Share

Female security prisoner announces hunger strike

Doctors at Barzilai Medical Centre, where Allan is on a respirator and receiving intravenous nutrients, described his condition as critical but stable and said they would consider later in the day whether to try to wean him off the machine.

Advertisement

This comes after his lawyer, Kamal Natur, sent an appeal to the court on August 15, saying that his client should be immediately released from administrative detention, where he has been held without charge since November 2014.

If his health deteriorates further, they will reconvene before Wednesday. Allaan has demanded Israel either release him or put him on trial.

A Palestinian man who attacked an Israeli soldier with a knife was shot dead Saturday by Israeli soldiers in the north of the occupied West Bank, said the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and the Israeli police.

At the end of last July, the Israeli Knesset passed the second and third readings of the draft law regarding the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike.

What happens next – whether or not the suspected militant becomes the first Palestinian prisoner force-fed to stay alive under a controversial new Israeli law – is an issue that has caused cleavages between doctors and the state in a clash over medical ethics and Israel’s detention policies.

Early Friday morning, Allan was reported to have been suffering from constant shivering and seizures, and he was unable to breath before he lost consciousness, according toAddameer, a prisoner support and human rights association for Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian prisons.

The justice ministry released a statement ahead of the hearing that included an offer to free Allan, a lawyer from northern West Bank town Einabus, “if he agrees to go overseas for a period of four years”.

Palestinian minister of prisoners’ affairs Issa Qaraqe. “He considered Israeli administrative detention barbaric even before his own detention”, Ameed told Anadolu Agency.

Beyond arguing that the patient’s life was in danger, they could also present arguments that allowing him to die would lead to security risks, according to Physicians for Human Rights.

Members of Israel’s 135,000-strong ethnic Ethiopian community say they suffer from discrimination. The feeding process involves a person being strapped to a chair, before special tubes are inserted through the nostril and pushed down towards the stomach. “The truth is that I now savor hunger as long as the goal is freedom in the absence of law in Israeli courts, and so I found myself having to fight this battle”.

Advertisement

On 16 June, Allan launched his open-ended, full hunger strike, refusing vitamins, salts and supplements, and consuming only water.

Credit AP