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One man take on the system......and is suffering for it

The hunger-strike of one Palestinian one in Israel - 62 days so far - has not only brought worldwide attention to his plight but the whole "system" of detention of Palestinians by Israelis, the conditions under which Palestinians exist ("live" is hardly the appropriate word) in the West Bank and Israel itself and Israel's appalling legal (not "justice") system.

"A Palestinian man who has refused to eat since he was detained without charge two months ago by Israel “could die at any minute,” one of his lawyers told The Guardian newspaper on Thursday, day 61 of the hunger strike.

An Israeli medical charity’s report on the condition of the detained man, Khader Adnan, which was submitted in support of his appeal to Israel’s High Court, agreed that his life was in danger.

As Amira Hass reported for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week, Mr. Adnan, 33, was arrested in December at his home in the West Bank and began his hunger strike to protest “what he regards as humiliating practices exercised by Shin Bet security service interrogators.” Three weeks after his arrest, an Israeli military prosecutor obtained an order that would initially keep Mr. Adnan in prison for four months, without charge or trial. According to Israeli authorities, classified information presented to the court suggested that Mr. Adnan was “a senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who is involved in organizational activity” on behalf of the militant group, which has killed Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Mr. Khader has acted as a spokesman for Islamic Jihad in the West Bank in the past, as my colleagues Christine Hauser and Steven Erlanger reported in 2005.

Under Israel’s system of military justice in the occupied West Bank, Palestinians can be held in detention under “administrative arrest orders” without the right to see the evidence against them. According to Ms. Hass, this puts lawyers for prisoners like Mr. Adnan in an impossible situation. In her account of a hearing on Mr. Adnan’s detention in a military court, Ms. Hass wrote: “The process of opposing administrative arrest turns into a guessing game, or a game of tag in which one side is blindfolded while the other side has a full view of events. There is no indictment, nor is there evidence to dispute.”

In a report for the Israeli news blog +972, Yossi Gurvitz explained, “Administrative detention in Israel is based on the British emergency laws, which were never repealed.” He added: “A person may be detained for up to six months without the government needing to show any evidence against him. Perhaps the most cruel element of administrative detention … is the fact that it may be extended time and time again.”

In an op-ed for Al Jazeera, Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American activist who has argued for Israelis and Palestinians to share a single state, explained that Mr. Adnan had explicitly stated that his strike was in protest at the system of administrative detention.

Adnan wrote in a letter published through his lawyer, “I have been humiliated, beaten, and harassed by interrogators for no reason, and thus I swore to God I would fight the policy of administrative detention to which I and hundreds of my fellow prisoners fell prey.”

According to Amnesty International, which has issued two urgent appeals on Adnan’s behalf, as of Dec. 31 last year, 307 Palestinians were in Israeli administrative detention, including 21 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council that was elected in January 2006.

“I hereby assert that I am confronting the occupiers not for my own sake as an individual, but for the sake of thousands of prisoners who are being deprived of their simplest human rights while the world and international community look on,” Adnan wrote in his letter.
Mr. Abunimah’s argument in favor of a shared Israeli-Palestinian state is based in part on what he sees as the example of Northern Ireland. On Thursday, he noted on Twitter that a spokesman for Sinn Féin, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, called for Ireland’s government “to urgently intervene to save Khader Adnan’s life.” In the 1980s, 10 I.R.A. prisoners died after long hunger strikes protesting the conditions under which they were held in a Northern Ireland jail. The first striker to die, Bobby Sands, died 66 days into his fast.
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This piece, here, is worth reading in order to get a sense of the issues in the hunger-strike. Meanwhile, Gideon Levy, in Haaretz, also writes about this Palestinian's situation.

"Khader Adnan was arrested on December 17. Israeli soldiers came to this house in the middle of the night. This was his seventh detention or arrest by Israel. The first time was in 1999, when he was held for half a year without trial. After that, he spent eight months in detention in 2000; he was arrested again in 2002-2003; detained in 2004; detained for 18 months in 2005-2006 and six months in 2008.

In 2010, the Palestinian Authority arrested him for 12 days. Then, too, he went on a hunger strike, for the first time in his life. Between arrests, he worked at a pita bakery in Qabatiya and was an Islamic Jihad activist. His family says he is a political activist."


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