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Palestinian hunger striker loses consciousness after 60 days

Mohammed had in the past been imprisoned for his affiliation with the Islamic Jihad, a violent Palestinian militant group, the father said.

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Allan had been refusing food as well as medical treatment, and it was feared he might be force-fed just weeks after Israel passed a law enabling the controversial procedure.

The hunger-striker, now under administrative detention in Israel, has also refused medical care since being hospitalized several days ago, but once he lost consciousness, the doctors at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon intervened to save his life.

Supporters of the law say force-feeding is necessary to save prisoners from death, and to discourage them from using hunger strikes as a tactic to end – or draw attention – to their detention.

A devastating Gaza war last summer between Israel and Hamas killed more than 2,200 Palestinians and 73 people on the Israeli side, while the Islamists evicted Abbas’s Fatah party in a week of deadly street clashes in 2007. An ethics committee at the hospital authorized taking blood samples as a first step to force-feeding him, but doctors declined to comply.

“His condition is stable”, said Kedar, who added that further testing of Allan’s condition would determine whether more treatment is required. Barzilai said that it was giving the prisoner liquids and a saline drip and his condition had stabilized.

An initial investigation by the Israeli military concluded that the Palestinian assailant reached the checkpoint from west of the Beit Horon settlement in order to attack the soldier, the Channel 10 news reported.

According to a report published on June 2015, B’Tselem, Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, documented dozens of cases in the Ramallah area of the West Bank in which Palestinians were injured, some severely, by live ammunition fired by Israeli security forces.

Allan is protesting “administrative detention”, which means he has not been indicted or tried.

Under the new law prisons must seek the permission of a district court and doctor before a force-feeding can be carried out, but physicians are not compelled to participate.

Allan remains conscious, and has decided to continue his hunger strike despite the grave danger to his health.

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“It’s like standing under a 20-story building that you know someone is about to jump from, and instead of stopping his jump we are being told to wait and then try to save his life after he falls”, she said.

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