Alwaght- 250 Palestinian being held in Israeli regime’s notorious Negev prison began an open-ended hunger strike on Tuesday to protest their administrative detention.
A representative of the prisoners told Ma'an News that Israeli regime uses the policy of administrative detention "to coerce the Palestinians and deprive them of their life."
Administrative detention is a notorious military violence that allows the Israeli regime to hold captives for an indefinite period. The inhuman process also allows for arrest based on secret evidence, and there is no requirement to charge the detainees or to allow them to stand trial.
Palestinian administrative detainees launched hunger strike after Palestinian prisoner Muhammad Allan, 31-year-old lawyer on 60 days hunger strike, slipped into a coma on Friday. Allan who has also undertaken his hunger strike to protest his administrative detention woke from his coma on Tuesday, vowing to continue hunger strike.
There are currently approximately 1,500 Palestinian prisoners in the Negev prison, 250 of whom are being held in administrative detention.
At the end of June, there were a total of 370 Palestinians being held in administrative detention, according to Israeli rights group B'Tselem.
The prisoners' representative in the Negev jail told Ma'an that the hunger strike would go on "until Israel’s policy of administrative detention comes to an end."
He promised that administrative detainees will continue to struggle and urging the "world and the Palestinian community in particular" to support prisoners in their fight.
Administrative detainees are community leaders, lecturers, doctors, lawyers, and students, among others, he said, pointing in particular to Nidal Abu Akar, a leader from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine movement, who has served a total of nine years in administrative detention.
Israeli forces usually release him for a few weeks or months, he said, and then they detain him again for a year or two without trial under administrative detention.
"This time we declare a real Intifada so as to cancel the military law called administrative detention," the representative said.
"We are not asking to be released or to have our sentences reduced, but rather we are asking to completely stop administrative detentions."
This practice is criticized by human rights organizations as a breach of civil and political rights. As explicitly proclaimed in Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to fair trial is an essential right in all countries that respect the rule of law. The majority of countries in the world are parties to the Covenant — including Israeli regime, which signed the treaty in 1966.
Ann Harrisson, Deputy Director in the Amnesty International global movement, says “[Israeli regime] has used its system of administrative detention – intended as an exceptional measure against people posing an extreme and imminent danger to security – to trample on the human rights of detainees for decades. It is a relic that should be put out to pasture.”
OHCHR reiterates it call on Israeli regime to end its practice of administrative detention and to either release without delay or to promptly charge all administrative detainees and prosecute them with all the judicial guarantees required by international human rights law.
The prolonged hunger strikes of administrative detainees such as Khader Adnan and Hana Shalabi put the issue of administrative detention under the international spotlight. Their non-violent protest was followed by a mass hunger strike which included an estimated 2,000 other Palestinians in Israeli prisons, many of whom are either serving prison sentences or awaiting trial. Amnesty International’s report also documents measures taken by the [Israeli regime] Prison Service (IPS) against prisoners and detainees who went on hunger strike, with detainees describing ill-treatment by medically-trained IPS staff.
