Letter by Palestinians held in Israeli jails delivered to UN commissioner

A letter written by Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons has been delivered to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Ramallah.
According to qudsnet.com , the Palestinian Authority’s Minister for Prisoners’ Affairs Issa Qaraqe handed the letter over to the UN official on Saturday in the presence of prisoners’ families and freed detainees who had travelled to Ramallah from various cities across the West Bank.

Sawsan Shaheen, the coordinator of the event who has been on hunger strike for over one month to express solidarity with Palestinian hunger-striking prisoners, says people should mount pressure on the UN in order to force the body to give an appropriate response.

Commenting on the issue, Khazr Adnan, a senior member of Palestine Islamic Jihad Movement, said UN silence in the face of Israeli regime’s crimes towards Palestinian prisoners amounts to collusion with Tel Aviv in its massacring of the people of Palestine.

More than 4,500 Palestinian prisoners are held in Israeli prisons. Among the inmates are Ayman Sharawneh, Samer al-Issawi, Jaafar Ezzedine, and Tareq Qaa’dan, who have been refusing food for months.

The four embarked on a hunger strike to protest against their administrative detention, a controversial practice used by Tel Aviv that allows Israeli authorities to incarcerate Palestinians indefinitely without charging them or holding a trial.

In February, thousands of Palestinian prisoners went on a one-day hunger strike in protest at the death of Arafat Jaradat, a 30-year-old father of two, who had died, according to Israeli prison authorities, of cardiac arrest in Israel’s Megiddo Prison.