Executive director of human rights group B’Tselem, Hagai Elad, sends a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, asking for the immediate release of administrative detainee Mohammed al-Qiq, who has been on hunger strike for the past 86 days.
Al-Qiq, who is striking to protest his detention in Israel, on Tuesday rejected a compromise that would have seen him transferred to a hospital in East Jerusalem, saying he will only end his fast if he is sent to a Palestinian medical facility.
Mohammed al-Qiq, a Palestinian prisoner on hunger strike, talks to a man in a hospital in the northern Israeli town of Afula on February 5, 2016. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)
On Tuesday, radical Islamist cleric Raed Salah announced that he was going on hunger strike in solidarity with al-Qiq.
Salah leads the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, which the Israeli cabinet banned in November as an organization with terrorist links. The group rejects the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians and boycotts national elections on the grounds that they legitimize the Jewish state.
Al-Qiq, who was arrested and held by Israel without charge under administrative detention, is currently being treated at Haemek hospital in the Israeli town of Afula in the Lower Galilee.
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