Palestinian prisoners: After 79 days of hunger-strike, Tha’er Halahla and Bilal Thiab to be released
After an ongoing 79 days of hunger-strike, Palestinian detainees Tha’er Halahla and Bilal Thiab, signed an agreement with the Israeli Prison Authorities to end their hunger-strike in exchange for their release as they are being held without charges, the Maan News Agency reported.
According to Maan, head of the Legal Unit at the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS), Lawyer Jawad Boulos, was present when detainee Tha’er signed the agreement at the Ramla Israeli Prison, adding Halahla will be released on June 5th.
The father of Halahla said that Tha’er phoned him shortly after midnight, informed him of the recent developments, and told him that he still has no information regarding the fate of the rest of the political prisoners held under administrative detention.
Furthermore, the brother of detainee Bilal Thiab said that a late-night agreement was reached between his brother and the Prison Administration, and that detainee Jamal Al-Hour, representative of Hamas at the Hunger-Strike Committee, detainee Bassam As-Sa’dy, in addition to lawyer Boulos were present when the agreement was signed.
According to initial reports, detainee Bilal Thiab will be release on August 14, 2012.
Talking to his mother over phone, Thiab said that he grants this victory to the Palestinian People, adding that this agreement was reached after a series of meetings. He further stated that negotiations are still being held at the Ramla Prison to conclude all files of hunger-striking detainees.
Thousands of Palestinians are imprisoned by Israel, hundreds are currently being held under the illegal administrative detention polices that deprive them from their right to legal representation. Read more »
Palestinian inmates agree to end hunger strike
It was not clear what impact the accord would have on a separate hunger strike by several prisoners against Israel’s policy of detaining Palestinians without charge for months or even years.
The Israeli activist organisation Physicians for Human Rights-Israel said on Monday that at least seven administrative detainees were on weeks-long hunger strikes. Most have been refusing food for at least 40 days. The group also said two had been refusing food for more than 70 days and were “in imminent risk of death”.
According to Israeli human rights activists, international law says countries should use administrative detentions only in exceptional cases but Israel implements it as a “blanket measure” against Palestinians....
The agreement did not make any mention of administrative detentions." (See the Financial Times and Addameer for more information. --Frontlines ed.]
by Nidal al-Mughrabi | Reuters | May 14, 2012
A Palestinian artist paints a mural in Gaza City in support of Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike in Israeli jails May 14, 2012. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem
Palestinian women look at a man standing inside a mock prison cell during a rally in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 14, 2012, in support of Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike in Israeli jails. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails agreed on Monday to an Egyptian-brokered deal aimed at ending a mass hunger strike that challenged Israel’s policy of detention without trial and raised fears of a bloody Palestinian backlash if any protesters died.
Most of some 1,600 prisoners, a third of the 4,800 Palestinians in Israeli jails, began refusing food on April 17 although a few had been fasting much longer – up to 77 days.
Their protest centered on demands for more family visits, an end to solitary confinement and an easing of so-called “administrative detention”, a practice that has drawn international criticism on human rights grounds.
An Egyptian official involved in the talks said that under Monday’s deal to end the strike, Israel had agreed to end solitary confinement for 19 prisoners and lifted a ban on visits to prisoners by relatives living in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Israel also agreed to improve other conditions of detention, and to free so-called administrative detainees once they complete their terms unless they are brought to court, according to the official.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri confirmed the deal, telling Reuters that “the prisoners signed the deal after their demands were met. The deal was brokered by Egypt.”
Israel also confirmed an accord had been struck. “An agreement has been signed to bring about the end of a 28-day hunger strike by Palestinian security prisoners,” the Israel Prisons Authority said in a written statement. Read more »
Palestine: Hunger-striker Bilal Diab writes will to family
Palestinian protesters hold up banners and portraits of a prisoners jailed in Israel,during a rally in solidarity with prisoners in Israeli jails, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, April 30, 2012 (APA images)
May 12, 2012 — JENIN (Ma’an) — Hunger-striker Bilal Diab has sent a will to his family in the northern West Bank on his 75th day without food, relatives said on Saturday.
Diab, 27, has refused food since Feb. 29 to protest his detention without charge in Israeli jail.
His family, from Jenin-district town Kufr Rai, said they received his will on Saturday detailing his wishes in case of his death.
“We will have victory, but only through either martyrdom or immediate release — not any partial solution as claimed by the prisons administration,” Diab wrote.
Last week, representative for Fatah prisoners Jamal al-Rjoob said detainees affiliated to Fatah had accepted half the proposals offered by Israeli authorities in response to the strike.
