PALESTINIAN prisoners held under Israel’s so-called administrative detention policy are defiantly planning a mass open-ended hunger strike in protest at their unlawful and indefinite imprisonment without trial or charge.
The mass protest action is to start next Sunday, June 18, according to the Palestinian Administrative Detainees’ Committee.
Palestinian inmates will also keep up their boycott of the regime’s courts ‘as a means of drawing attention to the violation of their rights,’ the committee added.
The detainees’ key demand is for the regime to end its practice of administrative detention, while also seeking to force ‘Israel to respect its obligations under the international humanitarian and human rights law.’
The UN has once again called on Israel to release Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Detention takes place on the orders of a military commander and on the basis of what the regime describes as ‘secret’ evidence, which the Palestinians describe as ‘prefabricated.’ Using the method of ‘prefabriciation’, some prisoners have been held in administrative detention for up to 11 years.
The latest figures released by Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association show that Israel is currently holding around 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners in its prisons and detention facilities, including 155 children and 32 women.
The figure also includes 1,014 Palestinians who are being kept under the regime’s administrative detention policy.
Many Palestinian detainees have resorted to open-ended hunger strikes on frequent occasions to express outrage at their plight under the occupying regime’s inhumane detention policy.
Khader Adnan, a senior leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement, recently died in an Israeli prison after an 87- day hunger strike.
The Palestinian Administrative Detainees’ Committee said the plan to hold a mass open-ended hunger strike was agreed after its negotiations with the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) failed.
During the talks, the committee demanded, among other things, an end to Israel’s administrative detention regime and lifting of the penalties and other forms of collective punishment targeting prisoners affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement. The committee also urged the regime to end the solitary confinement of female detainees at Ramleh Prison.
The committee stated that the IPS and Israeli intelligence turned a deaf ear to all of the above demands and even resorted to threats of violence against prisoners.
Meanwhile the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations has called on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to add Israel to the list of parties liable for prosecution for grave violations against children.
Riyad Mansour made the plea on Tuesday at the international conference on protecting children in armed conflict, which was held in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.
He said that adding the Tel Aviv regime to the UN’s annual ‘list of shame,’ which includes governments and armed groups that commit grave abuses against children, will act as a deterrence.
The envoy further urged UN member states to support the moral, political and legal measures against Israel, saying it is a necessary and important step towards protecting children during conflicts.
Those included in the blacklist may be subject to Security Council sanctions for their violations and must sign and implement a UN action plan to end their violations in order to be removed from the list.
Also in his remarks, Mansour predicted that 2023 would be more deadly than the previous year, citing the killing of more than 20 Palestinian children by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has called 2022 the deadliest year for the Palestinians in the West Bank since 2006, with over 40 slain Palestinian children.
On Monday, three-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Tamimi died in hospital, four days after he was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers during a raid in the village of Nabi Saleh, near the city of Ramallah.
The toddler is the youngest Palestinian to have been killed by the occupation forces in the West Bank.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry condemned the killing of Tamimi as ‘a heinous crime against humanity,’ and demanded ‘an urgent international investigation into this crime and other crimes of killing Palestinian children.’
‘Israeli political and military officials and settlers must be held accountable to the full extent of the law,’ the ministry added. It called on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to add Israel to the list of parties liable for grave violations against children.
