After an 86-day hunger strike in administrative detention, Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan died in Israel’s Ramle prison cell yesterday morning. Israeli officials refused to grant Adnan his freedom despite being informed by a Physicians for Human Rights Israel medic that he was facing “imminent death.”
The death of Khader is a reminder of the
deadly cost that Palestinians pay for challenging Israel’s apartheid and
a military justice system rigged against them,
Khader died in protest at the Israeli authorities’
systematic arbitrary detention of Palestinians and cruel and inhumane
treatment of prisoners. Palestinian detainees frequently use hunger
strikes to challenge such policies, risking their health and lives in
order to demand the rights that Israel denies them.
Khader 45 a modest baker by trade ftom Arrabeh, Jenin, had nine children with his wife
Randa, 41 who tirelessly campaigned for his release. Since 2004 he had been
arrested 13 times by Israeli authorities, due to his affiliation with
the political wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement. While
PIJ’s armed wing has carried out attacks on Israeli civilians, Khader
Adnan himself was never charged with any involvement in acts of
violence. In total, he spent eight years in detention, including nearly
six years in administrative detention without charge or trial.
Khader, helped introduce the practice of protracted hunger strikes by individual prisoners as a form of protest. Palestinian detainees have mostly used hunger strikes to challenge administrative detention, a controversial tactic in which more than 1,000 Palestinians and a handful of Israelis are currently being held without charge or trial.
Khader first grabbed international headlines and inspired solidarity protests over a decade ago, when he staged a 66-day hunger strike against his administrative detention. That galvanized hundreds of other prisoners to join the strike, which ended with a deal for his release. He was later arrested again. Through all levels of Palestinian society. from squalid refugee camps in Gaza to wealthy businesses in the West Bank. Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention are celebrated as national heroes. Israel considers Palestinian prisoners to be terrorists.
Before his last arrest, which led to his death Khader was arrested a dozen times and spent nearly a fifth of his life in Israeli prison, and became a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s open-ended occupation, now in its 56th year. His use of hunger strikes as a bargaining chip against Israeli authorities. during two other strikes in 2015 and 2018 that lasted 56 and 58 days, respectively motivated many other desperate Palestinians in administrative detention to refuse food.
Israel’s prison service said Khader had been charged with “involvement in terrorist activities” following his February arrest. Last week, an Israeli military court denied him bail. A hearing on his appeal was repeatedly postponed.
Khader's nearly eight years in Israeli prisons,were mostly spent in administrative detention, a standard practice that allows Israel to indefinitely imprison someone without ever charging them with an offence. Political prisoners like Khader are then detained based on secret evidence not available to them or their lawyer, and kept imprisoned without ever facing trial.
With some of
them staying in jail for up to 11 years according to human rights groups. Israeli jail
authorities keep Palestinian prisoners under deplorable conditions
lacking proper hygienic standards. The inmates have also been subjected
to systematic torture, harassment, and repression.
Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes in an attempt to express their outrage at the practice.
Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes in an attempt to express their outrage at the practice.
Ever since Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem
and Gaza in 1967, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have resorted
to hunger strikes as a form of protest to win collective or individual
rights.Since then, there have been many more mass and group hunger strikes. Prisoners have demanded improved
conditions, to be allowed family visits, or an end to solitary
confinement.
Hunger strikes are a form of resistance that has long been understood as a weapon of last resort
by the powerless and disenfranchised. designed to provoke feelings
of guilt in others, especially those in positions of authority. Most
hunger strikers involve either a
time-limited symbolic refusal of food, or – in more extreme cases – a
prolonged fast, limiting themselves to a liquid
diet.
Over the first three days without food, the body uses up its store of
glucose for energy. Then, the liver starts processing body fat, and the
body enters “ketosis”, producing ketones to use as fuel.
Once the fat store is exhausted, the body enters “starvation mode”
and starts harvesting muscles and vital organs for energy. At this
stage, the loss of bone marrow becomes life-threatening. Hunger strikers
can last anything from 46 to 73 days before dying.Indeed, death has been the outcome of many hunger strikes as in the case of the 1981 Irish Republican prisoners’ strike which saw. Robert Gerard "Bobby " Sands (Roibeard Gearóid Ó Seachnasaigh ) die at 1.17am on 5th of March 1981 after being on hunger strike for 66 days in the Long Kesh Maze Prison in Northern Ireland to protest against British treatment of political prisoners.
Over the next few months, 9 other republican prisoners followed him, the culmination of a 5 year struggle in the prisons of Northern Ireland demanding jail reforms and the return of special category status allowing them to be treated as prisoners of war , allowing them the privileges of POW's as specified in the Geneva Convention.
Humans can generally live for up to seven days without food or water, depending on their health.
If only liquids are taken, a human can survive for up to 30 to 45
days. To last longer than that, hunger strikers must keep their physical
activity down to a minimum.
As with other forms of resistance within
and outside prison walls hunger strikes are acts of resistance through
which Palestinians assert their political existence and demand their
rights. It is vital to sustain and nurture this resistance. In addition
to giving strength to and supporting the prisoners in their struggle for
rights, this form of resistance continuously and powerfully inspires
hope among Palestinians at large and the solidarity movement. It is our
responsibility to both support Palestinian prisoners – and to work for a
time when Palestinians no longer need to resort to such acts of
resistance through which their only recourse is to put their lives on
the line.