But Yousef Rizqa, political adviser to Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, warned on Monday that Israel was trying to use party affiliations to sow rifts between the hunger-strikers.
“On the 75th day of my hunger strike, I am still determined, patient and focused on continuing against conspiracies, threats and solitary confinement by the fascist Israeli prison administration,” Diab wrote.
Diab instructed his family keep his grave at ground level, in accordance with Islamic teaching, and distribute sweets at his funeral as a sign of celebration.
He asked his brother Homam to perform prayers for him, and freed hunger-striker Khader Adnan to lower him into his grave.
The young hunger-striker thanked all Palestinians, and Arab and Islamic nations for their support. Read more »
Palestinian hunger strikers ‘in immiment danger’
May 10, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish
At least six of the 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are in imminent danger of dying, according to their lawyers.
Al Jazeera’s Cal Perry reports from Ramallah, West Bank.
Palestine: Political prisoners’ hunger strike reaches critical stage
Detained PFLP Leader Moved To Prison Hospital
Palestinian sources reported, Sunday, that detained secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Ahmad Sa’adat, was moved to the Ramla prison hospital after a sharp deterioration in his health condition.
Sa’adat had been on hunger-strike since thirteen days joining the open-ended hunger-strike declared by the Palestinian political prisoners held in various Israeli prisons and detention center.
The PFLP leader has been in solitary confinement for three years now, with no end in sight; his health condition is gradually deteriorating due to various health conditions that need specialized medical attention.
Palestinian Minister of Detainee, Issa Qaraqe’, stated that the Ministry’s attorney, Rami Al-Alami, went to visit Sa’adat on Sunday but the Israeli Prison Administration told him that Sa’adat was moved to the Ramla Prison hospital.
The Quds Net News Agency reported that detainees of the PFLP rejected an Israeli offer to end their hunger-strike in exchange for removing Sa’adat from solitary confinement, and stated that Israel must stop all of its violations, and put an end to its illegal solitary confinement policies.
All hunger-striking detainees are demanding Israel to treatment in accordance with International Law, and insist on an end to all policies of solitary confinement, and all sorts of attacks and violations against them and their visiting family members.
Detainee Bilal Thiab entered his sixty-second day of ongoing hunger-strike demanding to be released. Several hunger-striking detainees were moved to hospital but refused to break their strike.
Detainee Tha’er Halahla entered his 61 day of hunger-strike at the Ramla Prison Hospital; prison doctors warned Thursday that his body is losing its immune system and his organs might be failing. Read more »
58 Days On Hunger-Strike, Ailing Palestinian Detainee Determined To Continue
by Saed Bannoura
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Israel: Number Of Hunger-Striking Palestinian Detainees Could Reach 3000
Tuesday April 24, 2012
Israeli Prison - File, Nablus TV
Dozens of detainees are currently on hunger-strike that officially started last Tuesday; the strike, described as “the battle of empty bowels”, aims at ending Israel’s illegal administrative detention polices, halting all violations against the detainees and their families, and improving the living conditions of the detainees.
Head of the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS), Qaddoura Fares, told the Maan News Agency that the first group of detainees, held under administrative detention without charges, have reached the “no return point” as they have been on hunger-strike since 56 days, and insist on not breaking their strike until they are released.
Fares added that the second group of detainees has been on hunger strike since seven days now, and are demanding Israeli to improve their living conditions, allowing visitation rights, halting violations against their visiting family members, ending all solitary confinement policies, allowing them the right to education, and ending all night raids, and searches, targeting the them and their rooms.
“The current number of detainees who are on hunger-strike is 1400-1600, and will likely increase to 3000 in the coming few days” Fares said and added that it is unlikely that all 4700 detainees will join the strike, but could hold solidarity hunger strikes, such as two days a week. Read more »
Palestinian officials want UN help for ‘hostages’
Palestinian officials appealed to the international community on Tuesday to press the Israeli government to end its draconian administrative detention policy.
Addressing the first day of a two-day UN meeting in Geneva on “The question of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention facilities,” Palestinian Legislative Council representative Ahmed Shreem and director general of prisoners’ rehabilitation minister Mohammad Albatta called on UN member states to bring concerted legal and diplomatic pressure to bear on Israeli authorities.
They said that this was the only way to force them to stop locking Palestinian people up in Israel for renewable terms of six months without charge.
Earlier this week PA Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs Issa Qaraqe branded administrative detention a “dangerous policy” which “turns Palestinian prisoners into hostages of the Israeli security services in breach of international human rights law.”
