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Graphics:
Prisoner strike. Published by IMEMC News

Prisoner strike. Published WAFA (Palestinian News Agency)
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RAMALLAH, Wednesday, August 17, 2022 (WAFA) – Four Palestinian detainees in Israel are currently on hunger strike in protest against their prolonged detention without charge or trial, including one who has been on hunger strike for 158 days, two siblings, and a 64-year-old man, the Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) said.

Khalil Awawda, 40, has been on hunger strike for 158 days today in protest against his administrative detention.

He is reported to be in critical health condition and kept at an Israeli hospital. He appealed his detention to the Israeli military court, which rejected it.

Awawda, from the town of Doura in the south of the West Bank, suspended his first hunger strike after 111 days of fast after he was promised to be released.

However, when Israel reneged on its decision and renewed his administrative detention for four more months, he resumed his hunger strike.

The siblings Ahmad Hussein Mousa, 44, and Odal, 34, have also been on hunger strike for the 11th day in protest against their administrative detention. They are from Al-Khader town near Bethlehem.

Yousef al-Baz, 64, an Israeli citizen and the Imam of a mosque imam from the Arab town of Lydda (Lod), is also on hunger strike for the seventh day in a row in protest against his arbitrary detention. He was abducted on April 30.
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Why This Palestinian Father Is Prepared to Lose His Hunger-striking Son

This is day 170 of the longest-ever hunger strike by a Palestinian administrative detainee. Khalil Awawdeh has spent 13 years in Israeli jails and was due to be freed after the Gaza cease-fire, but that didn't happen

by Gideon Levy and Alex Levac for Haaretz
Aug 19, 2022

Mohammed Awawdeh wants his son, Khalil, to continue not to give in, and is ready to lose him to that end. “If he comes out dead, he will get what he wanted – even if he is dead,” the 61-year-old father explains in the yard of the family home in the town of Idna, west of Hebron.

Even so, the concern and anxiety in this house surged this week. Mohammed leaps up at every ring of the phone: It could be the call informing him that his son has died. Khalil’s mother, Jalila, 62, wanted her son to stop his hunger strike from day one. She wants him alive, even at the price of his freedom. Not the father. And Dalal, Khalil’s wife, says she is on her husband’s side in his decision to go all the way.

Dalal is the last family member to have seen Khalil, at the Shamir Medical Center, southwest of Tel Aviv, where he was transferred last weekend. She was severely shocked at what she saw. On Saturday, Dalal encountered a man she barely recognized, nearly blind, barely able to speak.

His life is in danger, and with it comes the danger of sparking a wave of renewed violence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Unlike in Israel, Khalil Awawdeh’s fate continues to arouse interest and worry in certain international circles. A demonstration took place a few days ago in London calling for his release, and similar events have been held in other cities as well.

A neglected yard, adorned with posters calling for the release of Awawdeh, in a quiet neighborhood of Idna. Khalil Awawdeh is 41, the father of four daughters. The youngest, a year and a half old, is nestling in her mother’s arms. Khalil is one of eight children of Mohammed and Jalila, but only Khalil has been active in Islamic Jihad. “They each followed their own path, Khalil is on the right path,” says his father, who attests that he himself was never active in politics.

Mohammed, a short, affable man, worked for years in Israel and speaks a good workers’ Hebrew. He’s been unemployed since 1992, when he was injured in a work accident in Ashkelon, and he has a disability status of 77 percent. To his great chagrin, he has been barred from entering Israel – it’s not clear why. This week, too, he asked for help from a visitor in obtaining an entry permit in order to visit his son and to go back to working in Israel.

Khalil Awawdeh has been an eternal undergraduate student at Hebron University, studying engineering, but his frequent incarcerations have prevented him from completing his studies. He needs to take another nine hours of classes and a undergo a final interview in order to obtain a degree – things he will probably not manage to do any time soon, if ever.

The history of his arrests is long and disturbing: It’s not reasonable to hold people in detention without trial so many times, and for so many years. Now he is determined to put an end to this cycle, one way or the other.

Mohammed remembers vividly all his son’s arrest dates. The first time was in May 2002. Khalil was sentenced to five and a half years in prison after being convicted for membership in and activity on behalf of Islamic Jihad; he served the term in full. After his release, he tried resuming his university studies, but was arrested again that October. This time he was incarcerated for two years, though he was never brought to trial. A few months after that release, he was placed in administrative detention once again, for 33 months. Shortly after being released he was taken into custody yet again; this time the administrative detention lasted 26 months. He was freed on June 30, 2016.

According to the data of the security forces, between 2007 and 2010 Khalil was incarcerated for a total of 34 months without trial, and from 2014 to 2016, he spent another 26 months in prison without seeing a judge (as distinguished from jail sentences resulting from convictions, following trials). Khalil had a few years of quiet after that, until December 27, 2021, when he was taken into custody again, his last arrest for the time being.

A force of a few dozen Israeli soldiers arrived at the house we are now visiting, at 2:30 A.M. that day. Mohammed accompanied them to the third floor, to his son’s apartment, where they took Khalil into custody and left. A few weeks later, he was brought before a judge for remand, and the court ordered his release. But then the Shin Bet security service, following its usual practice in such cases, ordered him to be placed in administrative detention for six months.

