Israel’s Supreme Court is hearing a petition today to free the prisoner, Mohammed Allan, on health grounds.
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“I don’t think he should be released”, Yaakov Peri, an Israeli lawmaker and former head of the Shin Bet internal security agency, told Israel Radio.
Over 7,000 Palestinians are reportedly incarcerated in 17 Israeli prisons and detention centers, many of them without charge or trial.
“He was critically wounded by five bullets: we tried to save him but he died”, he said.
As for how force-feeding is implemented, he said it is “done by inserting a tube through his nose to his stomach”, adding that this tube “hits all the parts that it passes through inside the body, which causes (internal) cuts and bruises and puts the prisoner’s life at risk”.
Police separated hundreds of people from each side, with the 1948 Palestinians waving Palestinian flags, chanting their support for Allan and calling for his release.
Palestinian hunger striker Mohammed Allan spent his college years as an activist and leader in the student wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group at a West Bank university.
Many Palestinian prisoners have staged hunger strikes, including those on administrative detention.
Allan is still unconscious, but in a stable condition after being given intravenous fluids and salts, while he is breathing with the aid of an artificial respirator.
Nearly every day, Palestinians have held solidarity protests outside the hospital in Ashkelon.
A almost two-month hunger strike by a Palestinian detainee now in a coma may test a controversial new Israeli law on force-feeding, with doctors vowing to refuse to carry it out. A doctor, who is working on behalf of the Allan family, Dr. Hani Abedin, was denied access to visit Allan by Israeli Prison Service guards.
In protest, Allan began a hunger strike in June, only drinking water.
In that case, he said, the patient would likely die in a very short time if no medical assistance was given. 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.
Doctors and activists point to the law’s limited powers to coerce objecting doctors into force-feeding as evidence of its political motivation, rather than medical. “They wanted to prevent us from showing solidarity with a person that the state is punishing for no fault of his own”. They searched his office and sifted through his documents, according to Addameer, a group that advocates for Palestinian prisoners.
The use of administrative detention orders against Jewish suspects was approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.
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Several rallies to protest alleged police brutality and racism against the Ethiopian community have been held in recent months, some of which turned violent.