More than 300 Palestinians are currently held in administrative detention in Israeli prisons. Read more »
Apartheid is a Crime, Not an Analogy
[It may be that most war criminals do not talk much about war crimes and international law, for obvious reasons. But this is not true for imperialists, who, along with their dictatorial friends and Zionist allies, carry out the largest crimes against humanity, yet arrogantly claim the mantle of "humanitarian" wars and occupations "to spread democracy and justice." The US and Israel do not submit to the authority of international law, or of the International Criminal Court, which they nevertheless invoke against defiant warlords, bullies, and petty criminals who refuse to serve imperial designs. In fact, the Iraqi regime, however much their roots were as puppets of the US occupation, were unwilling to further extend the immunity of US soldiers from prosecution for war crimes, under Iraqi law. And this was the reason for the withdrawal of US troops--and why the "democratic" claims of the US ring hollow, around the world. So, too, are the claims of Israel to be "the only democracy in the middle east"--far too many know the history of the removal of Palestinians from historic Palestine--ethnic cleansing--and of Israeli's apartheid "double standard" toward Palestinians, to even consider that phony, arrogant, and racist claim. This article by Joe Catron in Ma'an breaks this down. -- Frontlines ed.]
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Palestinians being searched by Israeli troops at one of the countless "check-points" that block the movement of Palestinians across historic Palestine
By Joe Catron, Ma’an | March 4, 2012
As Israeli Apartheid Week unfolds around the world, apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people scramble to defend their chosen regime’s system of racism, ethnic cleansing, and occupation, against the charge of apartheid.
“The apartheid analogy is fatally flawed,” the Jerusalem Connection’s Shelley Neese writes. The David Project’s David Bernstein says, “The apartheid analogy is specious and absurd.” The Anti-Defamation League has even circulated an old report: “The Apartheid Analogy: Wrong for Israel.”
These commentators are right, but not for the reasons they claim. An apartheid ‘analogy’ is fatally flawed, specious, absurd, and wrong for Israel because apartheid is not an analogy, but a crime as well-defined in law as embezzlement or kidnapping.
The most relevant statute, the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, perhaps muddies the waters by stating that “the term ‘the crime of apartheid’ … shall include similar practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa.”
But it goes on to define exactly what those and other “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them” are.
Most will sound familiar to anyone who follows news from Palestine. The ban on “arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups” should bring to mind Hana Shalabi, Khader Adnan, and 307 other administrative detainees held indefinitely without charges, evidence, or trials. This is further to the 4,078 Palestinian political prisoners sentenced by military courts or facing the imminent prospect, all under occupation laws no Jew will ever face.
The prohibition of “measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country” could have been meant to describe discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Read more »
Palestinian political prisoner on hunger strike against administrative detention
Hana Shalabi vs Israel
Protesters supporting hunger striker Hana Shalabi (Photo: Alternative Information Center)
by Allison Deger, Mondoweiss
Today Hana Shalabi entered her 16th day of hunger strike against Israeli administrative detention. This is Shalabi’s second round of administrative detention; she was held without charge from 2009-2011 in Israeli administrative detention. Last October Shalabi was released through a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas.
Wednesday, the hunger striker was scheduled to see a judge at Ofer Military Court. However, Shalibi and her attorney were banned; the hearing took place without Shalabi, and the judge ruled to postpone a decision on the hunger striker’s release. The next hearing is set for March 3, 2011, when an Israeli intelligence official will be present. Neither Shalabi nor her attorney is permitted to attend the hearing.
Hana Yahya Shalabi is 30 years old and is one of nine children. Before her arrest she was living with her parents, who are also on hunger strike, in a village near Jenin. Shalabi’s parents began their hunger strike on 23 February.
In addition to family and legal support, Shalabi’s case is somewhat of an internet cause, akin to Khader Adnan, who is also in Israeli administrative detention. Adnan recently ended a 66-day hunger strike and gained international recognition through a Twitter campaign calling for his release.
Yesterday, Palestinians and solidarity activists tweeted with the hashtag #HanaVsIsrael15Days, in order to build awareness for Shalabi and Israel’s practice of administrative detention. The hashtag trended globally around 2pm EST. Read more »
Palestine: Btselem’s end of 2011 video
btselem on Jan 4, 2012
In 2011, volunteers in B’Tselem’s camera project filmed over 500 hours of footage in the West Bank.
There are two minutes we collected from it, in order to sum up the passing year.