Khalil was determined to embark on a hunger strike but was infected with COVID-19 in Ofer Prison. He was sick for a few weeks, and afterward launched what would become the longest-ever hunger strike by any Palestinian being held by Israel, beginning on March 3, 2022. Spring and summer have nearly passed, and he continues unabated. Monday, when we visited his family, was day 166 of the hunger strike.

Khali’s wife has been permitted to see him only twice since his arrest, once on February 13, shortly before he began the strike, and again last Saturday. Dalal alone was allowed to visit, not even one of their daughters. The handcuffs and leg chains that bound him in the hospital were removed before the visit, but most of the time, this critically ill man remains bound, according to his lawyer, Ahlam Haddad. Many prison guards are watching over him – Dalal counted nine of them inside and outside her husband's room. “Not so many,” Khalil’s father jokes.

Dalal was let in to the hospital via a rear door in order to circumvent the Palestinian and foreign media there – the Israeli media are taking no interest in the fate of the most determined hunger striker in local history. Initially she was allowed to be by her husband’s side for only half an hour, and only in the presence of prison guards. She was also not permitted to photograph her husband, which would have allowed the world to see what he looks like now.

Dalal was made to leave the room after 30 minutes, but representatives of the International Red Cross who were present protested the briefness of the visit after such a lengthy period without any such encounters, and also in the light of the prisoner’s serious condition. Dalal was finally allowed to return for another hour, after a short wait. She did not try to persuade Khalil to end the hunger strike. He is subsisting solely on water, at present.

“No one will tell him to stop,” his father says.

Dalal, 32, teaches geography in a primary school in a neighboring village. She was appalled by her husband’s appearance, she relates. His eyes seem to be bulging out of their sockets, his arms and legs are emaciated. When she returned to the room to continue the visit, he no longer remembered who she was, as had been the case at the start of the visit. Nor could he recall his daughters’ names. His eyes are open but he doesn’t see, and he finds it difficult to identify people by their voice.

A few weeks before his last arrest, Awawdeh was summoned for questioning to the offices of the Shin Bet at the Etzion facility near Bethlehem. At the end of the session, his father says, he told his interrogators that if he were to be incarcerated again without trial he would begin a hunger strike. Mohammed has no information about the negotiations that are currently underway for his release, with Egypt mediating between Israel and Islamic Jihad – no one updates the family and anything they know they get from the media.

At the conclusion of the army’s Operation Breaking Dawn in Gaza earlier this month, Islamic Jihad demanded that Awawdeh be transferred to a hospital, but that only happened a few days later, despite his grave condition. He was moved to the hospital last Thursday, slightly more than 160 days after the start of his hunger strike. He weighs 38 kilograms (83 pounds), the family says; before he stopped eating, his weight was 86 kilos.

Does he think about the possibility that his son may die? Mohammed: “I think about that every minute. Every time the phone rings I think he has died. But if he dies, the Jihad will not be silent.” And if Khalil were to ask him now what to do? “I would tell him to keep going. Not to stop. If he eats now, they will give him another six months [of imprisonment], and after that another six months.” But if he doesn’t eat he will die. “He’ll die.” And what about his children? “The children have God.”

During the course of the hunger strike, the family has been visited twice by Hisham Abu Hawash, an administrative detainee who was released after a hunger strike of 141 days, the longest until Khalil. Abu Hawash, who ended his strike last January, is still a wreck, Mohammed says: He has a hard time walking, eating and climbing stairs.

On day 50 of Khalil’s hunger strike, Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet forces raided the family home in the dead of night and demanded that they take down the posters in his yard calling for Khalil’s release. The family refused, saying the posters would come down only after Khalil returned home. The troops left.

A Shin Bet agent told Mohammed at the time: “Your son will be released in the end, but he will not be a human being.” Mohammed asked why, and was told: “He will come out perhaps without a leg, without kidneys, without the liver, without eyes.” Mohammed replied: “If he comes out, he will get what he wanted. The Shin Bet wants him to die. My son did not do anything against Israel. If he had, he would have received 20 years in prison.”

The posters demanding his release affixed to every tree here state, “No to administrative detention.”

This week a military appeals court heard the request for Awawdeh's release. Judge Col. Eyal Nun wrote in his decision not to free him, apparently without his hand trembling on the keyboard: “The key to the medical condition of the appellant is in his hands, and I can only express my hope that he will make use of it… One can protest against what the appellant sees as an unjust incarceration without endangering one’s life, but if the appellant wishes to bring things to a pass where in the wake of the danger to his life he will be released from administrative detention – it is impossible to accept that, in the light of the danger he poses. At most, if the appellant’s condition reaches a condition of immediate danger to his life, it would be possible to order the suspension of the administrative detention order.

“I was not convinced that the appellant’s condition has reached that state and, accordingly, I cannot grant the appeal… The end result is that, because I did not find an error in the decision of the previous court, even in light of the latest developments, and having found that the appellant’s administrative detention is justified – I hereby reject the appeal.”

How long will he be imprisoned without being brought to trial? When will the “danger” he poses abate? As it is, no evidence exists to prove the danger even partially in court, which is why Awawdeh is not being brought to trial, as happens in proper law-abiding states, but is being held in custody without trial. And how will we know that his dangerousness has ended?

Such is the military legal system and the Israeli system of justice in the territories.