150 Palestinian prisoners go on hunger strike: NGO

A Palestinian non-governmental organization says nearly 150 Palestinian prisoners have gone on hunger strike over the past week.

“120 Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s Nafha Prison [who were recently transferred] announced an open hunger strike on Thursday to demand that they be returned to the prison blocs in which they were previously held,” Qadora Faris, the head of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, said on Sunday.

The head of the NGO added that “within the last 24 hours, another 28 inmates in Israel’s Rimon and Ishel prisons joined the hunger strike.”

The NGO says 6,500 Palestinians are in Israeli jails, including 466 under so-called administrative detention.

Administrative detention is a sort of imprisonment without trial or charge that allows the Israeli regime to imprison Palestinians for up to six months. The detention order can be renewed for indefinite periods of time.

Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are increasingly resorting to hunger strike to protest both administrative detention medical negligence.

Israeli officials have announced a decision to force-feed a Palestinian detainee who has been on hunger strike for nearly two months. Jamil al-Khatib, the lawyer for Mohammed Allaan (shown below), said on Saturday that Israeli officials are seeking a court order to force-feed his client, who has been held without charge since November 2014.

The Israeli parliament, Knesset, approved the force-feeding law on July 30. UN officials have said the force-feeding law is a flagrant violation of human rights.

The UN officials in the occupied West Bank also denounced the force-feeding law as “a cause for concern to those who work to protect the right to health of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory.”