Palestinian Political Prisoners Launch Mass Hunger Strike
There are reportedly more than 7,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Hundreds of them have been incarcerated under the practice of administrative detention. On February 10, they started a hunger strike in all Israeli prisons in protest against the death of a Palestinian prisoner due to deliberate medical negligence in a hospital in the Occupied Territories.
The move prompted the Emergency Committee of the Palestine Prisoners' Movement to announce a state of alert in all prisons of the Zionist regime on February 10 and three days of public mourning following the martyrdom of Ahmad Abu Ali.
The Palestinian Prisoners' Society (PPS) announced in a statement that Ahmed Badr Abdullah Abu Ali, a resident of Yatta in the south of the occupied West Bank city of al-Khalil, died at Soroka Medical Center on the morning of Friday, February 10.
The 48-year-old Abu Ali was detained in 2012 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. His family says he was suffering from chronic heart failure, diabetes and obesity and was admitted to the hospital after his health condition sharply deteriorated.
The PPS held Israeli authorities fully responsible for Abu Ali's death and for the fate of all ill Palestinian prisoners being incarcerated at the regime's detention centers, stating that his death represents yet another crime that the occupying Tel Aviv regime is systematically perpetrating against Palestinians.
Human rights organizations say Israel violates all the rights and freedoms granted to prisoners by the Fourth Geneva Convention. They say administrative detention violates their right to due process since the evidence is withheld from prisoners while they are held for lengthy periods without being charged, tried, or convicted.
Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes to protest their detention and the conditions in the prisons of the Zionist regime. Israeli jail authorities keep Palestinian prisoners under deplorable conditions without proper hygiene standards. Palestinian inmates have also been subject to systematic torture, harassment, and repression.
This article was published in
Volume 53 Number 2 - February 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2023/Articles/M5300224.HTM
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