contacted through the website.
22nd May 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine
Yesterday during the early evening, several Palestinian youths were riding bikes near checkpoint 56 in the Tel Rumeida area of Al-Khalil (Hebron). At around 7pm, one youth, 17-year-old Izz Adel Bedo, from the Jabal Al-Takruri area of Hebron was knocked off his bike and run over by a settler driving a bus on the way to the illegal Tel Rumeida settlement.
Paramedics arrived within about five minutes, leaving their ambulance parked outside the checkpoint whilst they came inside to attend to the youth. By this time, approximately 15-20 Israeli soldiers and border police had arrived on the scene and were preventing local Palestinians from filming and photographing the incident, and the bus that had run over the youth had driven away from the scene.
The youth had sustained injuries to his arm and leg, and possibly also to his neck, medics placed him in a neck brace as a precaution before attempting to move him. He was taken through the checkpoint to the awaiting ambulance and was taken away to Al-Ahli Hospital for treatment.
At around the same time that the ambulance was leaving, a group of Israeli soldiers entered through the checkpoint into the H1 (Palestinian Authority controlled) area of Hebron and threw a stun grenade in the general direction of the ambulance and some Palestinian youths who had gathered. The youths then started to throw stones in the direction of the checkpoint. Israeli soldiers then launched tear gas canisters and more stun grenades.
Back on the H2 (Israeli military controlled) side of the checkpoint, approximately five or six settlers, some of them armed, were extremely aggressive in their behaviour. One armed settler assaulted a Palestinian man who was coming through the checkpoint into H2. He then argued with the soldiers, apparently demanding that they take some sort of action against the Palestinians who had gathered. He spent a further 10 minutes doing this and generally attempting to provoke a further incident. Other settlers, including the hardline settlement leader Baruch Marzel, were verbally abusing the Palestinians and international observers present.
After a further 30 minutes, the settlers left in their cars and the soldiers also dispersed. Neither the Israeli soldiers nor border police made any attempt to locate and/or talk to the driver of the vehicle.
Settlers have used their vehicles as weapons against Palestinians many times before, as has been reported previously.
