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Amnesty: Hunger striker could be resentenced if health improves

The petition before the High Court of Justice, asking the judges to release Allan, was brought by Adalah, an influential Israeli political advocacy NGO.

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The Israeli high Court chose to suspend the detention-without-trial order of Allan following a 65-day-long hunger strike because of his critical medical condition. He cautioned that it could take several weeks to know the full extent of the damage that he had sustained from the strike.

Khatib spoke after visiting Allan in hospital in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon and said his health was improving, though he remained bedridden.

“Such violence is possible because of the environment created as a result of Israel’s decades-long policy of illegal settlement activities”, Feltman said in his briefing to the 15-member Security Council on the situation in the Middle East. “He is starting to communicate and I am happy that medically he is on the right path”. His body can not yet process food after such a prolonged fast. He has been held since November in a form of internment known as administrative detention, which was temporarily lifted by Wednesday’s ruling.

Allan maintained that he should be released by September, and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said that when Allan woke up from his four-day coma on Tuesday he “declared in front of his doctors that if there is not any solution to his case within 24 hours he will ask for all treatment to stop and will stop drinking water”. These NGOs are among the leaders of campaigns demonizing Israel, and the Allaan hunger strike is another means to achieve this end.

Palestinian prisoners have used hunger strikes before to draw attention to the practice of administrative detention. The film was rejected because it concerned Israel but did not deal directly with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank or discrimination against Palestinians, the New York Times reported.

Earlier this year, Adnan waged a second hunger strike – this time for 55 days – that eventually forced Israel to release him in July.

Allan has been detained without charge or trial since November 2014 on the basis of “secret evidence” which has been withheld from him and his lawyers, thereby denying him the ability to exercise his right to challenge his detention.

Last month, the Knesset passed into law the “Prevention of Damage by Hunger Strikers” bill, which gives the country the right to force-feed hunger-striking prisoners if certain conditions are met. The force-feeding can take place only if the individual case is approved by the attorney general and a president of a district court.

Force-feeding is an unethical violation of patient autonomy and is very close to being torture.

Dr Hezy Levy of Israel’s Barzilai hospital said that his condition had greatly improved.

He has additionally turn into a trigger for rightwing Israelis, however for various causes. On one hand the court condoned the legality of the use of administrative detention and suggested its support for its use against Palestinian political prisoners’.

In Gaza, the Islamic Jihad group threatened to renew attacks if Allan died.

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Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile-defence system was deployed in the south. Media reports said it was in case Islamic Jihad or other militant groups launched attacks over the hunger strike.

Israeli regime forces arrest a Palestinian man during a demonstration