Ethnic Cleansing of Invented People
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian activist Mustafa al-Tamimi during his funeral in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on December 11, 2011 (Photographer: ABBAS MOMANI/Source: AFP/Getty Images)
By Miko Peled
Mostafa Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, Bahjat Zaalan and his son Ramdan from Gaza died on my fiftieth birthday and just a few days after Newt Gingrich declared them an invented people. They were murdered by the Israeli terrorist organization, the IDF, an organization that is supported and funded by the US. One Israeli terrorist shot the invented Tamimi in the head with a tear gas canister, and another Israeli terrorist fired a rocket that murdered the invented Zaalan and his boy Ramadan. Both terrorists were educated and trained by Israel, and armed by the US. The Israeli terrorists are not invented but quite real, and they are safe, protected by the apartheid regime that trained and sent them on their missions, and the Israeli court system will make sure that they are never brought to justice. This is how Israel’s well-oiled ethnic cleansing machine operates.
The Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine is not a thing of the past but an ongoing campaign that is executed by three arms of the State of Israel: The education system, a dedicated bureaucracy and the security forces. The education system is dedicated to indoctrinating and producing soldiers and bureaucrats who will execute and enforce the ethnic cleansing. The bureaucracy is charged with making rules that make life unlivable for Palestinians. Rules that restrict Palestinian access to their lands, and restrict their ability to travel freely to work and school. This same bureaucracy then demands that Palestinians pay for permits to be allowed do these very same basic things that they were denied. The security forces, the most obvious of which is the IDF, are charged with enforcing the restrictions, fighting off the resistance, armed or peaceful, and terrorizing the “invented” people of Palestine.
Since my father was a general and I served as a soldier in the IDF terrorist organization, people often ask me how is it that Israeli children who are raised in a Western style democracy become such monsters once they are in uniform? The detailed answer can be found in my book, The General’s Son due out in February 2012, but the short answer is this: Education – Racism requires a mindset that is fashioned by education. In order to rationalize and justify the ethnic cleansing the Israeli education system portrays Palestinians as culturally inferior, violent and bent on the annihilation of the Jews, and at the same time, void of a true national identity. Palestinian national identity is but a figment of some anti-Semitic imagination.
Israeli children are educated to see the Palestinians as a problem that must be solved and as a threat that must be eliminated. They can go through life, as I did growing up in Jerusalem, without ever meeting a Palestinian child. They know nothing of the life or culture of Palestinians who quite often live only several hundred meters from them. Read more »
Zionist business as usual: another day of Ethnic Cleansing and settler-colonial violence against Palestinians
Israeli Forces Arrest Eight Citizens from Jenin Camp, Nablus, Gaza
December 20, 2011, PNN – Palestine News Network, occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com
When they ask: “Why Do you Teach your Children Hate?”
Rafeef Ziadah – ‘We teach life, sir’, London, 12.11.11
sternchenproductions on Nov 13, 2011
RAFEEF ZIADAH is a Canadian-Palestinian spoken word artist and activist. Her debut CD Hadeel is dedicated to Palestinian youth, who still fly kites in the face of F16 bombers, who still remember the names if their villages in Palestine and still hear the sound of Hadeel (cooing of doves) over Gaza.
Palestine: Five Wounded, Four Arrested in West Bank Protests in Solidarity with Hunger-Striking Prisoners
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PNN
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Weekly protests erupted around the West Bank on Friday, resulting in two injuries and the arrests of at least three Palestinians and one German solidarity activist. Demonstrations were held in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners entering their eleventh day of hunger strikes in Israeli prisons.
 In the southern West Bank village of al-Walajeh, a few kilometers west of Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers shot tear gas canisters to suppress a demonstration of about 50 people, mostly youths. Hosam Odah, Mohammed al-Jawarish, and Hamzah Sarasreh, ages unknown, were arrested as well as German solidarity activist Amr Mohammed.In nearby al-Ma’sara village, two Palestinians named Mahmoud Ala’adin and Mahmoud Zawahireh were injured when Israeli soldiers suppressed a protest. Their injuries were described as “moderate.”
In the central West Bank village of Bil’in, popular committee media coordinator Ratib Abu Rahma said that the Israeli army shot tear gas canisters, sound bombs, and rubber bullets at demonstrating Palestinians. He explained that dozens of Palestinians suffered from “severe tear gas inhalation,” including Palestine TV cameraman Ali Dar Ali and photographer Mohammed Radi.
Violent clashes were also reported in the central West Bank village of al-Nabi Saleh, where three Palestinians were hit by Israeli tear gas canisters. Reporters claimed that in violation of Israeli army open-fire regulations, soldiers fired the canisters directly at protestors instead of over their heads.
Palestinian prisoners in Israeli military prisons have been refusing to eat since September 27 in protest of worsening prison conditions. The strike includes at least 500 people as of Friday, about 7% of the 7,500 total prisoners. It was called after Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu authorized a tightening of prison restrictions designed to force the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas in Gaza since 2006.
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