At first glance, such acts of self-destruction might seem oddly
irrational or self-defeating. Many forms of resistance , such as a
classic workers’ strike – aim to place economic and other costs on
opponents. Yet with the hunger strike, the most severe costs are
suffered by protesters, who risk pain, bodily damage and as id the case pf Khader Adnan: death.
Nonetheless, detainees know that the refusal of food can shame the
authorities who bear ultimate responsibility for the lives of those in
their custody.By striking, hunger strikers also exert some measure of control
against a system that micromanages their lives and strips them of
agency. They demonstrate that they are sovereign over their own bodies
and that the most serious decision of all – over life and death – is
still in their hands.
As Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene put it, "They could lock me up for no reason and with no chance to argue my
innocence. They could torture me, deprive me of sleep, put me in an
isolation cell, control every single aspect of my life. But they
couldn’t make me swallow their food."
Also for detained migrants and refugees, the choice of such an extreme
technique is powerful evidence of the cruelty they are subject to in
detention, and their moral determination to resist. Caged and herded
like animals, they exhibit the characteristically human capacity of
mastering their natural appetites in pursuit of a higher ideal.
Through hunger strikes, prisoners no
longer remain silent recipients of the prison authorities’ ongoing
violence: Instead, they inflict violence upon their own bodies in order
to impose their demands. In other words, hunger strikes are a space
outside the reach of the state’s power. The body of the striking
prisoner unsettles one of the most fundamental relationships to
violence behind prison walls, the one in which the state and its
prison authorities control every aspect of their lives behind bars and
are the sole inflictors of violence. In effect, prisoners reverse the
object and subject relationship to violence by fusing both into a single
body - the body of the striking prisoner – and in so doing reclaim
agency. They assert their status as political prisoners, refuse their
reduction to the status of “security prisoner”, and claim their rights
and existence. While authorities across the world frequently attempt to
dismiss hunger strikers as pathological and mentally ill, the strike is
in reality a careful and deliberate form of political action. As such,
hunger striking should be respected as an expression of the fundamental
human right to protest, as set out in Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This means that authorities must refrain
from force-feeding, and all other forms of intimidation and listen to
the just claims of detainees regarding their treatment. “Khader Adnan is the first Palestinian detainee to die as a result of a
hunger strike since 1992. When his life was at risk, Israeli authorities
refused Khader Adnan access to the specialized care he needed in a
civilian hospital and instead left him to die alone in his cell. The
appalling treatment of such a high-profile detainee is the latest
alarming sign that Israeli authorities are growing increasingly brazen
in their contempt for Palestinians’ rights and lives, and increasingly
reckless in their cruelty towards Palestinians,” said Heba Morayef,
Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North
Africa.
Undoubtedly, Khader Adnan was a notable symbol of the Palestinian prisoners’ struggle for freedom. Israel’s regime of mass arrests and imprisonment of Palestinians is an evident systematic effort to embed its criminal occupation and apartheid over Palestinian life. According to Israeli human rights group https://hamoked.org/ Israel currently holds more than 1,000 Palestinian detainees in administrative detention, meaning they are being held without charges or trial. This is the highest number being kept on record in three decades and as of last month, 4,900 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons as political prisoners. Amongst these are 160 child prisoners, 30 female prisoners, and 554 serving life sentences for resisting occupation and ethnic cleansing.
Administrative detention orders issued by the Israeli military against
Palestinians are based on secret evidence and are almost automatically
approved by the military courts which operate in the occupied West Bank.
Detainees cannot challenge the grounds of their detention – a denial of
their right to due process.
Israel’s systematic and discriminatory use of administrative
detention against Palestinians forms part of its system of domination
and oppression and constitutes the crime against humanity of apartheid.
Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court, imprisonment in violation of fundamental rules of international
law also constitutes a crime against humanity, if committed as part of a
widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.
On Tuesday afternoon, hours after his death, Israeli authorities
moved forward to perform an autopsy on the hunger striker’s body,
against Adnan’s final will that his body not be cut open and autopsied
in the event of his death.
According to statements made to the press by Adnan’s legal team, an
appeal was submitted to the Israeli courts to ban the autopsy. And more than 24 hours after his death, Khader Adnan’s family have yet to
receive his body back for burial despite a petition filed by his lawyer
on Tuesday. Amnesty International is calling on Israeli authorities to
expedite the release of Khader Adnan’s body to his family to enable a
dignified burial, as required under international humanitarian law and
international human rights law.
The Israeli regime is so unhinged it goes as far as systematically abusing and brutalizing children in Israeli military detention.Khader's life of resistance and martyrdom will live on with us. His death should be a jolting wake-up call for those who have remained silent as Israel has continued its ploy to demolish Palestinian lives for decades via endless imprisonment and the grander prison of military occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid.
While not prohibited under international humanitarian law,
administrative detention is only lawful if employed for imperative
security reasons. Israel’s routine and extensive use of administrative
detention renders it arbitrary, therefore violating international human
rights and humanitarian law. Also, in contravention of international
law, it is used in a deeply discriminatory manner. Please write the Foreign Office to demand they press Israel to end its use of administrative detention and release Palestinian political prisoners
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