Palestinian prisoners in Israel protest after inmate dies

Palestinian inmates serving time in Israeli prison protested on Sunday after a prisoner who had previously assaulted a guard died while being hospitalized.

Aziz Awizat, serving a 30-year term for plotting to blow up buildings in Jerusalem by tampering with gas lines, died while being treated at Asaf Harofeh hospital for a heart ailment on Sunday.

There were no immediate details about his death.

On Sunday night, prisoners began banging on doors and yelling to protest Awizat’s death, according to Hebrew media reports.

The disturbances were reported at Eshel prisoner near Be’er Sheva, where Awizat, 53, had been serving, as well as Ketziot Prison, in the Negev desert, and Gilboa prison in the Lower Galilee.

Following his death, the Prisons Service beefed up guards at Eshel prison fearing riots, the Haaretz newspaper reported.

On May 7, Awizat was charged with attacking a guard with boiling water and hitting him with an electric kettle. The guard suffered burns to his upper body from the attack.

Awizat, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, was arrested in 2014 and convicted of trying to set off explosions in a number of buildings housing Israelis in East Jerusalem by damaging gas lines.

The Shin Bet said he confessed under questioning that an accidental gas explosion that killed three people in Jerusalem earlier that year served as an inspiration.

He was also convicted of attempted murder for attacking a Jewish man with an ax in Jerusalem’s Old City in 2012.

Mitch Ginsburg contributed to this report.