Hunger striking prisoner ‘not of sound mind’ after coma, lawyer says

The lawyer for the Palestinian security prisoner hospitalized in Israel after a two-month hunger strike said Tuesday that his client was no longer of sound mind, and demanded his immediate release.

“The only scenario he will accept is his immediate release,” Jamal Hatib, the lawyer for Mohammed Allaan, told Army Radio. “He knows that the continuation of his hunger strike is a death sentence for him, and he’s willing to do it anyway.”

“Mohammad has pains throughout his body and pressure in his chest,” he added. Hatib said Allaan also had impaired vision and hearing.

Allaan emerged from a coma Tuesday and warned he will step up his fast if Israel does not resolve his case within 24 hours, a Palestinian group said earlier Tuesday.

Allaan, “declared in front of his doctors that if there is not any solution to his case within 24 hours he will ask for all treatment to stop and will stop drinking water,” the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said in a statement.

Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan on Tuesday urged the state to force-feed Allaan.

“The state offered to free him if he leaves the country for four years. He refused, and now act in accordance with the force-feeding law and feed him,” Ben-Dahan said, adding that Israel “certainly cannot give in to his demands and free him.”

“If the State of Israel gives in, all the prisoners will do the same thing with the knowledge that the State of Israel will give in and free them,” he said.

The Knesset okayed a controversial bill allowing Israel to begin force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners in July, but the Physicians for Human Rights-Israel said soon after that doctors at Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital, where Allaan was hospitalized at the time, had decided to refrain from treating him without his consent.

A lawyer by profession, Allaan has been held in administrative detention — a preventative security measure when intelligence suggests suspects may be involved in terror activities — since last November over his alleged membership in the Islamic Jihad terror group. He has been on hunger strike since June 18, taking only water, and lost consciousness Friday morning at the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, where he is being treated.

Allaan was awakened from his coma and his condition has stabilized, doctors at Barzilai said Tuesday. Doctors had been giving Allaan water and salts intravenously, and he had also been connected to a respirator.

Following an appeal for Allaan’s release on medical grounds, the High Court found Monday that “there is no change in the justification for holding [Allaan] in administrative detention,” and said it would reconvene Wednesday for a further hearing on his possible release.

At a High Court hearing Monday, one of the doctors treating Allaan said that if he were to continue his hunger strike he was likely to go into a fatal decline.

The Justice Ministry released a statement ahead of Monday’s hearing that included an offer to free Allaan “if he agrees to go abroad for a period of four years.” His lawyer immediately dismissed the proposal.

Several demonstrations in support of Allaan have been held since his condition began to deteriorate over the past two weeks, with pro-Palestinian protesters facing off against right-wing Israeli counter-protesters and Israeli police in sometimes violent confrontations.