Force-feeding hunger strikers a human rights violation, says UN

The UN on Saturday criticized Israel’s planned force-feeding of a hunger-striking Palestinian prisoner.

Alleged Islamic Jihad activist Mohammed Allaan, held without trial by Israel under special anti-terror measures knows as “administrative detention,” entered the 56th day of his hunger strike on Sunday in protest over his incarceration since last November.

If carried out, the force-feeding would be the first instance of the practice in Israel since the Knesset’s adoption on July 30 of a new law that made it legal.

Doctors were instructed to use the method only if the prisoner’s life was in immediate danger, according to Channel 2.

But in a letter sent to media outlets Saturday, UN officials in the West Bank called the new law “a cause for concern to those who work to protect the right to health of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

Peaceful protests such as hunger strikes by Palestinian prisoners are “a fundamental human right,” the officials said.

Citing the prisoners’ “prolonged detention on administrative orders without charge,” the officials described the hunger strikes as “a non-violent form of protest used by individuals who have exhausted other forms of protest to highlight the seriousness of their situations.”

Israel has claimed the detainees, who have resort to an appeal to the High Court of Justice but do not receive full criminal trials before being detained indefinitely, are engaged in terror planning activities, and would be able to continue these activities if security forces were forced to produce the level of evidence required by criminal court proceedings in order to detain them.

The letter is signed by the UN’s Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Piper, James Turpin of the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights, and Gerald Rockenschaub of the World Health Organization.

They slammed the proposed force-feeding as a human rights violation. “The Israeli Medical Association has said that force-feeding is tantamount to torture. United Nations human rights experts have called it a violation of internationally-protected human rights. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Juan E. Méndez, has called ‘feeding induced by threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints of individuals, who have opted for the extreme recourse of a hunger strike to protest against their detention … tantamount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, even if intended for their benefit.’”

On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Allaan was “at immediate risk” of death.

Allaan’s attorney Jamil al-Khatib told AFP Israeli judicial officials “informed me of the intention to proceed with the force feeding of Mr Allaan.”

“I have informed him of this but it does not alter his intention to continue his strike,” Khatib said, adding that his client had actually been refusing food for 55 days by Saturday.

He added that Allaan, himself a lawyer, was placed in intensive hospital care when his body became unable to absorb drinking water.

While the new law does not specifically mention Palestinians, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who sponsored the legislation, said last week it was necessary since “hunger strikes of terrorists in prisons have become a means to threaten Israel.”

Last month, Israel freed Islamic Jihad member Khader Adnan after a 56-day hunger strike that brought him near death.